Hitting the Trail: On the Heels of the Hudson River School

Experts commonly accept the Hudson River School, led by Thomas Cole, as the first true American art school and movement. They looked at the American landscape and saw something the natural settings of England and Europe did not offer. That natural newness fit in beautifully with the uniqueness of the American democratic experiment. Thanks to the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, we can now walk in the footsteps and see what the Hudson River School painters once saw, or at least as close an approximation as modernity allows. The Hudson River School Art Trail takes us back in time to when the land was pristine and the American democratic dream still seemed attainable. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Hitting the Trail."

Go Tell It on the Mountain: Ansel Adams at the Amon Carter Museum

Photographer Ansel Adams claimed that the goal of his art was “to rekindle an appreciation of the marvelous.” Ansel Adams: Eloquent Light at the Amon Carter Museum rekindles the marvelous aspects of the artist that over-familiarity threatens to extinguish. Through 40 photographs representative of different themes and periods of development in Adams’ career, this exhibition distills the essence of his work into one bright shining moment of clarity and, yes, eloquence. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Go Tell It on the Mountain."

[Image: Ansel Adams (1902–1984). Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park, 1944.Gelatin silver print, before 1975. ©2010 The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust. Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas Anonymous gift. P2008.5.]



[Many thanks to the Amon Carter Museum for providing the image above and press materials from Ansel Adams: Eloquent Light, which runs through November 7, 2010.]

Imported Goods

I’ve always found it fascinating how the first quintessentially “American” school of thought—Transcendentalism—borrowed heavily from non-American sources. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and others drew heavily from Eastern mysticism, Immanuel Kant and German Idealism, and Emanuel Swedenborg. Of course, all things quintessentially American came from somewhere else, the “mutt” leader of the world. Even Thomas Cole, the lead member of Transcendentalist-tinged Hudson River School, the first American art movement, came from England. Born February 1, 1801 in Lancashire, England, Cole was 17 years old when he first came to America, moving about with his family until finally formally learning painting at the PAFA in 1825. Soon after, Cole set out on his career of painting spiritually moving landscapes of American scenes of New England and the Catskill Mountains of New York. Yet, Cole resists the label of a purely “American” painter. Cole always painted some version of paradise, sometimes literally as in The Garden of Eden (above, from 1828). Regardless of location, the perfect landscape always existed in a timeless, locationless place in his imagination.

Cole spent several years in the early 1830s and early 1840s living in England and Italy. In Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama argues that landscape painters are shaped in part by the landscape before them. In other words, the local growth of the American scene provides different materials than the forests of England or Europe, which then influence the work of the artist. Cole saw enough of these different landscapes that they eventually mingled into the “idea” of a landscape over time. A good Transcendentalist, Cole transcended the mundane facts of the landscape and struck at the spirit of the woods. Cole’s L'Allegro (Italian Sunset) (above, from 1845) borrows a title from the British poet John Milton and sets itself in Italy, but the idealized light and pastoral sensibility come entirely from the amalgamation in Cole’s head and heart. The liveliness of the upbeat figures in the foreground contrasts sharply with the deathly stillness of the classical ruins far in the distance. Cole painted series such as The Course of Empire and The Voyage of Life as overt allegories, but for him every landscape was an allegory.

Cole also painted Milton’s pendant poem to L’Allegro, Il Penseroso (above, from 1845). The prone, pensive figure before the religious ruin in the foreground resembles one of the figures seen dancing in L’Allegro. Like Milton, Cole wants to offer both sides of the human emotional coin. The ancient-looking icon is pure Old World, but the abundance of greenery speaks more of the still-virginal American forests of Cole’s day. Cole perfectly combines the wisdom of the ages of Western Civilization with the fresh perspective of the rising American experiment. Again, this combination is, paradoxically, exactly what makes it so “American” in nature. Cole’s Europeanism resembles Milton’s classicism in that both take the lessons of yesterday to construct new meanings for their own age, and ours. Never a slave to realism, Cole painted more realistic landscapes by delving into his soul and the souls of other thinkers and artists and assembling a landscape more of meaning and memory than just trees and grass.

