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Description: Implication: An Ecocritical Dictionary for Art History
In a classic study of Keywords in English literature and cultural history, Raymond Williams described “nature” as “perhaps the most complex word in the language,” owing to its many senses and meanings...
PublisherYale University Press
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00341.9
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8. Nature: Wilderness Trouble
nature, n.
Origin: Of multiple origins. Partly a borrowing from French. Partly a borrowing from Latin. Etymons: French nature; Latin nātūra.
IV. Senses relating to the material world.
10. a. The creative and regulative power which is conceived of as operating in the material world and as the immediate cause of its phenomena. Cf. balance of nature.
10. b. Usually with capital initial. This power personified as a female being. Frequently as Dame Nature or Mother Nature.
11. a. The phenomena of the physical world collectively; esp. plants, animals, and other features and products of the earth itself, as opposed to humans and human creations.
11. b. In wider sense: the whole natural world, including human beings; the cosmos. Obsolete.
In a classic study of Keywords in English literature and cultural history, Raymond Williams described “nature” as “perhaps the most complex word in the language,” owing to its many senses and meanings. With etymological roots in old Latin and French words for birth, nation, and essential character, “nature” (sometimes personified as “Nature”) has long carried connotations of fundamental truth, often understood in relation to place. Since the eighteenth century in Europe, said Williams, “one of the most powerful uses of nature” has been its “selective sense of goodness and innocence,” whereby “Nature has meant the ‘countryside,’ the ‘unspoiled places,’ plants and creatures other than man.” In other words, with the Industrial Revolution and the rise of romanticism in Europe, the term gradually shed its associations with human beings to become its own ideal realm or entity. As corroborated by the Oxford English Dictionary (quoted above), “nature” now generally refers to “the phenomena of the physical world collectively; esp. plants, animals, and other features and products of the earth itself, as opposed to humans and human creations.” This latter meaning, equating nature with the nonhuman world, persists widely today and probably constitutes the most common understanding of “nature,” not just in the English-speaking world but internationally. Even politicians and activists in the so-called Global South have used this dehumanized sense when referring to the “Rights of Nature,” as distinct from human rights. From an ecological perspective, however, such thinking raises a problem, for it segregates human beings from the rest of existence, effectively extracting us as a species from our environment and implicitly rendering us as unnatural. In art history, this habit of conceptual segregation appears most vividly in romantic landscape painting of the nineteenth century, which frequently idealized nature as a pristine place without humans. As a way of demonstrating the constructed quality of such idealism, the present chapter ecocritically scrutinizes one of its most successful artistic proponents.1 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 219, 223. On the “Rights of Nature,” see Daniel P. Corrigan and Markku Oksanen, Rights of Nature: A Re-Examination (New York: Routledge, 2021). For critique of the “nature” concept, see Steven Vogel, Thinking Like a Mall: Environmental Philosophy after the End of Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2015); Jedediah Purdy, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015); and Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009).
In 1860, Frederic Edwin Church created Twilight in the Wilderness (fig. 1). Widely admired as a masterpiece of American romantic landscape painting in the tradition of the Hudson River School, this large picture vividly represents New England scenery passing into darkness after sunset. A glassy lake, surrounded by rugged forest, reflects a fiery sky with dramatic red clouds above a glowing yellow horizon. In the foreground, gnarled hemlocks and other trees frame the view, their dark branches rendered with meticulous precision, creating a striking contrast with the waning atmospheric light. For many nineteenth-century observers these elements conjured a rustic autumn in Maine, a state well known to the artist, who hailed from Connecticut and traveled extensively in New England. Lumber from that region had made Church’s father rich, securing the family financially, but the painting contains no obvious allusion to the timber industry, even though the artist had celebrated that enterprise in several earlier landscapes with sawmills. Indeed, the absence of specific local references in Twilight in the Wilderness intimates a broader national and even planetary significance. No trace of humanity seems to intrude upon the scene—no people, no roads, no boats, no houses—only Church’s supreme powers of artifice in creating the illusion, which invites the viewer to imagine this wilderness as representing nature in a pure, ideal state.2 On Twilight in the Wilderness, see the standard account in Franklin Kelly, Frederic Edwin Church and the National Landscape (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988), 102–22; see pages 14–16 for discussion of Church’s early depictions of sawmills and family ties to the timber industry. For other interpretations of Twilight in the Wilderness, all indebted to Kelly, see John K. Howat, Frederic Church (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 99–100; and Angela Miller, Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 128–29.
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Description: Twilight in the Wilderness by Church, Frederic Edwin
Fig. 1. Frederic Edwin Church, Twilight in the Wilderness, 1860. Oil on canvas, 40 × 64 in. (101.6 × 162.6 cm). Cleveland Museum of Art
The painting marks a turning point, in fact, as Church’s first monumental depiction of a scene with no evidence of humankind. Nor was he alone in embracing such a vision, for the idea of pristine wilderness increasingly appealed to some of his contemporaries in an emerging environmental conservation movement closely tied to aesthetics. Yet precisely by trying to imagine an untouched natural place without people, the artist and his peers idealized wilderness as a utopia—one that was appealing but elusive and evanescent, like the sun’s rays at twilight. Troubling this wilderness ideal was a looming awareness of pervasive human presence and influence, not just in New England or North America but also in more remote corners of the Earth as a fact of modernity. In effect, Twilight in the Wilderness points to the twilight of wilderness as a precarious concept at the very moment of its cultural ascent, amid dawning public consciousness about the ubiquity of human beings and their planetary impact. Nowhere was such impact more visible than in Church’s own artistic impulse to conjure and mark distant places, in pictures and in physical settings, including his private hilltop manor, Olana, built high above the Hudson River in rural Upstate New York on land he acquired during the same year he painted Twilight in the Wilderness. For Church, wilderness as an ideal, primordial condition of nature existed only in the imagination, and even there it became indelibly implicated with the human.3 On Twilight in the Wilderness as Church’s first major picture “where all such references [to human presence] are completely excluded,” see Kelly, Frederic Church, 108. For a classic study of the wilderness concept, see Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind [1967], 4th ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
THE METEOR OF THE WAR?
