Synopses & Reviews
The painters who came to be known as the Hudson River School--Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Frederic Edwin Church, Jasper Cropsey, Sanford Robinson Gifford, and others--found inspiration in our young country's natural wonders and were the first to paint many of its still-wild vistas. As America was settled and the wilderness receded, their successors--most notably Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran--carried their quest for the sublime to the Far West, communicating its breathtaking grandeur in brilliant views of Rocky Mountain peaks, roaring waterfalls, and vast canyons. Within a single generation these artists established the dramatic approach to American landscape painting that is celebrated in this stirringly beautiful book. The freshness of their vision, the intensity of their invention, and the energy of their execution were all born of the urgency these artists sensed in the life of America itself.
Published to accompany a major transatlantic exhibition, American Sublime rejoices in America the Beautiful as seen in some of the country's most glorious landscape paintings. It contains a fully illustrated catalogue of all the paintings in the exhibition, with more than one hundred color plates, including three gatefolds. Biographies of the artists are included, and thoughtful and elegantly written essays cast new light on their ambitions and achievements. The lucid text places American landscape painting in the context of the international art world and of the European landscape tradition. And it explores ideas of national identity and empire in America, looking in particular at how these landscapes, whether real or imagined, reflect Americans' hopes and fears for their country.
As a tribute to some of our most important American artists and the land that inspired them, this stunningly illustrated book will have a deep and wide appeal.
Review
"The catalog is far more than a souvenir of this astonishing [exhibition]. There are two well-contrasted essays by the exhibition's organizers Andrew Wilton and Tim Barringer, and reproductions of each work are accompanied by very ample notes. . . . [B]oth authors emphasize the religious and ethical themes portrayed, or more often symbolized, in many of the works."
--Geoffrey Newman, The Art Book
Review
"Splendid. . . . Andrew Wilton and Tim Barringer have written a book to treasure. . . . A valuable contribution to the study of American art history."
--Phyllis Tuchman, ArtNet Magazine
Review
"The spectacular paintings that record [the] search for sublimity, handsomely printed here, retain their power to entice and overwhelm."
--New York Times Book Review
Review
What glorious images these are!
Review
Highly and enthusiastically recommended.
Review
"At first glance, the color plates reproduced in
American Sublime seem to be nothing more than pretty pictures. Only when the authors put them back into the political and cultural context in which they were created do the images take on new meanings, and only then do we begin to see the sometimes grandiose intentions of the artists who painted them and the art collectors who displayed them."
--Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times
Review
"The term Hudson River School was once an insult. . . . But as the paintings included in this lavishly illustrated exhibition catalog demonstrate, the landscape of the North American continent made for strong local color. . . . The drama of American space gave artists a new subject matter, and they conveyed the news of craggy mountain ranges and impossibly deep canyons with striking detail."
--Carly Berwick, ArtNews
Review
"A gorgeously illustrated and learned history of nineteenth-century American landscape painting. . . . Wilton and Barringer's commentary is stimulating and important, and the exceptional plates are bliss unadulterated."
--Booklist
Review
Winner of the Art Exhibition Catalogue Award, Art Newspaper/AXA
Winner of the Henry-Russell Hitchcock Award
Review
"The essays and catalog entries are well written and informative, providing a geographic and historical context for the artwork, [but] it is the stunning illustrations (including several two-page foldouts) that dazzle the eye and imagination."
--Library Journal
Review
"What glorious images these are!"
--National Geographic Adventure
Review
"Highly and enthusiastically recommended."
--Choice
Review
"Wilton and Barringer no doubt convinced their British readers and exhibition patrons that these Americans do indeed fit into an aesthetic continuum, engaging in the discourse of the Sublime (as well as the Beautiful). They move American readers to a less parochial appreciation of our local heroes."
--Nancy J. D. Hazelton, The Bloomsbury Review
Synopsis
The painters who came to be known as the Hudson River School--Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Frederic Edwin Church, Jasper Cropsey, Sanford Robinson Gifford, and others--found inspiration in our young country's natural wonders. As America was settled and the wilderness receded, their successors--most notably Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran--carried their quest for the sublime to the West, communicating its breathtaking grandeur in brilliant views of Rocky Mountain peaks, roaring waterfalls, and vast canyons. American Sublime rejoices in America the Beautiful as seen in these glorious landscape paintings. Containing more than one hundred color plates and biographies of the artists, this catalogue also includes thoughtful essays that cast new light on their ambitions and achievements. The lucid text places American landscape painting in the context of the international art world and of the European landscape tradition. And it explores ideas of national identity and empire in America, looking in particular at how these landscapes, whether real or imagined, reflect Americans' hopes and fears for their country.
About the Author
Andrew Wilton is former Keeper and Senior Research Fellow at the Tate Gallery. He is the author of The Swagger Portrait and the editor of Grand Tour and The Age of Rossetti. Tim Barringer is Assistant Professor of Art History at Yale University. He is coeditor of Colonialism and the Object and Reading the Pre-Raphaelites.
Table of Contents
Forward 7
Acknowledgments 9
ANDREW WILTON: The Subline in the Old World and the New 10
TIM BARRINGER: The Course of Empires: Landscape and Identity in America and Britain, 1820-1880 38
ANDREW WILTON AND TIM BARRINGER:
Catalogue
1. Wilderness 66
2. The Course of Empire 86
3. The Still Small Voice 114
4. "Awful Grandeur" 132
5. Painting from nature 156
6. A Transcendental Vision 186
7. Explorations 216
8. The Great West 228
GRAHAM C. BOETTCHER
Biographies of the Artists 252
Notes 262
Bibliography 272
Lenders and Credits 278
Index 279