Attention to Detail

If you think that’s a photograph above, you’re wrong. It’s hard to believe, but William Trost Richards’ Forest Interior (above, from 1865) is just one example of the incredibly photographic draftsmanship of one of America’s truly great landscapists of the nineteenth century. Born November 14, 1833, Richards falls within an art historical crack—born too late to be considered truly part of the Hudson River School and born on the wrong side of the Atlantic to join the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Richards’ painting is too clinically precise to join the ranks of Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, and other more spiritually oriented Hudson River School artists. On the other hand, Richards’ precision matches that of Pre-Raphaelite greats such as John Everett Millais except for one major detail—an almost complete lacking of the human figure. Occasionally Richards would set a person into his landscape as an almost grudging concession to convey a sense of scale. The literary flights of fancy the Pre-Raphaelites painted over and over, however, never enter into Richards’ signature style. Just the facts, he seems to say. Just the facts are magical enough for me.

Richards grew up in Philadelphia but studied for years in Europe before returning to live in Pennsylvania. Upon his return, Richards brought back much of the grand style of Romanticism ala Caspar David Friedrich, but, again, devoid of human presence. Moonlight on Mount Lafayette, New Hampshire (above, from 1873) demonstrates how Richards could depict effects of light on the landscape and on clouds beautifully. Looking through Richards’ oeuvre, you never get the sense that he repeated himself. From fire-red autumnal scenes to cool-blue moonlit landscapes, nothing seemed beyond Richards’ reach. Yet, for all his technical proficiency, he’s little known today, just a footnote in the histories of American art. Perhaps he’s too good, almost too photographic. Realism this real seems somehow unreal without some sense of the artist’s personality mixed in. Unfortunately, Richards never provides a clue to who he is other than a great recorder of nature.

As great as Richards was with oils, he paints in watercolor even better, as can be seen in works such as Beach with Rising Sun, New Jersey (above, from 1870-1875). In the last stage of his career, Richards concentrated mainly on marine scenes, as if he had mastered the inland and now set out to conquer the seas. A trip to England in the 1870s during which he saw the watercolors of J.M.W. Turner most likely inspired Richards to put the water in his watercolors. Turner ranks among the greatest watercolorists ever thanks to his combination of technique and Romantic feel for nature. In these final works, Richards seems to approach a Turner-esque level of Romanticism yet still somehow falls short. It’s difficult to look at these great works and say they fail on some level, but it’s more difficult to say they satisfy completely. These works lack the personality we in the West look for in art. But, in the East, the absence of the artist doesn’t disqualify a piece as great art. Maybe Richards achieved a type of Zen in his art that the uninitiated just can’t relate to.

Merchant Marine

Thomas Chambers. Capture of the H.B.M. Frigate Macedonian by U.S. Frigate United States, October 25, 1812,1852. Oil on canvas, 34 ½ x 50 inches. Smithsonian American Art Museum/Art Resource; Gift of Sheldon and Caroline Keck in honor of Elizabeth Broun, 1992.

How do you write about a painter about whom almost nothing is known? Can the work absent the biography provide us with satisfying answers? Kathleen A. Foster tackles these challenges in Thomas Chambers: American Marine and Landscape Painter, 1808-1869, the companion publication to the exhibition currently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “The distinctiveness of [Chambers’] style as a painter, matched inversely by the vagueness of his biography, has made him a tantalizing figure,” Foster writes of the artist whom she has pursued since the 1990s, “at once one of the most widely collected American ‘folk’ landscape painters and yet one of the least studied and understood.” Putting flesh on the skeletal framework of what we know about Chambers through relentless sleuthing and an encyclopedic examination of what it meant to be a working artist in nineteenth century America, Foster schools readers not only on what kind of artist Chambers most likely was but also on what it takes to recover such lost souls from the depths of murky art history. Chambers’ works, such as his Capture of the H.B.M. Frigate Macedonian by U.S. Frigate United States, October 25, 1812 (above, from 1852), captivate us with their otherness and strange modernity and draw us in to ask more. Foster provides more answers than we should expect.