Scholars today generally interpret Twilight in the Wilderness as a somber expression of national anxiety about problems then facing the United States, especially the prospect of civil war between northern Union states and rebellious southern Confederates. A patriotic and deeply religious northern painter, Church completed the picture in his New York City studio less than a year before rebel forces initiated military conflict by attacking Fort Sumter at Charleston, South Carolina, on April 12, 1861. Growing sectional tension over slavery during the 1850s had already made such a conflagration seem inevitable to many Americans. Although Church left no clear verbal statement about impending war, art historians have read Twilight in the Wilderness as foreshadowing hostilities with dread and doubt about the future of the nation. For these scholars, two small foreground details subtly suggest the artist’s concerns for the political and spiritual future of the United States as a sacred entity embodied in the northern, New England landscape: an American eagle perched high in a tree at left and a natural cross formed by a pair of broken branches atop a nearby stump (fig. 2). As if to confirm the painting’s anticipation of war, Church produced a roughly similar composition the following year, offering an explicit display of nationalism keyed to surging patriotic sentiment after the outbreak of violence (fig. 3). Titled Our Banner in the Sky, this new picture of 1861 seems to translate the mute symbolism of Twilight in the Wilderness into a declaration of war by turning the sky into a blazing American flag formed by clouds, stars, and tree. In the words of art historian Franklin Kelly, “Twilight in the Wilderness may thus be seen as representing the nation on the eve of civil war, whereas Our Banner in the Sky represents the morning of the war itself.”4 Kelly, Frederic Edwin Church, 119. For a historical account of incidents that led up to the outbreak of war, see David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861, new ed. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2011).
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Description: Twilight in the Wilderness, detail by Church, Frederic Edwin
Fig. 2. Frederic Edwin Church, Twilight in the Wilderness, 1860 (detail). Oil on canvas, 40 × 64 in. (101.6 × 162.6 cm). Cleveland Museum of Art
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Description: Our Banner in the Sky by Church, Frederic Edwin
Fig. 3. Frederic Edwin Church, Our Banner in the Sky, 1861. Oil on paper, 7 1/2 × 11 1/4 in. (19.1 × 28.5 cm). Collection of Fred Keeler
Kelly’s interpretation of Twilight in the Wilderness has become an article of faith among scholars, who have reiterated it in various ways over the years. For example, as Angela Miller observes, “Church’s wilderness apocalypse is a baptism through violence into a redeemed sense of nationhood. Such was the manner in which northerners frequently justified the social and human costs of war. . . . Church’s Twilight was a prayer, summoning not to action but to silent witness . . . [of] a nature that has erased culture’s wounds.” Discussing the “final crisis” between North and South, Tim Barringer says, “Twilight in the Wilderness . . . seemed to presage an American apocalypse such as Church’s Puritan ancestors had prophesied.” In a similar vein, Jennifer Raab describes Church’s picture as exemplifying “Painting in Wartime,” with its “depiction of the American wilderness under a portentously apocalyptic sky.”5 Miller, Empire of the Eye, 129; Andrew Wilton and Tim Barringer, American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820–1880 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press in association with Tate Trustees, 2002), 56; Jennifer Raab, Frederic Church: The Art and Science of Detail (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 93. An exception is Howat, Frederic Church, 99–101, who does not repeat Kelly’s interpretation.
But what if we were to revisit Twilight in the Wilderness without the hindsight of the Civil War’s outbreak or the ensuing patriotism so ardently expressed by Our Banner in the Sky? Could another frame of interpretation bring alternative meanings to light? I think so. When Church first exhibited Twilight in the Wilderness to the public in the summer of 1860, at Goupil’s gallery on Broadway in New York, numerous art critics had much to say about the work but none of them mentioned it being a premonition of war. If the painting expressed Church’s northern views about the future of the Union, this evidently did not discourage his patron, William Thompson Walters (1820–1894)—a wealthy Baltimore merchant, art collector, and Confederate sympathizer—from purchasing it shortly before leaving the United States to spend much of the war abroad in Europe. Although several contemporary writers noted the painting’s melancholy mood, using terms like “sombre” and “sombreness,” “solemnity,” “solemn splendor,” and even “oppressive gloom,” they did not link such observations to politics or sectional conflict in any discernible way. In fact, reviewers generally admired the painting’s subdued tone in depicting nature as part of its attraction, one of them even referring to “the charming manner in which Church has contrived to suggest the melancholy, but pleasing influence of a twilight in the wilderness.” Such comments suggest art-world criteria of landscape aesthetics rather than broader sociopolitical concerns. In other words, a picture that art historians have interpreted as a presentiment of war apparently did not look that way to contemporary critics when Church unveiled the work publicly in 1860. Prevailing interpretation of the painting today therefore has a retrospective quality, not unlike Herman Melville’s postwar poem “The Portent,” describing John Brown’s prewar insurrectionary raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry and subsequent execution in 1859 as “the meteor of the war.” Even Kelly hedged about his reading of Twilight in the Wilderness, conceding, “We cannot be certain that Church himself intended every meaning that the painting seems to offer.”6 “Mr. Church’s Last Picture,” New York Times, June 7, 1860, 4 (“solemnity”); “Fine Arts,” New York Herald, June 8, 1860, 10 (“gorgeous effects of twilight,” “magnificent,” “sombre”); “Church’s New Picture,” Harper’s Weekly, July 14, 1860, 435 (“profound skill,” “wonderful ability,” “solemn splendor,” and “oppressive gloom”). References to “sombreness” and “melancholy, but pleasing influence” occur in “Art Matters; Mr. Church’s New Picture, Twilight in the Wilderness,” New York Morning Express, June 7, 1860, 2. On Walters and the commission, see Howat, Frederic Church, 99; and Mary Carole McCauley, “Men behind Walters Art Collection Were Confederate Sympathizers, Officials at Baltimore Museum Reveal,” Baltimore Sun, March 15, 2021. Herman Melville, “The Portent,” in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1866), [11]. Kelly, Frederic Church, 122.
If the critics who saw Twilight in the Wilderness in 1860 made no obvious mention of impending civil war, what did they see and say, apart from offering praise of its aesthetic achievement? Many admired Church’s evocation of Maine and New England, as in the article by a visiting Boston journalist, who wrote, “No lover of nature on this continent, no one who has bivouacked in the Adirondacks, explored the hills of New Hampshire or the forests of Maine, will but imagine that he has beheld the very scene.” Similarly, a writer for the New York Herald exclaimed, “It embodies the studies made in the wilds and pine forests of Maine, and gives a perfect idea of the general characteristics of that region.” As usual for Church, reviewers also gushed about the artist’s unsurpassed technical proficiency by praising his “profound skill,” “wonderful ability,” and “minute fidelity to details,” with one critic even faulting his “cunning force of hand” approaching “mechanism.” Critics marveled as well at his command of color and detail while repeatedly expressing appreciation for what they called the “unity and simplicity of the effect,” the “poetical feeling and unity of design,” and the “unity of impression” he achieved in the painting. Amid this refrain about formal “unity,” we encounter no laments about national disunion.7 Z., “Letter from New York,” Boston Evening Transcript, June 5, 1860, 1 (“hills of New Hampshire or the forests of Maine”); “Fine Arts,” New York Herald, June 8, 1860, 10 (“wilds and pine forests of Maine,” “minute fidelity to details”); “Church’s New Picture,” Harper’s Weekly, July 14, 1860, 435 (“profound skill,” “wonderful ability”); “Twilight in the Wilderness,” New York Tribune, June 13, 1860, 6 (“cunning force of hand” and “mechanism”). References to “unity” appear in “Art Matters; Mr. Church’s New Picture, Twilight in the Wilderness,” New York Morning Express, June 7, 1860, 2; “Fine Arts,” Albion, June 9, 1860, 273; “Art Items,” New-York Tribune, June 9, 1860, 5; and “Twilight in the Wilderness,” New York World, June 20, 1860, 5.
