There Are Two Lakes Situated in a Wild Mountain Gorge in New Hampshire

“There are two lakes…situated in a wild mountain gorge…in New Hampshire. They lie within a few hundred feet of each other, but are remarkable as having no communication… Shut in by stupendous mountains…whose rugged brows and shadowy breaks are clothed by dark and tangled woods, they have such an aspect of deep seclusion, of utter and unbroken solitude, that, when standing on their brink a lonely traveller [sic], I was overwhelmed with an emotion of the sublime, such as I have rarely felt…[O]ver all, rocks, wood, and water, brooded the spirit of repose, and the silent energy of nature stirred the soul to its inmost depths.”[i] Those words could easily have come from the 19th century thinker and writer Henry David Thoreau; the ideas of natural energy, solitude and sublimity are sentiments more often recognized as those of a New England transcendentalist than a landscape painter from New York. In fact, the passage was taken from an “Essay on American Scenery” by the artist Thomas Cole. While it is no surprise that the American Romantic painter would pay such close attention to detail and have so high a regard for nature, the words he uses and ideas he conveys are a reflection of the influence that the transcendentalists had on the character and focus of 19th century American landscape painting.

The 19th century was one of emergence for American culture. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay “The American Scholar,” asserted the that it was necessary for writers, artists and thinkers to break away from European traditions and develop an art and philosophy based on unique and independent ideas. Since the inchoate nation had no grand temples or rich history to paint, no philosophical or religious traditions of its own, the obvious place to turn was to nature. It was here that America would find its “original relationship to the universe.”[ii] There was no doubt that the inspiration provided by the nature of the new world could far exceed that offered by the culture of the old world.

The transcendentalists believed deeply in this philosophy and could be found guilty, as Barbara Novak suggests, of “nature worship.” In it, they found the basis for a philosophy that celebrated the union of God and nature, believed in the divinity that could be realized by man through nature, and that, contrary to tradition, the sublime could be discerned in silence and in the ordinary. In her book Nature and Culture, Novak proposes that there was, in some way, a connection between Emerson and the landscape painters, but never sufficiently examines that notion. In this paper I propose that the transcendentalists profoundly influenced landscape painting and intend to demonstrate where and how transcendentalism acted as an inspiration for two of the most important landscapists of the 19th century, Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Church.

Transcendentalism, in its modern sense, was born out of New England in the early 1830s. A group of intellectuals and writers, including Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, William Channing and Bronson Alcott among others, responding to contemporary religion and traditional philosophy, discussed new ideas and shared writings about God, nature and beauty. While there was not one set of beliefs common to all the transcendentalists, the fundamental principles were based on the idea of an immanent God whose divinity was present in both man and nature. Influenced by Immanuel Kant’s philosophy, the transcendentalists also focused on the concepts of the sublime and the importance of solitude and self-reliance. The term transcendentalism, however, remains difficult to define. Emerson goes so far as to say there is no such thing as a pure transcendentalist and himself devoted entire essays to the concept. It is unnecessary to explicate it in great detail here, but there are a few relevant ideas that are important to a basic understanding of transcendentalism and its relationship to the landscape painters that should be mentioned.

In his most famous essay, “Nature,” Emerson asserted that “the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, NATURE.”[iii] Both Nature and the Soul, however, are touched by the divinity of God and His immanence is felt in two distinct and important ways. The first was explained by Channing when he wrote, "We see God around us because He dwells within us… [T]he beauty and glory of God's works are revealed to the mind by a light beaming from itself." The other significant idea is demonstrated in Emerson’s assertion that nature does not so much represent the divine as it does reflect it: to paraphrase, nature is a symbolic expression of the spiritual world that exists beyond the physical world. Transcendentalism is based on the power of thought, on will and inspiration and it promotes self-reliance while focusing on the spiritual connection of things. Finally, and significantly, nature plays a central role in the individual’s quest for beauty and divinity.

While trained as an artist in Germany, Albert Bierstadt had New England roots and was as intent on developing a uniquely American art as Emerson was on creating an American literary tradition. Bierstadt recognized that there was nothing more American than the west and in the tradition of Margaret Fuller, who, at a crossroads in her writing career went to the (then) frontier to obtain a “poetic impression” of the country, he set out on a journey to the west that would prove pivotal to his success as a landscapist. Just as the scenery would “provide [Fuller] the inspiration for passages of meditation and description”[iv] that would give rise to her book Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, Bierstadt’s trip to the Rocky Mountains “provided critical visual and emotional experiences that launched his career as an ‘artist-explorer.’”[v] He returned with the material to paint one of his most famous works, the ambitious Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak, 1863.

