{"id":84866,"date":"2019-11-18T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-11-18T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/landscapes-quaker-otherwise\/"},"modified":"2024-03-22T09:05:59","modified_gmt":"2024-03-22T13:05:59","slug":"landscapes-quaker-otherwise","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/landscapes-quaker-otherwise\/","title":{"rendered":"Landscapes, Quaker & otherwise"},"content":{"rendered":"

One<\/span> can enjoy an exhibition while rejecting its central premise, as one must when the art on the walls does not support that premise. \u201cFrom the Schuylkill to the Hudson: Landscapes of the Early American Republic,\u201d at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, postulates a Philadelphia-centered \u201cSchuylkill River School\u201d that \u201cgave birth to the better-known Hudson River School.\u201d1<\/a><\/span><\/span> The exhibition strives mightily to show the continuity between the two, in the process revealing a fundamental discontinuity. As it happens, that discontinuity is itself fascinating.<\/p>\n

The Hudson River School is the wildly popular school of landscape painting that flourished in antebellum America and found its subject matter in the picturesque scenery of the Catskill Mountains. But its savage gorges and lofty, slender waterfalls were only its nominal subject; its real theme was the tragic fragility of nature. In 1825, the year Thomas Cole, the school\u2019s founding figure, made his first sketching tour of the Catskills, the Erie Canal opened. Even as he trudged north along the Hudson in search of unspoiled wilderness, steamboats were already thundering south along the same river, carrying the wealth and produce of a continent to New York City.<\/p>\n

Cole turned his back on the distressing spectacle; he seems never to have painted a steamboat. He preferred to depict nature in its primal state, declaring that \u201cthe most distinctive, and perhaps the most impressive, aspect of American scenery is its wildness.\u201d The human presence in Hudson River School paintings is generally restricted to a small figure or two (Cole was never more than a passable painter of the human body) and perhaps a distant cabin with a curl of smoke. But that cabin is a melancholy harbinger of coming change and reminds us that the settling of the continent grinds ever onward. This is the note that gives every Hudson River School landscape its mournful undertow.<\/p>\n

Cole was born in Lancashire, England, in 1801 and came to the United States in 1818. Over the next seven years he cobbled together a rudimentary artistic education and set himself up as a portrait painter in Pittsburgh, something for which he had no aptitude whatsoever. From 1823 to 1825, he lived in Philadelphia, where he frequented the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, drawing from its plaster casts and submitting works to its annual exhibition. Cole\u2019s elusive two years in Philadelphia are the thin string that allegedly ties the Schuylkill and the Hudson together.<\/p>\n

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Thomas Doughty, <\/em>Landscape with Curving River, 1823, Oil on canvas, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

The exhibition does a terrific job of recreating the artistic world of 1820s Philadelphia, and it brings together the most significant landscapes of Thomas Doughty, William Birch, and Thomas Birch (William\u2019s son). The favorite subject of those artists was the scenery of the Schuylkill River, particularly the point where the flat grid of William Penn\u2019s original city abruptly gives way to a picturesque landscape of rocky hills and narrow streams. This sudden transition began with the Faire Mount, the hill on which the Philadelphia Museum of Art would one day rise and which gave Fairmount Park, Philadelphia\u2019s great municipal park, its name.<\/p>\n

As it happened, this was also the site of Philadelphia\u2019s newest and most enlightened public works project, the Fairmount Waterworks, just completed in 1815. The waterworks were but one of the many improving institutions in which Philadelphia, prompted by its lively Quaker humanitarian tradition, abounded; the roster included America\u2019s first public hospital, first modern mental asylum, and first penitentiary. The waterworks were a desperate response to the Yellow Fever outbreaks of the 1790s. A dam was built across the river, which generated enough power to pump water into a reservoir atop the hill, providing the city with fresh water. A Philadelphian who looked at the Faire Mount saw something both beautiful and useful\u2014very satisfying to the Quaker eye.<\/p>\n

The<\/span> exhibition gives pride of place, appropriately enough, to Thomas Birch\u2019s Fairmount Water Works <\/span>(1821), which was shown at the Academy in the same 1824 exhibition in which Cole first appeared. It is the finest of all images of the waterworks and was widely copied in prints. It also seems to have dispirited Cole. He later confessed that \u201chis heart sunk as he felt his deficiencies in art when standing before the landscapes of Birch.\u201d But it is curious, given the theme of \u201cFrom the Schuylkill to the Hudson,\u201d how utterly unlike Birch\u2019s painting is any of the subsequent work of Cole. Birch gives us an orderly and ordered landscape in which nature everywhere shows the hand of man: villas dot the distant hills; the dam and waterworks control the river, which is merrily trafficked by barges and a steam-powered paddlewheel. The steam engine and churning water pose no threat to nature and instead coexist in balanced harmony. Although the dam and its associated buildings are new, they are no intruders; they are as much an integral part of the landscape as any crumbling ruin or ancient tower in a landscape by Claude.<\/p>\n