A SCENE UNHISTORIC
For purposes of the present chapter, the most striking explicit theme in early critical responses to Twilight in the Wilderness concerns the absence of human subject matter. Many reviewers admired the picture for representing nature in an authentic state, untouched by people. As the Boston Evening Transcript observed, the painting was “true to nature.” According to the New York Morning Express, “Not a house or a human being is visible . . . not an object is obtruded which can mar the effect or interfere with the perfect harmony of the whole.” Another critic, writing in the Albion, praised Church for showing “the solemnity of undisturbed primeval nature” and “a faithful transcript of Nature.” Likewise, the New York World praised the picture’s “embodiment of the subtlest expression of beauty that can come from inanimate nature,” saying the artist paints, “not nature according to Mr. Church, but simply nature.” George William Curtis, reporting for Harper’s Weekly, typified such comments by applauding the artist’s depiction of a “primeval forest,” celebrating this “waste of absolute solitude” as “perfect,” “a scene unhistoric, with no other interest than that of a wilderness, without human associations of any kind.” As these comments suggest, contemporary observers admired Twilight in the Wilderness as a work in which “Nature” (both capitalized and not) effectively represented itself, with no signs of human intervention and no creative modification or interpretation by the artist.8 “Fine Arts,” 273; [George William Curtis], “Church’s New Picture,” 435; “Twilight in the Wilderness,” New York World, 5. A poetic review by “W. G. D.” in the Evening Post (New York), June 21, 1860, unpaginated, contains two couplets that refer to conflict: “Though in the distant wilderness, / Which human footsteps seldom press, / Where there is no sign of human life / Or human care or human strife.” However, the poem’s language here and elsewhere is so broad as to encompass many possible interpretations, none of which necessarily relates to war.
This desire to encounter nature in a pristine, unmediated state untrammeled by human presence epitomizes Western romanticism’s broad, momentous shift in ideology and aesthetic attitudes in response to industrialism and other upheavals of the modern world. In 1862, at nearly the same moment Church painted Twilight in the Wilderness, Henry David Thoreau declared, “In Wildness is the preservation of the World,” heralding as a general principle the idea that unspoiled nature could offer a salutary antidote to, and refuge from, perceived problems associated with industry, politics, demographic change, and other conditions of modernity. War certainly contributed to such therapeutic desires, but the impulse to find solace in pure nature belonged to a much larger cultural trend, one with deep historical roots that culminated in the nineteenth-century wilderness aesthetic. In 1872, the United States inaugurated Yellowstone as the first national park in an act of Congress famously commemorated by another eminent American landscape painter, Thomas Moran, in Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (fig. 4), a work that institutionalized the wilderness aesthetic and related therapeutic tourism as official federal policy. For a nation seemingly blessed with remarkable natural wonders but also witnessing disorienting change from aggressive expansion and economic development, wilderness oases such as Yellowstone seemed to promise the “preservation” Thoreau described while guaranteeing America’s exceptional, providential status as “nature’s nation”—an idea reflecting fundamental beliefs about colonialism as a Christian mission. According to such thinking, the New World was a rediscovered Eden where Americans, as its chosen people, could start again. Church’s Twilight in the Wilderness artistically engaged this enduring discourse and clearly succeeded. Regardless of whether the painting foreshadowed the Civil War, its representation of “inanimate nature” “without human associations of any kind” obviously fulfilled other expectations in a timely romantic manner that also resonated with longstanding beliefs about American exceptionalism.9 On romanticism and ideas about nature, see Tim Blanning, The Romantic Revolution: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2011), 16–23. Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” Atlantic Monthly 9, no. 56 (1862): 665. Perry Miller, Nature’s Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967). Regarding the long history of nature escapism, see Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). On Yellowstone and the establishment of national parks, see Dorceta E. Taylor, The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), 290–327; and Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 41–70. For more on Moran’s picture, see Alan C. Braddock and Karl Kusserow, “Introduction,” in Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Art Museum in association with Yale University Press, 2018), 15–24.
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Description: The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone by Moran, Thomas
Fig. 4. Thomas Moran, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, 1872. Oil on canvas, 84 × 144 1/4 in. (213 × 366.3 cm). Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. [Lent by the Department of the Interior Museum, Washington, D.C.]
The environmental historian William Cronon has critically examined the conceptual underpinnings of the nineteenth-century wilderness aesthetic in an influential volume titled Uncommon Ground, including an essay on “The Trouble with Wilderness, or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” More art historians need to grapple with Cronon’s insights. Building on earlier arguments by scholars in various disciplines, he argues that Western ideas about nature evolved in ways that emphasized its otherness, exteriority, and difference from human culture:
The work of literary scholars, anthropologists, cultural historians, and critical theorists over the past several decades has yielded abundant evidence that “nature” is not nearly so natural as it seems. Instead, it is a profoundly human construction. This is not to say that the nonhuman world is somehow unreal or a mere figment of our imaginations—far from it. But the way we describe and understand that world is so entangled with our own values and assumptions that the two can never be fully separated. What we mean when we use the word “nature” says as much about ourselves as about the things we label with that word.10William Cronon, “Introduction: In Search of Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 25.
Aptly illustrating Cronon’s point about “nature” as “human construction,” Church based Twilight in the Wilderness on a sunset he observed not in the wilds of rural New England but rather from his studio on Tenth Street in downtown Manhattan. Preferring a wilderness setting for such a scene, he initially concocted a small oil study titled Twilight, a Sketch (fig. 5), removing all signs of the city and transposing the sunset to an ideal, uninhabited site with forest and lake. When Church exhibited this preliminary sketch at the National Academy of Design in 1859, a critic approvingly observed, “We understand that this is the record of a remarkable sunset that blessed the world in the summer solstice of 1858.” Triangulating evidence of the artist’s whereabouts at that time, Kelly deduced, “It is likely he saw this sunset in New York City.” Thus Church’s “unhistoric” scene of “wilderness, without human associations of any kind,” originated in an urban metropolis.11 Kelly, Frederic Church, 103, quoting “National Academy of Design; No. 3,” Spirit of the Times, May 14, 1859, 157.