Thomas Chambers. Rockaway Beach, New York, with the Wreck of the Ship Bristol, c. 1837-40. Oil on canvas, 21 3/4 x 30 3/8 inches. Indiana University Art Museum; Morton and Marie Bradley Memorial Collection.

Foster begins her manhunt in Whitby, England, Chambers’ birthplace, where his brother George initiated him into the world of being a working artist taking on all manner of jobs to make a living. The theatrical and panoramic paintings of popular English entertainment of the time influenced Thomas and impressed on him the need to market your wares properly to survive as an artist. Chambers arrived in the United States in 1832, setting up shop in New Orleans for a few years. Moving to New York City, Chambers advertised himself in a local paper as “Thomas Chambers, Marine and Landscape Painter” ready to perform “Fancy Painting of every description done to order.” Chambers painted everything from furniture and signs to fine art for the home, including works such as Rockaway Beach, New York, with the Wreck of the Ship Bristol (above, circa 1837-1840), which recounts the story of a shipwreck that would have been familiar to his local audience. “With the practical outlook of a mariner,” Foster writes, “he includes the workaday salvage of the ship by the wreckers who have pulled alongside… [yet] within a romantic structure in which a bystander contemplates, under sunny skies, the aftermath of the most recent episode in a timeless cycle of tragedy and recovery.” This tension between merchandising and higher artistic aspirations energizes much of Chambers’ art as he continually pursued a buying audience, often physically, as shown by moves from New York City to Baltimore, Boston, Albany, and New York City, again, before returning to England in his final years. Foster identifies Chambers’ contemporary audience as “prosperous, bourgeois householders attentive to the latest urban style… evidently attracted by a novel, fashionable, prestigious, and cosmopolitan item: the original framed oil painting of a landscape or marine subject.” Upwardly mobile Americans looking to acquire the trappings of success sought out artists such as Chambers, who supplied them with an affordable touch of class. Chambers, Foster believes, was “the first American painter to bring professional landscape and marine easel painting to an audience beyond the metropolitan elite,” thus democratizing art for the still-young democracy.

Thomas Chambers. The Constitution and the Guerrière, c. 1840-50. Oil on canvas, 24 3/4 x 34 1/4 inches. Metropolitan Museum of Art; Gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, 1962.

Capitalizing on the continued interest in the War of 1812, Chambers painted multiple versions of The Constitution and the Guerrière (above, from circa 1840-1850), the battle that made “Old Ironsides” a household name. Chambers painted several different naval conflicts from that war, always looking to open up new markets or fulfill new commissions. Chambers played to the wishes of his audience and his own tastes rather than slavishly copy reality. “Sailors might have been disdainful, considering the nonsensical signal flags, out-of-scale vessels, and perilous courses depicted,” Foster muses, “but perhaps they enjoyed [Chambers’] spirit,” as adventuresome in paint as the events he depicted. To expect properly rendered ship’s rigging from Chambers work seems as silly as to expect anatomically correct animals in the work of Edward Hicks, an artist from the generation just before Chambers’. N.C. Wyeth actually owned two naval battle scenes by Chambers, proving that their inner spirit continued to entrance kindred spirits even a century later. Although not truly an illustrator like Wyeth, Chambers scoured popular magazines and newspapers for subjects for his brush, illustrating the images that were fresh in the mind of his buying audience.

Thomas Chambers. Niagara Falls from the American Side, c. 1843-52. Oil on canvas, 18 1/16 x 24 inches. Indiana University Art Museum; Morton and Marie Bradley Memorial Collection.