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The large-scale work, a pay-per-view known as a “Great Painting” presented in dramatic fashion a mountain scene on par with those of the European Alps. While it (and later works) found an audience in the eastern part of the country and achieved popular success, it received what can only be described as a “chilly” reception from critics. Perhaps the two most emphatic voices of disapproval were those of James Jackson Jarves and Clarence Cook. Cook, the “ardent Ruskinian”[vi] complained that Bierstadt was not attentive enough to detail and that his mountain paintings showed too little geology. He said the work was “immature, and on too pretentious a scale.”[vii] But his most significant criticism of the work came veiled in what has often been viewed as praise for Lander’s Peak. As Nancy Anderson notes, “[Cook] recognized that the primary experience for the viewer of The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak was theatrical rather than aesthetic: a vicarious journey through space and time, recapitulating the difficult and risky artist’s pilgrimage.”[viii] Emphasis should be placed on the term “pilgrimage” and attention paid to its connotations. Rather than merely theatrical, as Anderson argues, Bierstadt intended for the painting to offer the viewer a spiritual experience.

The two focal points of the painting are the imposing, snow-capped Lander’s Peak and the glowing light that surrounds the waterfall and spring. With this peak, a claim could finally be made to the Swiss Alps; there was now “an American equivalent for the European sublime.”[ix] This was a prime example of the idea Emerson had advanced—here was an American original that could compare with or even surpass the traditions of the old world. But more important than the nationalist agenda suggested by Angela Miller in Eye of the Empire was Bierstadt’s illustration of the transcendental. Theodore Winthrop described the snow covered peak as “‘the sublimest of natural objects’ and extolled the ‘great white thrones of the Almighty’ that ‘demand our worship.”[x] The obvious connection is made by asserting that the grand mountain, in all its majesty, is simply a representation of God: As Emerson writes, Nature can be read and interpreted as a Biblical text without the middleman of symbolism: Mountains don’t just “represent the divine, they are the divine.”[xi]Lander’s Peak dos not astound its audience simply because of its sheer scale but also because of the intense spiritual feeling one has when viewing it. Through art and nature one has come into contact with God.

The spring, as the other point of focus, also implies transcendence as it is surrounded by a divine glow. The iconography of such light is well established—it is usually reserved by artists and poets for the divine; for God, Christ, the Holy Spirit or Saints. But light also serves another purpose in transcendentalism—through it passes not only the divine, but also beauty. Emerson wrote that “light is the first painter—light makes things beautiful.”[xii] And in “The Over Soul,” “From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.”

Light was extremely important to Bierstadt as well, and this became more apparent as his career progressed, most obviously in his series of paintings of the Yosemite Valley.

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In Valley of the Yosemite, 1864, Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California, 1865 and Sunset in Yosemite Valley, 1868 Bierstadt illustrates the divine presence by making a dramatic light effect central to the image. In these paintings Bierstadt also makes use of another of Emerson’s credos: “To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.”[xiii] These three pictures are of the same scene, from the same perspective, but with different lighting, cloud cover and at a different time of year. Bierstadt not only strikes the viewer into a feeling of awe, but uses subtle effects to extract a spiritual reverence for the scene and demonstrate the inherent connection between God and Nature.

Surprisingly, the contemporary critics remarked on none of this. A review of their comments perhaps reveals why it was that they found Bierstadt’s work sub par. One reviewer, who was perhaps sympathetic to (but not necessarily in tune with) Bierstadt’s project remarked of his paintings, “they do not appeal to the highest faculties of the mind; that is, they do not confront one’s spiritual moods.”[xiv] In one of the many scathing reviews Cook wrote, he said that “[Bierstadt] paints with ashes, with clay, with brimstone, but never with light.”[xv] The critics seemed to overlook some of the ideas Bierstadt was trying to convey and the methods through which he attempted to express them.