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Description: Twilight, A Sketch by Church, Frederic Edwin
Fig. 5. Frederic Edwin Church, Twilight, a Sketch, 1858. Oil on canvas, 8 1/4 × 12 1/4 in. (21 × 31.1 cm). Olana State Historic Site, New York
The trouble with wilderness, says Cronon, is its unrecognized power as a privileged “cultural invention” with Western origins and problematic historical implications. “Go back 250 years in American and European history,” he explains, “and you do not find nearly so many people wandering around remote corners of the planet looking for what today we would call the ‘wilderness experience.’” The historian notes that medieval and early modern people in the Western world understood “wilderness” in emphatically negative terms. For them, it referred to an uncultivated moral void or wasteland “where Christ had struggled with the devil and endured his temptations,” as Cronon reminds us, paraphrasing the Gospel of Matthew (4:1–11). An artistic interpretation of this medieval worldview appears, for example, in a fourteenth-century altar panel painted by the Sienese master Duccio showing Christ in a forbidding mountain wilderness, refusing Satan’s tempting offer of all the world’s kingdoms in exchange for obedience (fig. 6). “But by the end of the nineteenth century,” states Cronon, “all this had changed. The wastelands that had once seemed worthless had for some people come to seem almost beyond price.” With the rise of romanticism, “Satan’s home had become God’s own temple.” Thoreau’s modern, romantic belief in wilderness as “the preservation of the World” exemplifies this historic recoding of thinking about wild nature from negative to positive. Church’s Twilight in the Wilderness participated in the same ideological realignment, with reviewer after reviewer praising the artist for his solemn reverence in depicting the rustic natural scene uninhabited by human beings.12 Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness, or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground, 69, 70, 71, 72.
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Description: The Temptation of Christ by Duccio
Fig. 6. Duccio di Buoninsegna, The Temptation of Christ, ca. 1310. Tempera on poplar panel, 17 × 18 1/8 in. (43.2 × 46 cm). Frick Collection, New York
The downside of idealizing nature in this manner as a primeval untouched wilderness, according to Cronon, is that it erases history—especially the history of Indigenous people, whose presence on the land long predates European colonization. Such erasure notoriously shaped U.S. national parks, including Yellowstone and its representation by artists like Moran, whose monumental painting sanctified and palliated a violent process of Indian removal by the American military in pacifying the region for White tourists. During the 1870s and 1880s, the U.S. Army governed the park from a fortress, Fort Yellowstone, regularly deploying troops to evict trespassing Native Americans and other people who previously had used the area for subsistence. Some prominent nineteenth-century wilderness enthusiasts, including Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903) and John Muir (1838–1914), facilitated the process of removal by condemning Indigenous people as “savages” incapable of aesthetic appreciation or “civilized” conduct in such places. Muir, founder of the Sierra Club (1892), referred to the historic Native American inhabitants of Yosemite National Park in California as “these dark-eyed, dark-haired, half-happy savages” who lead a “strangely dirty and irregular life” in “this clean wilderness” and therefore have “no right place in the landscape.” As Cronon indicates, “The removal of Indians to create an ‘uninhabited wilderness’—uninhabited as never before in the human history of the place—reminds us just how invented, just how constructed, the American wilderness really is. . . . There is nothing natural about the concept of wilderness.”13 Cronon, 79. Regarding Indian removal, poaching, and U.S. national parks, see Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness; Karl Jacoby, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); and Alan C. Braddock, “Poaching Pictures: Yellowstone, Buffalo, and the Art of Wildlife Conservation,” American Art 23, no. 3 (2009): 36–59. For detailed discussion of Moran’s painting and the Muir quotations, see Kusserow and Braddock, Nature’s Nation, 15–24, 206. The Sierra Club has begun to confront the racist legacy of its founder; see Rebecca Solnit, “Unfinished Business: John Muir in Native America,” Sierra 106, no. 2 (2021): 36–43.
Church’s Twilight in the Wilderness performed an analogous aesthetic evacuation of Maine, where human residents historically included—and continue to include—several Algonquian-speaking Wabanaki communities: the Mi’kmaq Nation, the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians, the Passamaquoddy Tribes at Motahkokmikuk and Sipayik, and the Penobscot Nation. The Wabanaki, or People of the Dawn Land, trace their origins to a legendary hunter named Gloosekap, who shot arrows into ash trees to create the Indigenous people of this region. By the nineteenth century, the Wabanaki faced aggressive encroachment by local Euro-American settlers and the U.S. federal government. Already decimated by earlier colonial wars and imported European diseases, the Native tribes sold much of their historic land out of desperation in exchange for food and supplies during the early 1800s. In 1860, when art critics praised Church for representing Maine’s “primeval forest” as an “unhistoric . . . wilderness, without human associations of any kind,” the area’s remaining Indigenous inhabitants were struggling to survive by working in the timber industry, farming, and producing various “fancy” goods for sale. For example, a Penobscot storage basket made of brown ash splints—and contemporaneous with Church’s painting—may have been one of many such items sold door-to-door by Indigenous makers during the late nineteenth century (fig. 7). Art historians perpetuate the colonial process of historical erasure by uncritically accepting the idea that Church’s Twilight depicts “wilderness: pure, primeval, and untouched, such as is found only in the New World”—language that essentially recycles that of nineteenth-century art critics.14 Kelly, Frederic Church, 114, 115: “Church was thus forcibly stating that the true essence and identity of North America lay in the virgin wilderness itself.” Such a statement about “the virgin wilderness itself,” left unexamined, differs little from those by nineteenth-century reviewers who praised Church’s work in virtually the same terms. On Indigenous communities of Maine, see Abbe Museum, “About the Wabanaki Nations,” https://www.abbemuseum.org/about-the-wabanaki-nations; Bruce J. Bourque, Twelve Thousand Years: American Indians in Maine (Lincoln: Bison Books/University of Nebraska Press, 2004), esp. 219–44 on the nineteenth century. For information about the Penobscot basket and other Indigenous basketry in Maine, see Maine Historical Society, “Penobscot Band Basket, ca. 1860,” Maine Memory Network, https://www.mainememory.net/artifact/23438; Jennifer S. Neptune and Lisa K. Neuman, “Basketry of the Wabanaki Indians,” in Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures, ed. Helaine Selin (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2015); and University of Maine Hudson Museum, “Maine Basketry,” https://umaine.edu/hudsonmuseum/home/miba__trashed/maine-basketry/.
