Maria Tesoro, “A Drive through Southwestern Montana Accompanied by Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Frederic Church, and Albert Bierstadt,” BOZetto, Vol. 5 (Autumn 2017), 1-4.

 

In today’s world it is impossible to experience the sense of awe that American painters experienced when they came upon the scenic landscape in the 1800s. Human influence upon the environment can be seen almost everywhere; even unpopulated areas of the earth are starting to be impacted. It makes one wonder how artists like Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Frederic Church and Albert Bierstadt would react to America’s landscape today. I took a drive from Bozeman to Norris to experience the countryside through the creative gazes of these four famous American landscape painters. As I drove along, I scrutinized the countryside for signs of human presence and pondered how Cole, Durand, Church and Bierstadt would have acknowledged that presence in their paintings. Experiencing the countryside with these artists in mind allows for an understanding of how each artist dealt with the expansion of settlements and industry and how each acknowledged their effects on nature. 

 

 Bozeman is a town that has undergone rapid expansion. A drive through the city will reveal a variety of buildings from different time periods. This eclectic mix testifies to the growth that Bozeman has gone through since it was founded in 1864, twenty-five years before Montana was recognized as a state. As I drove through the community, I could appreciate the history that was around me, even if much of it has been covered up or destroyed. But the town of Bozeman was not the goal of my day’s journey. As I drove westward along Huffine Lane, I saw the cityscape slowly giving way to subdivisions and, as I reached Four Corners, to agricultural pursuits. I reveled in the beauty of the perfectly organized fields that bear the mark of farming. The Gallatin Valley is known for its lush, fertile soils that allow all kinds of crops to thrive and this was evident in the fields that seemed to expand without end.  There was a hopefulness about this farmland that showed the promise of human coexistence with nature.  

 

The scenery was akin to Asher Durand’s painting Progress (The Advance of Civilization) (Figure1). Durand was in favor of the expansion of people into the untamed wild; he even believed that expanding into nature could relieve a person of any social pressures and heal him or her of moral ills.[1] However, he was a bit overly optimistic that nature could simply absorb industry in a harmonious “landscape with figures” affirming the notion of “human progress.”[2]  At the edge of a lake in the lower right side of the painting lies a rustic town that is bathed in a golden light, indicating hope and progress. He includes telegraph poles that signal the expansion of technology into nature. Far from constituting a hostile intrusion, these poles meld with the wilderness as if they were so many branchless trees.  In contrast to the town’s light, the wilderness at left has dark undertones that provoke ideas of uncertainty, confusion and possibly danger.  In this separation of light from dark, spiritual forces seem to be at work as if blessing the advancement of civilization or affirming the notion of Manifest Destiny. [3]  Ten miles beyond Four Corners, a wind and rain storm cleared, and I saw a light effect similar to that in Durand’s painting.

 

As I continued my journey to Norris, the beautifully maintained farms and ranches slowly became less pronounced as the wild landscape began to take over. Rocky cliffs descended to the flowing river.  At first it seemed as if no human would be able to tame these features, but there were unmistakable signs of human presence:  the very road that my car sped down was a blemish to the beautiful landscape—a black scar that defiled an earthy beauty. I then began to pay attention to other alterations: bridges, buttresses, protective railings, and parcel fences. It is remarkable how people have accommodated themselves to fertile land as well as unfriendly topography. As the sun glimmered on the surface of creeks and rivers, Thomas Cole’s painting River in the Catskills (Figure 2) came to mind.  Cole creates a scene that at first glance seems to be a natural landscape of pure beauty. However, he inserted enough signs of transport and industry to suggest a warning against permitting the railroad to have unlimited access to the landscape.[4]   As Cole matured as an artist and citizen, he began to regard untamed nature as an Edenic paradise; he came to believe that the only thing that was keeping man from appreciating this was his own ambitious and fickle nature.[5]  In the foreground of the painting, a lumberjack occupies an area with felled trees and turns his back to the viewer to gaze out at more forests that will soon be chopped down.[6]  The lumberjack, while looking for progress in industry, has ignorantly destroyed part of the American Eden.