Perhaps the greatest objection to Bierstadt’s landscapes is that he was sometimes not true to nature, both embellishing effects and, through his titles, claiming as actual locations what were in fact composites of several scenes. While these facts are easily explained by evidence of Bierstadt’s financial agenda, they can also be attributed to a philosophy towards nature based in transcendentalism. In “Nature,” Emerson maintains that it is the responsibility of the artist and the poet to integrate all of the parts into the whole. Praising idealism and the work of the poet/artist, Emerson could have been referring to Bierstadt when he wrote:

“The sensual man conforms thoughts to things; the poet conforms things to his thoughts. The one esteems nature as rooted and fast; the other, as fluid, and impresses his being thereon...[the poet/artist] possesses the power ofsubordinating nature for the purposes of expression… The remotest spaces of nature are visited, and the farthest sundered things are brought together, by a subtle spiritual connection. We are made aware that the magnitude of material things is relative, and all objects shrink and expand to serve the passion of the poet.”[xvi]

The problem was, perhaps, that critics were viewing Bierstadt and his works solely in a nationalist context separate from an alternate interpretation that the artist may have intended. But, as tastes in American landscape painting shifted towards a realism that turned away from landscapes with religious connotations, there was no longer room for Bierstadt’s transcendental unification of the real and the ideal. That is not to say that transcendentalism in landscape painting did not survive—instead it found a different message of transcendence in the earlier works of Frederic Church.

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An artist famous in his own time and known for his tireless work ethic, Frederic Church moved to the Catskills when he was eighteen, to study under Thomas Cole. He was Cole’s first and only student and his early work and philosophy was greatly influenced by the American Romantic/transcendentalist. While his 1859 painting The Heart of the Andes fits with the Emersonian philosophy of the sublime that Bierstadt employed, it was not the work on that best illustrates his transcendentalist credentials. Instead, Church built his philosophy, as well as his career, on a series of small-scale New England landscapes that he painted in the late 1840s and early ‘50s. He experimented with different approaches in order to create a higher style of landscape painting that would not simply portray aesthetic delight, but extend a specific philosophy and challenge the viewer to think differently about the commonplace. As Franklin Kelly writes, “His goal was always the same: to make landscape painting rise above the merely descriptive and do far more than simply record the basic facts of the external world. He wanted his art, through landscape, to address issues of profound significance and, in doing so, to convey complex ideas about the world and mankind.”[xvii] Truly in the mode of his teacher, he sought a deeper meaning in landscape painting and hoped to raise it from its traditionally low rank among genres. As Cole wrote in an 1844 letter directly before Church came to study under him, “[There] are subjects of a moral and religious nature on such I think it the duty of the artist to turn…his works ought not to be mere dead imitations of things—without the power to impress a Sentiment or enforce a moral or religious truth.”[xviii] It is clear that, as much as may be said about Church’s talent for self-promotion and quest for a unique style, the most important thing to him about landscape painting was its ability to involve the viewer in a philosophic and religious questioning that could only be addressed by a venture into self-discovery.

This attitude of self-reliance and personal exploration is reminiscent of another New England transcendentalist, who wrote, famously “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately…and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived…I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…[and] if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it…”[xix] Appropriately, Thoreau’s Walden would appear visually, as well as philosophically in Church’s work. While Home by the Lake, 1852

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was a scene from the Catskills, it could easily have been Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond in Concord. Church’s focus on the lake reflects the influence of Cole, who thought that a lake was the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature and its seclusion tells of the solitude and self-reliance promoted by the transcendentalists. The stumps shown in the bottom-center of the painting are evocative of Thoreau’s first chapter describing the felling of trees that is necessary for building and future planting and discussing the first steps of settlement.

“Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my house, and began to cut down some tall arrowy white pines…for timber… So I went on for some days cutting and hewing timber… Each stick was carefully mortised...by its stump. Before I had done I was more the friend than the foe of the pine tree, though I had cut down some of them, having become better acquainted with it.”[xx]

The solitary journey into nature was important for both the writer and the painter. About it Emerson remarked, we must “retire from the chamber as well as society…in the woods we return to reason and faith.”[xxi] The transcendentalists in general, and Thoreau and Emerson in particular, believed that by going into to nature and writing it, one could create an original experience with it, and through it, with God. Church believed implicitly in the immanence of God in nature, and for good measure usually utilized some aspect of the traditional sublime to represent the spiritual presence. In the case of Home by the Lake (as well as New England Scenery) he does so with the inclusion of grand and billowing cloud formations that resemble snow-capped mountain peaks, the traditional symbol of majesty and the sublime.