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Description: Band basket
Fig. 7. Penobscot, Band Basket, ca. 1860–69. Ash colored with commercial dyes. 10 1/4 × 13 1/16 in. (diam.) (26 × 33.2 cm (diam.)). HM6565, Hudson Museum, University of Maine, Orono
Cronon also argues that romantic visions of pristine wilderness skew environmental perception by prizing certain rarefied environments at the expense of ordinary, less charismatic places. For example, the veneration of national parks and other spectacular sites as authentically natural for ostensibly being devoid of human presence effectively gives “permission to evade responsibility for the lives we actually lead” and “the homes we actually inhabit,” Cronon elucidates. Such priorities have potentially devastating environmental justice consequences for places viewed as external to the perceived grace of wilderness, especially cities with abundant people and ubiquitous evidence of human impact. As a result, wilderness enthusiasts have tended to view these inhabited areas as unnatural, “fallen,” and undeserving of attention. For this reason, Cronon critically aligns wilderness aesthetics with other politically regressive, idealist modes of thought, including the frontier myth and deep ecology. Furthermore, echoing the decolonial scholar Ramachandra Guha, Cronon notes the pernicious effect of exporting the Western wilderness aesthetic to non-Western countries, where complex environmental problems will not be solved by “a cultural myth that encourages us to ‘preserve’ peopleless landscapes that have not existed in such places for millennia.”15 Cronon, “Trouble with Wilderness,” 82, 84–85. Ramachandra Guha, “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique,” Environmental Ethics 11 (Spring 1989): 71–83.
Summarizing his argument, Cronon provides this statement deconstructing the wilderness ideal as a paradox riven by internal contradiction:
The trouble with wilderness is that it quietly expresses and reproduces the very values its devotees seek to reject. The flight from history that is very nearly the core of wilderness represents the false hope of an escape from responsibility, the illusion that we can somehow wipe clean the slate of our past and return to the tabula rasa that supposedly existed before we began to leave our marks on the world. . . . Only people whose relation to the land was already alienated could hold up wilderness as a model for human life in nature, for the romantic ideology of wilderness leaves precisely nowhere for human beings actually to make their living from the land. This, then, is the central paradox: wilderness embodies a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural. If we allow ourselves to believe that nature, to be true, must also be wild, then our very presence in nature represents its fall.16 Cronon, “Trouble with Wilderness,” 80–81.
Stopping short of advocating the liquidation of national parks, Cronon instead calls for greater scrutiny of wilderness aesthetics in the past and present. Beyond simply offering negative critique for its own sake, he hopes his analysis might help enable a more just, ethical, and complex vision of nature to emerge in which human beings honestly acknowledge history, structural inequity, and mutual responsibility while coexisting sustainably with nonhuman life.
Building on Cronon’s insights, some scholars have proposed the abandonment of the “nature” concept in favor of an ecological ethics that confronts environmental injustice without the pursuit of purity or nostalgia. For example, in Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (2009), literary philosopher Timothy Morton asserts, “The very idea of ‘nature’ which so many hold dear will have to wither away in an ‘ecological’ state of human society,” because it “is getting in the way of properly ecological forms of culture, philosophy, politics, and art.” For Morton, “nature” keeps the environment at arm’s length, in the background, alienated from everyday experience and ethics, like a framed romantic landscape painting.17 Morton, Ecology without Nature, 1. See also Vogel, Thinking Like a Mall; and Purdy, After Nature.
LEAVING MARKS
Such arguments provoke intriguing questions: How committed was Church to the ideal of pristine wilderness really? Could his art ever truly succeed in presenting a vision of nature entirely untouched by humanity? Pondering such questions has unexpected consequences for how we understand Church’s work and the troubling paradox of wilderness. After all, despite what critics said, Twilight in the Wilderness obviously provided more than “simply nature.” The painting also included symbolic references in the form of the American eagle and the Christian cross, invoking anthropocentric ideas about nationalism and religion. Though ostensibly natural, these symbols indicate Church’s subtle yet irrepressible impulse to leave “marks on the world” by inserting evidence of human presence in seemingly wild and remote places. In addition to risking nature’s “fall,” as noted by Cronon, such symbolic traces tacitly acknowledged the difficulty—even the impossibility—of disentangling humanity from nature. Moreover, as we will see in the remaining pages of this chapter, Church’s tendency to impose his signature or otherwise inflect the representation of distant, out-of-the-way places with human signs implicated art itself as a troubling intrusion of the sort that inspired wilderness aesthetics in the first place. In other words, within his own art, Church inserted various marks analogous to the physical traces human beings increasingly left around a modern world that was rapidly shrinking through development, travel, and scientific exploration. Could Church’s own artistic tendency to leave marks help explain the melancholy solemnity of Twilight in the Wilderness? Such a question seems no more speculative than interpreting the painting as a portent of war, especially in light of Church’s extensive voyages in support of his art. To an artist-traveler like him, pristine nature probably looked more and more elusive as the nineteenth century progressed, challenging even a painter of his stature to imagine “wilderness, without human associations of any kind.”
Let us consider additional works by Church that confirm his pictorial tendency to mark remote and unexpected places with human residues. Perhaps his most well-known recurring motif in this regard was the crucifix, planted in the foreground of celebrated masterpieces such as Cross in the Wilderness (1857) and Heart of the Andes (1859), overtly expressing his religious faith while also signaling the expansive reach of Christianity like a boundary post (figs. 8, 9). As the art historian Robin Kelsey observes in a study of nineteenth-century survey photography, “The cross, the ultimate Christian sign of fixity,” functioned as a “compelling counterpart to the boundary marker.” Thus, Church indicated the geographic extent of the church.18 Paloma Alarcó, “Frederic Edwin Church, Cross in the Wilderness,Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza (Madrid), https://www.museothyssen.org/en/collection/artists/church-frederic-edwin/cross-wilderness; Kevin J. Avery, Church’s Great Picture: The Heart of the Andes (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993), 31, 33. On the cross motif as boundary marker, see Robin Kelsey, Archive Style: Photographs and Illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1860–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 53–55, 116, quotation on page 53.
