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By Root 7729 0

Fine Arts in 1816, Governor Clinton suggested that exposure to the “wild, romantic, and awful scenery” of the American wilderness had the power “to elevate all the faculties of the mind, and to exalt all the feelings of the heart” (both of which, by implication, suffered in the nation’s cities). Within a decade, thanks less to Clinton’s oratory than to canny steamboat operators and the appearance of fashionable rustic “resorts” far removed from Manhattan, hundreds of affluent New Yorkers left town every summer to experience the restorative powers of uncontaminated Nature. Their favorite destination was the Catskill Mountain House (1824), the first successful hilltop hotel in the United States and a must-see stop for Europeans on the American Grand Tour. Ladies and gentlemen disposed to visit the seashore went to Coney Island House (1824), a retreat famed for its first-class accommodations, wellprepared meals, and up-to-date bathing facilities.

New York writers fostered the new sensibility with a widening stream of novels and poems that depicted the American wilderness as an antidote to alienated urban life (rather as the refined home was held up as a sanctuary from city hurly-burly). Cooper’s frontier romances were an extended paean to the nobility of the Catskills, while Irving, who had never been closer to the forest primeval than the deck of a river sloop, wrote lovingly of the supernal beauty of the Hudson highlands and their quaint inhabitants, who, like Rip Van Winkle, belonged to an earlier, less complicated time. Bryant, having fled the countryside for the big city, built an entire career on poetry that taught respectable merchants and bankers to yearn for woods, pastures, and streams.

Cole and his many disciples would convey the same message with even greater force in landscapes where all evidence of human presence was dwarfed by scenery so majestic and inspiring as to seem almost other-worldly—a point of view that garnered princely commissions from the very land speculators, canal boosters, and manufacturers who were doing their best to tame that scenery in the name of trade and commerce. What was more, some of Cole’s earliest and best-known paintings—Falls of Kaaterskill (1826); The Clove, Catskills (1827); Scene from “The Last of the Mohicans” (1827)—were of subjects already immortalized, or soon to be, by Irving, Cooper, and Bryant. Though Cole’s representations carefully deleted all signs of the new tourism, Catskill resort operators drew on his panegyrics, and those of Irving and Cooper, for use in advertisements. James Kirke Paulding, in his The New Mirror for Travellers; and Guide to the Springs (1828), urged “the picturesque tourist” not only to stay at the Mountain House but also to buy paintings from Cole and other landscape artists.

One of the few ways in which New York’s artists were willing to appreciate the city was by turning to its past—or a sentimentalized nostalgic version thereof. Like Home and Nature, History seemed a sanctuary from the hurried present. In 1827 the New-York Mirror began a series called “Antiquities of New York” that combined wistful, Irvingesque stories of New Amsterdam with engravings of old Dutch buildings by Alexander Jackson Davis.

Bryant often escaped from downtown to explore groves along the Hudson or ramble past old Dutch farms in Brooklyn, looking for traces of history. In 1829-30, he and Gulian Verplanck wrote “The Reminiscences of New York,” published in two successive issues of their annual, The Talisman. The fictive narrator of the piece fretted about the lack of “chivalric” associations common in Virginia or South Carolina: “I do not know whether any romance actually remains in New-York at the present moment,” because “the progress of continual alteration is so rapid” that a few years can “sweep away both the memory and the external vestiges of the generation that precedes us.” European cities changed little from decade to decade, but the narrator, having returned to Manhattan after an absence of just two years, found “every thing was strange, new and perplexing,