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Art & Ecology

Photoessays: Art and the Earth



Orientations to the Land

Signs of Expansion and Industrialization in Nineteenth-Century American Landscapes

by Jenny Siegenthaler, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

The availability of land has always been a defining aspect of the United States and an important motive for Europeans to settle in this country. The landscape they left behind had been transformed by centuries of habitation, agriculture, and war, whereas America offered seemingly boundless expanses of virgin wilderness, thought to possess an enormous potential for wealth. (However, as early as the seventeenth century, town meetings in New England colonies were devoted to shortages of timber and overgrazed cattle pastures.)1

Following the explorations of Lewis and Clark in 1804-1806, the American frontier pushed west at a rapid rate.2 Great swaths of land were cleared to allow the creation of new settlements, the growth of industries, and, starting in the 1830s, the building of railroads. The railroad was intrinsic to the fulfillment of Manifest Destiny--a widely held belief among European-Americans in the mid-nineteenth century, particularly those with sufficient wealth and power, that they had the right and duty to expand across the North American continent, annexing territories by force if necessary (as they did from Native Americans), and exploiting the land and its resources.3

Many in the nineteenth century recognized that America's wilderness was a national treasure. The artist Thomas Cole (1801-1848) and writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) extolled its unparalleled beauty as well as its spiritual qualities. Emerson was the leader of a movement known as transcendentalism. Its followers held that the beauty of nature had the power to lead the mind to God and that spiritual growth resulted from casting aside the artificial influences of civilization and opening oneself to the natural world. The like-minded Cole was responsible for founding the Hudson River school, a loosely-knit group of landscape painters that flourished in the mid-nineteenth century. With their romantic and idealized portrayals of New York's Hudson River Valley and Catskill Mountains, Massachusetts' Berkshire Mountains, and New Hampshire's White Mountains, these painters emphasized the purity, spirituality, and power of the American wilderness.

The writings of Cole and other intellectuals of the period often lamented the encroachment of civilization, as is reflected in Cole's poem TheComplaint of the Forest:

And dissonant--the axe--the unresting axe
Incessant smote our venerable ranks,
And crashing branches frequent lash'd the ground.
Stupendous trunks the pride of many years,
Roll'd on the groaning earth with all their umbrage . . .
Our ancient mother lay, wasted and bare
Beneath the burning sun--The little streams
That oft had rais'd their voices in the breeze
In joyful unison with ours, did waste
And pin'd away as though in deep despair . . . 4

Despite his impassioned writings, Cole's paintings and those of fellow Hudson River-school artists tended to downplay the environmental devastation wrought by population growth and industrialization. Instead, their paintings often reflect a quiet nostalgia for a pristine wilderness that was disappearing in the east.

Historian Hans Huth has noted that utilitarian ideas about natural forests prevailed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America and that "the axe was even accepted as the appropriate symbol of the early American attitude toward nature."5 The appearance of tree stumps in many Hudson River-school landscapes is thought by some art historians to simultaneously symbolize humankind's mastery over nature and to acknowledge its resulting destruction. Pioneers' Home,Eagle Cliff, White Mountains, an early painting by Jasper Cropsey(1823-1900), a leading Hudson River-school artist, features felled trees and jagged stumps in the foreground, a rustic log cabin in the background,and a noble axe-carrying pioneer, all emblematizing the leveling of the forest by settlers. It must be noted that viewers in Cropsey's time, and Cropsey himself, probably would have interpreted the painting differently.Though we cannot know precisely his intent, the image suggests he was admiring of the pioneers who shaped their homes out of the wilderness and that he idealized their lifestyle. That such sentiments were prevalent at the time this painting was made is suggested by Walt Whitman's (1819-1892) poem Song of the Broad Axe (1858), which exalts early American settlers as heroes.

To the delight of the railroad companies, such rustic scenes encouraged travel. In 1857 the Baltimore and Ohio railroad organized a special excursion for writers, painters, and photographers to record their impressions of scenic America. Recent art historians have considered the manner in which trains are represented in Hudson River-school landscapes. In a second and later painting by Cropsey, Sidney Plains with the Union of the Susquehannaand Unadilla Rivers, a tiny train appears in the distance of an expansive rural vista. The wisp of smoke it produces resembles the faint clouds on the horizon.A row of crooked, rough-hewn telegraph poles (presented without wires) blendsin naturally with the trees in the scene. Art historian Barbara Novak has written that such renderings reflect the desire on the part of the artist "to tailor the machine and its effects to the pastoral dream."6 In this and other Hudson River-school paintings new technologies are portrayed as existing harmoniously with nature. Many such depictions were commissioned by railroad executives. In the view of some art historians these images helped to glorify prevalent conceptions of progress and perpetuate myths about its benefits. In effect, artists assisted in the transformation of the land they so loved.

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