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Description: Cross in the Wilderness, detail by Church, Frederic Edwin
Fig. 8. Frederic Edwin Church, Cross in the Wilderness, 1857 (detail). Oil on canvas, 16 1/4 × 24 3/16 in. (41.3 × 61.5 cm). Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
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Description: The Heart of the Andes, detail by Church, Frederic Edwin
Fig. 9. Frederic Edwin Church, Heart of the Andes, 1859 (detail). Oil on canvas, 66 1/8 × 119 1/4 in. (168 × 302.9 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Other works by the artist acknowledge different traces of human presence at far-flung locations. In light of his renowned faith, scholars generally interpret these examples in Christian terms as well, but religion does not necessarily account for all the implications of the human residues in question. For example, in Beacon, off Mount Desert Island of 1851, the geometric form of a marine navigational device protrudes laconically into an ominous red sky at morning near the Maine coast (fig. 10). Meanwhile, sea gulls fly nearby and a few tiny ships dot the distant horizon, accentuating the lonely remoteness of the foreground scene, where the warning instrument uncannily registers virtual human agency far from any ordinary settled habitat. The art historian Pamela Belanger has thoroughly examined Church’s preparatory studies for this work and his subsequent exhibition of the finished painting in New York with an explicitly biblical figurative picture of The Deluge. For Belanger, as for other Church scholars, such a pairing invites biblical interpretation of Beacon, off Mount Desert Island as part of a broader statement of Old Testament ideas about washing away “the sins of the Old World so that mankind could be reborn into a New World of Christian faith.” Thus, in Belanger's view, “Church’s beacon in this concept of history would symbolize the emergence of this New World, namely America,” offering “assurances of safe passage” but also “guidance to salvation, both personal and national.”19Pamela J. Belanger, Inventing Acadia: Artists and Tourists at Mount Desert (Rockland, Me.: Farnsworth Art Museum in association with University Press of New England, 1999), 62, 63. See also Miller, Empire of the Eye, 176; and Franklin Kelly and Gerald L. Carr, The Early Landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church, 1845–1854 (Fort Worth, Tex.: Amon Carton Museum, 1987), 60–64, 115–17.
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Description: Beacon, Off Mount Desert Island by Church, Frederic Edwin
Fig. 10. Frederic Edwin Church, Beacon, Off Mount Desert Island, 1851. Oil on canvas, 31 × 46 in. (78.7 × 116.8 cm). Private Collection
Once again, art historical interpretation diverges noticeably from the testimony of nineteenth-century art critics. Church’s reviewers universally admired Beacon, off Mount Desert Island when he displayed it at the National Academy of Design’s spring exhibition in 1851, but none mentioned any biblical meanings in this work. Nor did they notice any thematic connection to The Deluge. In fact, while critics praised Beacon for its “brilliant color,” “great repose,” “subdued brilliance,” “truthful” realism, and “atmospheric” effects, they found The Deluge unconvincing and suffering from various “fatal” defects. Coining an interesting neologism, a writer for the New-York Tribune, identified only as “G. W. C.,” commended Beacon as “another of the artist’s gorgeous sky-scapes, if he will tolerate so doubtful a term.” This reviewer seems to have sensed something uncanny about the picture, saying, “As the spectator looks, he muses; and the sea and shore and their eternal mystery and sadness gather in his mind.”20“Fine Arts: The National Academy,” Literary World, April 19, 1851, 8; G. W. C., “The Fine Arts: The National Academy of Design,” New-York Daily Tribune, May 10, 1851, 5 (emphasis in original).
Neither a cross nor a human being exactly, the beacon depicted by Church functioned as both a warning light and an avatar within a burgeoning system of human geography and navigation, which increasingly enfolded the American coast into a planetary grid of knowledge at the time. In one illustration of that enfolding grid, a New England coastal map produced by Alexander Dallas Bache (1806–1867) for the U.S. Coast Survey in 1851 features an inset chart in the upper left showing “the progress of the Survey east of Portland, Maine,” including the region around Mount Desert Island (fig. 11). Annual Reports of the Coast Survey during this period contained many such maps along with lengthy discussions about the placement of lighthouses, buoys, and beacons to ensure safe navigation of coastal areas. As the word “progress” in Bache’s map caption suggests, such survey work was part of a larger cartographic project to chart the coastal perimeter for scientific, commercial, and defensive military purposes. Meanwhile, many other scientists and explorers, notably the British royal naval officer James Clark Ross (1800–1862) and the U.S. Naval Observatory cartographic oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury (1806–1873), were busily extending the global matrix of human knowledge by charting polar regions, ocean depths, meteorological patterns, and navigational currents.21 For discussion of Beacon, off Mount Desert Island, see Gerald L. Carr, Frederic Edwin Church: Romantic Landscapes and Seascapes (New York: Adelson Galleries, 2007), 101–2; Miller, Empire of the Eye, 176–77; and Franklin Kelly, Frederic Edwin Church (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1989), 26, 45–56. United States Coast Survey, Annual Report of the Superintendent of the Coast Survey (Washington, D.C.: Robert Armstrong, 1851–77). On Ross and Maury, see E. C. Coleman, The Royal Navy in Polar Expedition: From Frobisher to Ross (Stroud, U.K.: Tempus, 2006); Chester Hearn, Tracks in the Sea: Matthew Fontaine Maury and the Mapping of the Oceans (Camden, Me.: International Marine/McGraw-Hill, 2002).
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Description: Sketch A, showing the progress of the survey in section no. 1, from 1844 to 1851...
Fig. 11. Alexander Dallas Bache, Sketch A, showing the progress of the survey in section no. 1, from 1844 to 1851 [New England Coast], 1851. Printed map, 35 13/16 × 22 7/16 in. (91 × 57 cm). Published by U.S. Coast Survey, New York Public Library
Even when not depicting places remote from human presence, Church sometimes included unexpected evidence of modern industry and technology—unexpected given his reputation as a painter of rural and wilderness landscapes. In View of Blackwell’s Island, New York (1850), for example, he showed a factory in the distance at right as well as a shot tower for making bullets at left, fronting the East River at Fifty-Third Street (fig. 12). Another startling acknowledgment of modernity appears in one of Church’s sketches of the Parthenon in Athens, where he observed an artificial light show at night arranged for the benefit of visiting English royalty in 1869 (fig. 13). This was not a depiction of wilderness either, but Church’s interest in such a high-tech spectacle at the hallowed ancient site provides a further indication of his willingness, at least occasionally, to look beyond both pastoral and primeval visions. Such incursions suggest that even Church, an artist committed to romantic idealism about nature, could not erase all traces of modernity.22 On View of Blackwell’s Island, New York, see Kelly, Frederic Edwin Church (1989), 160, 193. For extensive discussion of Church’s Parthenon series, including Parthenon, at Night, Athens, see Kenneth John Myers, Frederic Church: A Painter’s Pilgrimage (Detroit, Mich.: Detroit Institute of Arts in association with Yale University Press, 2017), 139–77; see page 169 for the royal visit.
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Description: View of Blackwell's Island, New York (Youle's Shot Tower, East River, New York) by...
