Web resources:

View information about the revised edition of Novak’s Nature and Culture from Oxford University Press.

Check out the New Britain Museum of American Art for additional information on the Hudson River School of American painting.  The Hudson River School was a prominent school of American landscape artists, during the mid-19th century.  Many of the artists whose works belong to this school began life as engravers or technical craftspeople.  Prior to the Civil War, their works sold very well and one might assume that this reflected an interest, at least with respect to the wealthy, towards the natural, untouched environment.  Towards the latter part of the century, with the ascendancy of impressionism, artists came to value technique more and the general public and critics found fault with the realism of landscape painting and the school went into decline.  Recently, art critics, such as Barbara Novak, have begun to re-interpret and analyze in a different manner the Hudson River school and the paintings have gained a new following.

View images of the paintings discussed by Novak in the reading.

Important terms:

transcendentalists — The “New England Transcendentalists” comprised a social-cultural movement that flourished between 1830-1860 and that included Emerson, Thoreau, Channing, Riley, Brownson, and Alcott.  Influenced by Coleridge, German mysticism (Boehme) and Romanticism, they stressed the spiritual unity of the world and the superiority of intuitive knowledge.  They promoted a kind of “naturalistic pantheism” (in contrast to the natural religion of the Enlightenment and the revealed religion of traditional Christianity), where God was understood to be completely immanent in nature.  They upheld the natural goodness of humanity (in contrast to the previously dominant Calvinism of the Congregational establishment).

immanence — When applied to God, the doctrine that the divine is to be found within the processes of the natural world.  In an extreme version, this can become pantheism.

pantheism — Etymologically, everything (pan) is divine (theios).  The doctrine that the totality of the world or of nature is identical to God.

orthodox Christianity — In the context of Novak’s essay, the version of Christianity that dominated the US culturally through the 19^th century, namely “Reformed Christianity,” which emerged from the teachings of John Calvin and was transmitted to the US through the dominance of the Puritan (Pilgrim) influence of New England Congregationalism (and eventually Presbyterianism).  Its view of God, which finds a classical expression in the epic poetry of John Milton, stressed divine transcendence, the inscrutability of the divine will, the sinfulness or fallenness of humanity, and the need for biblical revelation to come to know the will of God and for redemption by Jesus Christ to attain any sort of human fulfillment (salvation).  Novak’s essay is pointing to the gradual transformation of US culture throughout the 19^th century away from a strict adherence to the traditional Calvinist orthodoxy to a more generic version of Christianity by the end of the century. [In turn, this gave way to a more “secular” cultural standpoint by the middle of the 20^th century.]  In effect, Novak’s essay is calling attention to the way the tensions involved in such a cultural transition were reflected or advanced by some of the art of the period.

legerdemain — slight of hand; trickery; nimbleness.

Primordial Wilderness, Garden of the World, original Paradise, regained Paradise — images derived from the biblical story of Adam and Eve which portray an idealized state of human existence and which were being applied, with varying nuances, to the geography of the US and, by extension, to the nation and its expansionist policies.

What is Novak attempting to express in her opening paragraphs where she depicts the way that “nature,” “God,” “revelation,” and the “nation” were becoming entangled (123) in American society during the first half of the 19^th century prior to the Civil War?

Novak introduces the painting (fig. 1) by Frederic Edwin Church, “Twilight in the Wilderness,” to be an artistic representation of “nature” which is coming to serve as the location for discovering the divine, indeed being the divine (124).  Do you have any sense of this when you view the painting?  Explain.

How do the ideas of “wilderness,” “garden,” “fall,” and “regained paradise” (124) relate to these larger themes?  How do they find expression in painting? (124-5)  Can you detect such themes in (fig. 2) Cole’s painting, “Expulsion from the Garden of Eden”?

Can you see in a painting such as Albert Bierstadt’s, “Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak” (fig. 3) an expression of the sense that the grandeur of the natural landscape (of America) was in effect a “revelation” of God or even God as such? (126-7)

What does the notion of the “sublime” (127) have to do with revelation and painting? How does landscape painting come to serve religious and nationalist purposes? How was art expected to contribute to the pressures that science was placing on Christianity? (127)

How does the development of images in Cole’s series of paintings, The Course of Empire (fig. 4, fig. 5, fig. 6, fig. 7, fig. 8), contribute to the moral significance of early 19^th century painting? (128f)

How does the process of landscape painting that captures the divine face of nature contribute to an appreciation of the consciousness of the nation? One facet of this development involved the sense of “communing” with nature/God/(and implicitly)nation (131f).  Do you think Durand’s portrait of Cole and Bryant in Kindred Spirits (fig. 9) captures this sensibility?

What does it mean to say that the national consciousness during the first half of the 19^th century identified American’s destiny with the American landscape? (131)  How are these landscape painters rightfully called the leaders of the national flock? (132)  Do you understand more clearly the epigram from Locke at the beginning of this essay now that you have grappled with some of its claims?  Explain.

How does this understanding of the divine (particularly the relationship of God and nature) compare with Bonaventure’s portrayal of this matter?  Explain.

Are you aware of contemporary images (say, from movies or in music videos) which give expression to the sense of the divine in post-modern American culture?  What are these images?  What do they convey about the contemporary experience (or lack thereof) of the divine?  How do such images compare with Bonaventure’s position?  With the artists’ portrayals analyzed in Novak’s essay?