The European development--by 1810 an established tradition in Germany and England--was transferred to America by means of shared philosophical sources as well as direct influences. Most important to this transposition was Washington Allston (1779-1843), whose paintings such as Moonlit Landscape (Fig. 2) adapted with remarkable similarity the devices already introduced by Friedrich,(7) and whose writings of the Ideal in nature were immensely influential on his fellow Americans. Allston had travelled extensively in Europe, beginning with two years study at the school of the Royal Academy in London, and ending with his return, to settle in Boston, eight years later. His numerous writings, in particular his Lectures on Art and Poetry, published posthumously in 1850, contain ideas drawn from several later 18th-century aestheticians: at times, Allston almost quotes Burke, and his phrases also recall those of Coleridge, whom Allston knew in England. In paintings such as Moonlit Landscape, natural objects were only indicators, or symbols, of what Allston called "Infinite Harmony," "Infinite Idea," or "the Creator." The landscape artist served as translator of such indicators, again both instructing and enlightening his viewers by means of the landscape.(8) Such ideas coincide in fundamental ways with those of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), whose writings on the importance of nature as God's word in turn seem to paraphrase the much earlier work of Wackenroder. Quoting Plato, Emerson claimed, "Those things which are said to be done by Nature, are indeed done by Divine Art." As Emerson then summarized: "Art, universally, is the spirit creative."(9)
If Allston and Emerson served as conveyors of this Romantic landscape theory to America, however, it was Thomas Cole (1801-1848) who was most recognized as the leading painter of the American "tradition." Cole, born in England but immigrated to the United States at the age of eighteen, was an early participant in the new landscape tradition (he exhibited his first landscape in Philadelphia in 1824), and did much during his long and prolific career to continue and to aggrandize it. A writer active in artists' groups and societies, Cole was best known as the painter of epic landscapes which, often conceived in series, symbolically evoked complex philosophical and religious lessons. Although he travelled twice to Europe, and learned there a more finished and heroic panoramic style, he had at the outset been warned by his friend, the poet William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), to remain American, and to "keep that earlier, wilder image bright."(10)
This Cole did; in works like River in the Catskills (1843; Fig. 3), he merged the panoramic view of sublime space and the single wanderer, seen from the back, as in European tradition, with a particular scene that seems unmistakably American. For Cole, especially by the time of this painting, however, this very combination embodied a particularly American paradox: seemingly infinite, wild spaces were already showing the intrusions of humanity and technology. Like most Americans at that time, Cole was ambivalent, wanting both wilderness and civilization to flourish; in his paintings after 1835, he seems to strive for a balance of these two extremes. As Albert Boime has recently pointed out, Cole's typical composition--a panorama with extensive middleground, seen from an elevated point of view--allowed for a "magisterial gaze" that would at once provide a view of the unencumbered land of Manifest Destiny and a detailed view of cultivated farmland with the marked trails of road- and railways.(11) The felled trees and broken stumps, which feature so prominently in the foreground of River in the Catskills, can be read as a symbol of the sublime passage of time, as they had in the works of earlier European artists; yet here they also document the peculiarly brutal American method of girding in order to clear large areas of forests for new settlement.(12) The anonymous figure now stands in this landscape in a transitional space--one only reminiscent of the wilderness of the past--and faces a vision of the future that includes the rolling farmland, houses, and a train. With this last inclusion, Cole hints at the fact that for him, the balance that he sought might soon be impossible to maintain; by the time of this painting, he was bitterly opposed to the incursion of the railroads near his own home in the Catskills.(13)
It was with Cole, therefore, that the tradition of the sublime landscape both culminated and ended. He had many students, followers, and others familiar with his work, especially the luminists,(14) who sought a similar idealism in their stilled, light-filled landscapes. But no later American artists succeeded in resolving this conflict between tradition and innovation--a conflict inherent in the very term Nineteenth-Century Landscapes. As both the inheritors of the 18th-century aesthetics of nature, and the progenitors of a newly fast-paced, progress-driven civilization, the artists of the nineteenth century created a tradition that from the outset was self-consciously nostalgic. As Derek Guthrie astutely pointed out in regard to the often bitter, even hopeless 20th-century view of nature, such a grand tradition of "divine" nature--with the capability of overwhelming and even overpowering humanity--was doomed to destruction in a nuclear age.(15)