Fig. 12. Frederic Edwin Church, View of Blackwell's Island, New York (Youle's Shot Tower, East River, New York), 1850. Oil on canvas, 11 × 15 1/2 in. (27.9 × 39.4 cm). Private Collection
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Description: Parthenon at Night, Athens by Church, Frederic Edwin
Fig. 13. Frederic Edwin Church, Parthenon at Night, Athens, 1869. Brush and oil, black chalk on thin cream paperboard, 12 15/16 × 16 5/16 in. (32.9 × 41.4 cm). Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York
In Evening on the Sea (1877–78), Church attempted to reconcile an elegiac seascape with the presence of coal smoke from a modern steamship traversing the open sea (fig. 14). This work’s title recalls a popular nineteenth-century Christian hymn, “Evening on the Sea of Galilee,” creating another incongruous juxtaposition of ancient and modern, in this case involving the biblical Holy Land and a new transcontinental mode of transportation. Perhaps not surprisingly given the artist’s reputation for therapeutic romanticism, critics responded negatively to what they regarded as this painting’s “sensationalism” and the “exaggerated” volume of smoke issuing from the steamer’s exhaust funnel. One reviewer called attention, disdainfully, to “a huge bank of clouds, fired from the interior by a lightning flash . . . producing the effect of a first-class volcanic eruption.” Perhaps both artist and critic struggled to comprehend the encounter between industrial technology and natural phenomena in such a remote setting.23 “Fine Arts,” New York Herald, April 8, 1878, 4; Christian Union, April 17, 1878, 336. For a reference to “Evening on the Sea of Galilee,” see “Organ News,” Musical Standard (London), June 28, 1879, 403.
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Description: Evening on the Sea by Church, Frederic Edwin
Fig. 14. Frederic Edwin Church, Evening on the Sea, 1877–78. Oil on canvas, 22 1/2 × 36 1/2 in. (57.2 × 92.7 cm). Private Collection
Church’s seemingly uncharacteristic desire to reveal human presence in wild, remote, or otherwise unusual places had deep personal roots. In an early work that art historian John Howat called “Church’s debut in the production of large canvases,” the artist represented Hooker and Company Journeying through the Wilderness from Plymouth to Hartford in 1636 (fig. 15). The subject pertains to Connecticut’s founding by a group of English settlers from Massachusetts, including one of Church’s ancestors. Painted in 1846, when Church was still a student training with Thomas Cole, it renders wilderness not so much as primeval or pristine but rather as welcoming settlement and civilization. A golden dawn lights the way for these colonists as anthropomorphic trees and rocks benignly seem to observe their progress. If this painting is any indication, wilderness for Church was always receptive to human presence.24 Howat, Frederic Church, 14. For a detailed discussion of the painting as a creative interpretation of Connecticut and Church family history, see Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, Hudson River School: Masterworks from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (Hartford, Conn.: Wadsworth Atheneum in association with Yale University Press, 2003), 9, 45–51.
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Description: Hooker and Company Journeying through the Wilderness from Plymouth to Hartford in...
Fig. 15. Frederic Edwin Church, Hooker and Company Journeying through the Wilderness from Plymouth to Hartford in 1636, 1846. Oil on canvas, 40 1/4 × 60 3/16 in. (102.2 × 152.9 cm). Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford
In light of these precedents, one of the artist’s grandest wilderness scenes, The Icebergs of 1861, takes on new meaning (fig. 16). Church drew inspiration for this enormous picture from a two-month expedition to the North Atlantic in 1859, when he visited the Canadian coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland with his friend Louis Legrand Noble (1813–1882). Using expedition sketches and other sources of information, Church conceived The Icebergs on a monumental scale in his New York City studio. Paralleling his nearly contemporary masterpieces, Heart of the Andes and Twilight in the Wilderness, this Arctic behemoth constituted another majestic epitome of a distinctive region, or zone, in the Americas, part of a global array of representations inspired by the cosmic geography of Alexander von Humboldt, whom the artist revered. When Church first unveiled The Icebergs in 1861, shortly after the outbreak of civil war, he gave it a patriotic title—The North—but he did not include the broken ship’s mast in the foreground. The latter element he added later, possibly as a narrative allusion to the famously doomed Arctic expedition of the British explorer Sir John Franklin, whose disappearance in 1845 caused a media sensation.25 On Church’s trip to Newfoundland and Labrador and subsequent production of The Icebergs (1861) and related works, see Raab, Frederic Church, 87–121; Howat, Frederic Church, 91–96, 103–108; Eleanor Jones Harvey and Gerald L. Carr, The Voyage of the Icebergs: Frederic Church’s Arctic Masterpiece (Dallas, Tex.: Dallas Museum of Art, 2002); and Timothy Mitchell, “Frederick Church’s The Icebergs: Erratic Boulders and Time’s Slow Changes,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art 3, no. 4 (1989): 2–23.
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Description: The Icebergs by Church, Frederic Edwin
Fig. 16. Frederic Edwin Church, The Icebergs, 1861. Oil on canvas, 64 1/2 × 112 1/2 in. (163.8 × 285.8 cm). Dallas Museum of Art
Church’s decision to insert the broken cruciform mast has prompted much art historical discussion along the now familiar lines of Christian religious symbolism, but I view this addition as further evidence of his propensity for marking wilderness, acknowledging the geographic scope of modernity, and thereby recognizing the far-reaching impact of humanity on a shrinking planet. Even with its narrative allusion to a failed Arctic expedition, the broken mast—situated near Church’s own signature inscribed like graffiti on a block of ice—confronts the viewer with a wilderness no longer untouched, pure, or out of reach (fig. 17). These particular intrusions into ostensibly pristine natural landscape may disintegrate and fade away into the extreme Arctic environment, but Church certainly knew that more expeditions were on the way, promising to settle even this frozen waste eventually—never mind the historical presence of Indigenous communities such as the Inuit, Innu, and Mi’kmaq.26 Michelle Filice, “First Nations in Newfoundland and Labrador,” The Canadian Encyclopedia, May 30, 2022, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/first-nations-in-newfoundland-and-labrador. See also Timo Koivurova et al., eds., Routledge Handbook of Indigenous Peoples of the Arctic (New York: Routledge, 2020); and John McCannon, A History of the Arctic: Nature, Exploration and Exploitation (London: Reaktion Books, 2012).