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John Lewis Krimmel, <\/em>Fourth of July in Centre Square, 1812, Oil on canvas, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Philadelphia, the exhibition makes abundantly clear, took inordinate pride in its waterworks. Even its short-lived predecessor, Benjamin Henry Latrobe\u2019s steam-powered pump house on Center Square, was a favorite backdrop for paintings, such as John Lewis Krimmel\u2019s Fourth of July in Centre Square <\/span>(1812), with its good-naturedly boisterous crowd celebrating the holiday beneath William Rush\u2019s allegorical sculpture of a water nymph with bittern. (It was a pleasant surprise to see the statue\u2019s head\u2014carved in wood and lucky to have survived for that reason\u2014on display alongside Krimmel\u2019s painting.)<\/p>\n

Volumes are sharply defined by finely drawn edges, and even when presented in the form of painting they seem to have been composed mentally in the language of engraving.<\/p>\n

Paintings of the waterworks were widely reproduced, not only through engravings but also on English and Chinese pottery\u2014copies of copies of copies, yet always maintaining some irreducible legibility. Looking at the spread of this popular imagery, one cannot help but be struck by its fundamentally graphic quality. Volumes are sharply defined by finely drawn edges, and even when presented in the form of painting they seem to have been composed mentally in the language of engraving. If there was indeed a Schuylkill River School, as the exhibition proposes, it was not a painterly school but one dominated by draftsmen and printmakers, characterized by impeccably tight draftsmanship.<\/p>\n

This is as one would expect. The dominant figure in Philadelphia landscape art was William Birch, who emigrated from England in 1794 and created the celebrated suite of twenty-seven engravings known as Birch\u2019s Views of Philadelphia<\/span>. Its tone of sober respectability\u2014neat buildings, neatly tended streets, all rendered in neat engravings\u2014struck the exact right note, and it was prodigiously influential, being issued repeatedly between 1800 and 1828. Thomas assisted his father with these later editions and imbibed his graphic language; we see its influence everywhere in this exhibition.<\/p>\n

It is perilous to generalize about the taste of an entire city, but Philadelphia in its early decades had no special affection for the painterly\u2014that is, for the expressive viscosity of liquid paint. It preferred the reassuring, quantifiable forms of draftsmanship. For this reason, it is startling to move to the later galleries of the exhibition and encounter the mature work of Cole and his peers. At once we lose all reverence for the well-ordered, settled landscape and are immersed as deeply as possible in wilderness, our back firmly turned to the steamboat-traveled Hudson. At the same time, we are liberated from tight neoclassical draftsmanship and enter a rich chromatic world.<\/p>\n

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Thomas Cole, <\/em>The Voyage of Life: Manhood, 1842, Oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

So rich, in fact, than one cannot help but reassess Cole. I confess that I tended to think of Cole more as a draftsman than a painter; he cannot be said to have thought in terms of color, as did Frederic Edwin Church, his far more talented pupil. After all, Cole\u2019s paintings were invariably based on pencil sketches made on site and subsequently worked up into paintings. But the exhibition\u2019s juxtaposition of the Schuylkill River School and the Hudson River School makes clear just how painterly Cole was\u2014and in surprising fashion. We are treated to James Smillie\u2019s brilliant prints of The Voyage of Life <\/span>(1842), Cole\u2019s poignant cycle that takes a man in four stages from infancy to old age, a dazzling feat in which the arc of growth, maturity, and decline is expressed vicariously by means of landscape rather than through the human form. Rendering Cole\u2019s variety of rich glossy textures and gauzy veils required an extraordinarily skillful blend of etching and engraving, yielding prints that are as atmospheric and painterly as anything by Rembrandt.<\/p>\n

It <\/span>is understandable for the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts to make the most spacious claim possible for its own influence on the Hudson River School. But the Academy\u2019s history undercuts the claim, for it never became a major center of landscape painting\u2014its instructors either favored elaborate history painting, as did the German-born Christian Schussele, or realism, as did Thomas Eakins. It is significant that it never assiduously collected Hudson River School painting.<\/p>\n

