Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [62]
Cole, “The Oxbow (The Connecticut River Near Northampton),” 1836, MMA, NY. Leader of the Hudson River School, Cole emphasized the grandeur and immensity of America’s landscape.
In “The Oxbow,” Cole faithfully reproduced rocks, juicy vegetation, a gnarled tree, and his folding chair and umbrella. The blond panorama of the Connecticut River Valley and receding hills seems to stretch forever. The painting depicts the moment just after a thunderstorm, when the foliage, freshened by a cloudburst, glistens in a theatrical light.
Cole’s work expressed the proud belief that America was a primeval paradise, a fresh start for humanity. For the optimistic Hudson River School, communion with nature was a religious experience that cleansed the soul as surely as rainfall renewed the landscape. As Cole wrote in his diary before painting this picture, “I would not live where tempests never come, for they bring beauty in their train.” America may have lacked picturesque ancient ruins, but its lush river valleys and awesome chasms and cascades were subject enough for the Hudson River School.
ARTIST-EXPLORERS: BIERSTADT AND CHURCH. The generation of painters after the Hudson River School tackled more far-flung landscapes. Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) and Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) were the Lewis and Clark of painting — “intrepid limners” they were called — as they sketched the savage beauty of nature from the lush vegetation of the tropics to the icebergs of the Arctic.
Bierstadt specialized in sweeping views of thrilling natural wonders. His career coincided with the westward movement begun by the forty-niners and their wagon trains. At the age of 29, Bierstadt joined a survey team mapping a westward route. Face to face with the Rocky Mountains, he found his personal mother lode: sketching the overwhelming vistas of the mountains. When he returned to his New York studio, he surrounded himself with photographs, sketches, Indian artifacts, and animal trophies and began to paint the views of the American West that made him world famous.
Bierstadt, “The Rocky Mountains,” 1863, MMA, NY. Bierdstadt captured the adventurous frontier spirit as well as the concept of the noble savage in harmony with nature.
“The Rocky Mountains” is one of Bierstadt’s typical images of the West as a Garden of Eden. He employed his usual compositional devices of a highly detailed foreground (the peaceful encampment of Shoshone Indians) and distant soaring mountains pierced by a shaft of sunlight. His paintings were like a commercial for westward expansion, as if that were America’s Manifest Destiny.
THE P T. BARNUM OF AMERICAN ART
Bierstodt’s paintings were as vast in scale as the scenes he depicted — wall-sized canvases as big as a 9’x12’ rug. A running joke was that his next subject would be “all outdoors” and that he had built a château near the widest part of the Hudson River so he would have room to turn his canvases. Bierstadt had a flair for showmanship. He not only sold paintings for $25,000 each (an enormous sum then), he charged 25 cents admission when he exhibited a work. Crowds lined up for the theatrical display of his paintings, which were flanked by potted plants and velvet draperies. The artist thoughtfully supplied magnifying glasses to scrutinize details of the polished scene, and although an entire painting might have a Paul Bunyan-like scale, on close inspection, one could see minute petals of individual wildflowers.
GENRE PAINTING: THE AMERICAN DREAM IN ACTION
Genre painting also gained respect in the first half of the nineteenth century. No longer placed on painting’s lowest rung, these scenes of the