 

My car sped along the road and I began to detect a change in contour and vegetation; I was now in wild terrain. A much narrower path meandered between a steep rocky incline and a slight drop to a creek.  The sheer mass of the rocky incline invoked a feeling of the sublime, especially as my car seemed so little and vulnerable in relation to the towering rocks.  Frederic Church, who loved vast expanses as well as intricate details of the landscape, tried to bring people a sublime sensation in his painting Heart of the Andes (Figure 3).  The finely worked renderings of trees, rocks and plants in the foreground are meant to draw the viewer’s eyes into the canvas and, once there, to roam among the interlinked patchworks so that a general topographical appreciation is elusive.[7]  Many of his contemporaries, including Mark Twain, confessed to feeling overwhelmed by the details of this “most wonderfully beautiful painting.”[8]    After repeated examination, Twain declared “your third visit will find your brain gasping and straining with futile efforts to take all the wonder in.”[9]  Despite this appreciation of the sublime qualities of raw nature, there is still evidence of man’s presence in the painting. In the bottom left there is a well-worn path that pilgrims follow to a cross set up on a cliff, which gives the painting religious significance—that the natural cycles of growth and decay are not just inevitable but sacred.  Artists had long gravitated toward nature as a source of religious and moral cleansing, but American artists like Church seem to have hoped to find religious, moral or spiritual purpose in nature.  As I got farther and farther away from any sign of human presence, many of my earthly worries began to seem trivial.

 

I also reflected that in addition to filling people’s physical, recreational, and spiritual needs, nature can also be used as a powerful political healing agent.  Along my drive areas that seemed to belong solely to nature would suddenly be enlivened by the sights and sounds of recreation—people making the most of the Red Mountain Campground or Warm Springs Boat Launch—that carried them far away from the worries of a regular job or family responsibilities.  Like the people in the recreation areas trying to steal a few hours of peace in their busy lives, Albert Bierstadt retreated into nature to try and escape life and bring hope to a stressed nation. He painted around the time of the Civil War and looked to the landscape of the West for signs of hope and possibility that America could heal political antagonisms and build a peaceful future.[10]  In Lander’s Peak (Figure 4) he shows a Native American tribe encamped before dramatic chain of snow-capped mountains. The tribe not only locates the scene in the West but also transports the viewer to a cohesive, peaceful people coexisting with the natural resources.[11] The true spectacle here is along the central horizontal axis where the jagged Rocky Mountains meet the verdant plains, and among which the people and horses seem but insignificant, momentary dwellers.

 

In conclusion, my drive through the Gallatin Valley demonstrated that human influence could be found even in the most rugged or unhospitable terrains, which a handful of early American landscape painters came to terms with about a hundred and eighty years ago.  Cole, Durand, Church and Bierstadt used the landscape as a vehicle to celebrate technological advances that aided man’s expansion into the countryside, to warn that irresponsible development could eradicate features of the land forever, to enthrall audiences with the possibility of awakening a sublime sensation or religious conscience, and to heal a people exhausted by years of political division and military conflict. Durand and Church were optimistic about expansion, they created works that showed industry and nature harmoniously co-existing. In contrast, Cole felt that industry was destroying Eden; his paintings contained warnings about what could happen if developers continued to exploit the land. Bierstadt tried to reconcile post-Civil War America by providing hope in the form of an untouched West, land of peace and plenty. Each of these artists had a different reaction to the expansive growth of America and the tensions that came with it, and they put these ideas into paintings that are still cherished today.  

 

[1] Angela L. Miller, Janet C. Berlo, Bryan Wolf, and Jennifer L. Roberts, American Encounters: Art, History and Cultural Identity  (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2008), 259.

 

[2] Miller et al, 2008, 259.

 

[3] Miller et al, 2008, 258.

 

[4] Henry Adams, “The American land inspired Cole's prescient visions,” Smithsonian, 25, 2 (May 1994): 98-106.

 

[5] Adams, 1994, 98-106.

 

[6] Allan Wallach, “Thomas Cole’s River in the Catskills as Antipastoral,” Art Bulletin, 84, 2 (2002): 334.

 

[7] J. Raab, "’Precisely These Objects’: Frederic Church and the Culture of Detail,” Art Bulletin, 95, 4 (2013): 578-596.

 

[8] Twain quoted in Raab, 2013, 584.

 

[9] Twain quoted in Raab, 2013, 584.

 

[10] Angela Miller, “Albert Bierstadt, Landscape Aesthetics, and the Meaning of the West in the Civil War Era,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, 27, 1 (2001): 45.

 

[11] Miller, 2001, 46-47.