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Frederick Edwin Church, <\/em>Valley of the Santa Ysabel, New Granada, 1875, Oil on canvas, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Until now, that is. The Academy has just acquired Church\u2019s radiant Valley of Santa Ysabel <\/span>(1875), which is the first of his works in its collection. It should be congratulated for this, even as the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, should be censured for selling it along with the lion\u2019s share of its trove of American art, which this journal has had occasion to lament. I found myself wishing that the exhibition had found space to include the 1875 review of the painting by a young Henry James, then the art critic for The Nation<\/span>. The painting, he said,<\/p>\n

is the kind of art which seems perpetually skirting the edge of something worse than itself, like a woman with a taste for florid ornaments who should dress herself in a way to make quiet people stare, and yet who should be really a very reputable person. . . . Why not accept this lovely tropic scene as a very pretty picture, and have done with it?<\/p>\n

James\u2019s smug disdain sums up the massive change in American sensibility that put an end to the Hudson River School after the Civil War. The Hudson River School presented a certain idealized and highly sentimental vision of the American landscape, which it viewed in distinctly moralizing and even explicitly Christian terms. This is why \u201cwildness\u201d was so important to Cole: it suggested the edenic innocence of the land. Even the absence of classical ruins was itself a sign of guiltlessness: \u201cYou see no ruined tower to tell of outrage,\u201d he wrote. Of course, such an attitude was not possible after Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, and subsequent painters would never see the American landscape with quite the innocent eye of Cole.<\/p>\n

If the claims of the exhibition are overly ambitious, and if its two halves ultimately fail to coalesce, the art on the wall is nevertheless exceptional, both aesthetically and historically. The visitor should also find time to see \u201cEtch and Flow,\u201d a companion exhibition of landscape prints from the later nineteenth and early twentieth century, centered around the etching revival. There is also available a slim but handsomely illustrated catalogue of the exhibition. It is a pleasure to see a rich and variegated exhibition that is fundamentally concerned with the aesthetic issues raised by the art itself and does not use the art as an instrument of social criticism. There is still time to see it and even to overlook its understandably exaggerated claims.<\/p>\n

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1<\/a> \u201cFrom the Schuylkill to the Hudson: Landscapes of the Early American Republic\u201d opened at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, on June 28 and remains on view through December 29, 2019.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On \u201cFrom the Schuylkill to the Hudson: Landscapes of the Early American Republic,\u201d at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1310,"featured_media":132119,"template":"","tags":[1950,1952,1250,1954],"department_id":[563],"issue":[2910],"section":[],"acf":{"participants":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":null,"value":null,"field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_65fd9fbaa0408","label":"Authors","name":"participants","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"user","value":null,"menu_order":0,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"role":"","return_format":"array","multiple":1,"allow_null":0,"bidirectional":0,"bidirectional_target":[],"_name":"participants","_valid":1}},"page_number":{"simple_value_formatted":24,"value_formatted":24,"value":"24","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_647e2bc0c860c","label":"Page Number","name":"page_number","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"number","value":null,"menu_order":1,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"default_value":"","min":"","max":"","placeholder":"","step":"","prepend":"","append":"","_name":"page_number","_valid":1}},"featured_image_credits":{"simple_value_formatted":"Thomas Birch, <\/i>Fairmount Water Works, 1821, Oil on canvas, Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts.<\/i>","value_formatted":"Thomas Birch, <\/i>Fairmount Water Works, 1821, Oil on canvas, Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts.<\/i>","value":"Thomas Birch, <\/i>Fairmount Water Works, 1821, Oil on canvas, Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts.<\/i>","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_651b519e4fcb7","label":"Featured Image Credits","name":"featured_image_credits","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"wysiwyg","value":null,"menu_order":2,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"default_value":"","tabs":"all","toolbar":"basic","media_upload":0,"delay":0,"_name":"featured_image_credits","_valid":1}},"enable_paywall":{"simple_value_formatted":"Yes","value_formatted":true,"value":"1","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_651d8874dce6f","label":"Enable Paywall","name":"enable_paywall","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"true_false","value":null,"menu_order":3,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"message":"","default_value":1,"ui":0,"ui_on_text":"","ui_off_text":"","_name":"enable_paywall","_valid":1}},"set_paywall_at":{"simple_value_formatted":null,"value_formatted":null,"value":null,"field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_66032c7fbb6f0","label":"Set Paywall At","name":"set_paywall_at","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"date_time_picker","value":null,"menu_order":4,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"display_format":"d\/m\/Y g:i a","return_format":"d\/m\/Y g:i a","first_day":1,"_name":"set_paywall_at","_valid":1}},"overlay_banner":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":"","value":"","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_66196a3de1de4","label":"Overlay Banner","name":"overlay_banner","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"text","value":null,"menu_order":5,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"default_value":"","maxlength":"","placeholder":"","prepend":"","append":"","_name":"overlay_banner","_valid":1}}},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"featured_img":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/1845_1_l.jpg","coauthors":[],"author_meta":{"author_link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/author\/michael-j-lewis\/","display_name":"Michael J. 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