{"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