Although Chambers painted both marine and landscape scenes, he clearly identified himself as a marine painter. The few works that bear his signature are marine paintings. Chambers might actually have gone so far as to create aliases under which he could sell his landscapes. Another factor that may have led Chambers not to place his name on such works as Niagara Falls from the American Side (above, circa 1843-1852) may have been his “borrowing” of such subjects from prints. Foster sees the fact that Chambers never copied one of Thomas Cole’s compositions as a sign that he respected the older artist’s work too much to mimic it. Although Chambers grew up in an art world that viewed such copying as a long-accepted practice, he practiced long enough to reach a time when such copying was looked down upon. “The issue of originality defines a sea change in that world during [Chambers’] lifetime that would forever disqualify him as a so-called fine artist in the eyes of his contemporaries,” Foster writes, explaining in part how Chambers fell into obscurity over time until his rediscovery in the middle of the twentieth century.

Thomas Chambers. Landscape with Lake and Monastery [Lake Albano and Castel Gandolfo?], c. 1843-60. Oil on canvas, 18 1/16 x 24 3/8 inches. Indiana University Art Museum; Morton and Marie Bradley Memorial Collection.

In the late 1930s, art dealers Albert Duveen and Norman Hirschl discovered a signed work by Chambers that led them to connect that one work to similarly painted works that had also emerged around that time. In 1942, they exhibited at the Macbeth Gallery in New York City 18 works attributed to Chambers, hailing him as the “First American Modern” and “The American Rousseau” for his unique style so similar to the primitivism valued by modern art movements. Just as Herman Melville resurfaced as the quintessential American novelist in the 1920s, Chambers resurfaces from obscurity as an “authentic American artist” according to critic Thomas Craven and others. Ironically, Foster points out, the “flatness, unnatural color, expressive distortion, abstraction, and simplification” of such works as Landscape with Lake and Monastery [Lake Albano and Castel Gandolfo?] (above, circa 1843-1860) that Chambers’ contemporaries “deemed bad in Chambers’ day… are exactly the traits that… make him a model of liberated individualism and originality” for a modern audience. Foster proceeds to prick this tidy balloon of posthumous acceptance by viewing the modern reading of Chambers as being as much a misreading of his art as the reading of his contemporaries. “Laundered, over time, of the class and guild prejudices that colored the opinions of Chambers’ own contemporaries,” Foster explains, “his work comes to us with nuances of subject matter and context likewise lost, and a measure of nostalgia and condescension added, as we smile over imagined naïve and innocent citizens of the past decorating their fancy parlors.” Foster’s coup de grace arrives in the form of Thomas Kinkade, whom Foster evokes as a possible analogue to the case of Chambers—an artist who played to the taste of his time in his own style despite critical approbation. “[I]f it is useful to call Chambers the ‘First American Modern’ in 1942,” Foster asks, “is it helpful to understand him as the ‘first Thomas Kinkade’?”

One of the finest prose stylists in art history writing today, Kathleen Foster delivers mightily with Thomas Chambers. As shocking as including the “Painter of Light™” in her argument seems, Foster makes it not only provocative but illuminating. Like Chambers’ art itself, Foster easily crosses all strata of culture, high and low, including Walt Disney’s Fantasia and PBS’ Bob “Happy Little Trees” Ross, to give a fully rounded recounting of what Chambers’ life most likely would have been like based on the sketchy evidence that survives. Foster’s presentation of her Sherlock Holmes-ish detective work and deductions are exhaustive without being exhausting, lightened by the twinkling wit of her writing and her impeccable eye for images that illustrate Chambers’ strengths. If you should ever fall into obscurity, pray for someone like Kathleen Foster to pull you out of it. Thomas Chambers recreates a little-understood era in early American art and exhumes an artist both representative of that time and well welcomed in our own.

[Many thanks to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for providing me with a review copy of Kathleen A. Foster’s Thomas Chambers: American Marine and Landscape Painter, 1808-1869 and for the images from the exhibition.]