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Description: The Icebergs, detail by Church, Frederic Edwin
Fig. 17. Frederic Edwin Church, The Icebergs, 1861 (detail). Oil on canvas, 64 1/2 × 112 1/2 in. (163.8 × 285.8 cm). Dallas Museum of Art
By littering the foreground of The Icebergs with the wreckage of a ship’s mast, Church anticipated a creative genre increasingly familiar today, as contemporary artists rush to bear witness to the Anthropocene. In this new geological epoch, planetary human impact is so pervasive that the idea of a pristine, untouched nature has become quaint and more-or-less obsolete, a fact now documented and interpreted by artists in a variety of ways. For example, in 2009, the photographer and filmmaker Chris Jordan produced perhaps the most famous example of this Anthropocene genre with a series of pictures showing dead albatrosses on the remote Pacific island of Midway (fig. 18). Adult birds of this species instinctively hunt bright, colorful pieces of plastic trash that saturate the surrounding ocean, thinking it is food. They then feed the discarded material to their young, causing the fledglings to die of starvation. Such industrially produced petrochemical waste accumulates and circulates thousands of miles on ocean currents in gargantuan trash gyres far from its points of human origin and consumption, only to be consumed lethally by birds. Showing the bodies of birds decomposing around plastic that never decays, Jordan’s images demonstrate one of the many ways in which human impact knows no planetary or temporal bounds. Although Church implied no such thematic permanence with his broken mast or signature in the foreground of The Icebergs, his painting—which still survives—nevertheless staked a human claim to remote terrain as part of an inexorable process of accelerating planetary conquest that continues today.27 Chris Jordan, “Midway,” Chris Jordan Photographic Arts, http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/midway/#CF000313%2018x24. See also Anna Turns, “Saving the Albatross: ‘The War Is against Plastic and They Are Casualties on the Frontlines,’” Guardian, March 12, 2018; and Rob Nixon, “Three Islands: An Environmental Justice Archipelago,” in Kusserow and Braddock, Nature’s Nation, 412–15. For discussion of Jordan’s work in relation to economic theories of expenditure and excess, see Amanda Boetzkes, Plastic Capitalism: Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2019), 234–37. Regarding ocean waste, see Julie Decker, Gyre: The Plastic Ocean (London: Booth-Clibborn Editions, 2014).
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Description: Midway: Message from the Gyre by Jordan, Chris
Fig. 18. Chris Jordan, Midway: Message from the Gyre, 2009. Chromogenic print. Courtesy of the artist
Another contemporary artist, Josh Keyes, has created a series of paintings that introduce graffiti on various unexpected sites and surfaces as a way of underscoring the inescapability of human environmental impact. Keyes’s picture I’ll Melt with You (fig. 19) riffs on a popular song by the British New Wave band Modern English, conceived in 1982 as an expression of doomed love amid nuclear holocaust and economic recession but containing this apt chorus:
The future’s open wide
I’ll stop the world and melt with you (I’ll stop the world)
I’ve seen some changes but it’s getting better all the time (let’s stop the world)
There’s nothing you and I won’t do (let’s stop the world)
I’ll stop the world and melt with you28 Modern English (Dalton Diehl, Gary Frances Mcdowell, Michael Frances Conroy, Richard Ian Brown, Robert James Grey, Stephen James Walker), “I Melt with You,” lyrics © Cohen and Cohen, recorded on the album After the Snow (4AD / Sire Records, 1982). On the song’s original meaning, see “Modern English Debut Quarantine Version of ‘I Melt with You,’” Post-Punk.com, July 6, 2020, https://post-punk.com/modern-english-debut-quarantine-version-of-i-melt-with-you/.
As adapted by Keyes, the lyrical references to “the future’s open wide,” stopping the “world,” and “melt[ing] with you” acquire haunting new meanings in light of today’s planetary crisis of climate change. The artistic allusion reinterprets earlier Cold War era doubts about the planet’s future, including the mock-confident phrase “There’s nothing you and I won’t do” into a poignant expression of environmental pessimism.29 On Keyes, see Clara Chaisson, “In These Paintings, the Earth Gets Tagged Out,” NRDC on Earth, May 11, 2017, https://www.nrdc.org/onearth/these-paintings-earth-gets-tagged-out.
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Description: I'll Melt with You by Keyes, Josh
Fig. 19. Josh Keyes, I’ll Melt with You, 2017. Acrylic on wood panel with UV varnish, 12 × 16 in. (30.5 × 40.6 cm). Courtesy of the artist
With its startling representation of tagged icebergs, Keyes’s painting eerily, if unintentionally, recalls Church’s nineteenth-century masterpiece. In contrast to the dark eco-irony of Keyes’s I’ll Melt with You, though, Church’s Icebergs makes a more confident statement about the world’s future. While the ship’s wreckage in the foreground projects a romantic sense of nature’s sublimity through a melancholy ruin of human enterprise, it nonetheless marks this distant wilderness as a place within human reach—a reach becoming only more powerful and extensive with Arctic voyages such as the one undertaken by Church himself. Likewise, the artist’s signature on a nearby chunk of ice inscribes the scene in a manner resembling graffiti on stone (see fig. 17). Despite the apparent humility of its romantic conceit about icy ephemerality, this signature functions territorially, akin to numerous other traces left by the artist. Indeed, it mirrors an ancient tradition of graffiti left ubiquitously by a host of conquering invaders, colonial explorers, and globe-trotting tourists over the centuries. From the Greek γράφειν (graphein), “to write,” and the Italian graffiato, meaning “scratched,” graffiti as a form of inscription on various architectural or environmental surfaces dates back at least to ancient Egypt, though modern usage of the term began with archaeological discoveries at Pompeii. The cultural status of graffiti as a form of expression has varied widely over time depending on context, circumstances, and perspective, but Church imbued it with power and legitimacy through his signature. In that respect, it brings to mind the signatures depicted as graffiti in a celebrated portrait by Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) of Napoleon Crossing the Alps (fig. 20), showing the French emperor leading his army across Europe, dramatically riding a rearing horse above mountain rocks inscribed with his name and that of earlier imperial conquerors: “Hannibal” and “Karolus Magnus” (Charlemagne). At first glance, Church’s signature seems more discreet and self-effacing than David’s imperial Napoleonic inscriptions, but it actually asserts a comparable planetary ambition to mark the boundlessness of human knowledge and enterprise—including the extent of his own artistic travels.30 On the history of graffiti, see Chloé Ragazzoli, Ömür Harmansah, Chiara Salvador, and Elizabeth Frood, eds., Scribbling through History: Graffiti, Places and People from Antiquity to Modernity (London: Bloomsbury, 2019); and Jennifer Baird and Claire Taylor, Ancient Graffiti in Context (New York: Routledge, 2010).
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Description: Napoleon Crossing the Alps by David, Jacques-Louis
Fig. 20. Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon Crossing the Alps, 1802. Oil on canvas, 107 1/2 × 92 1/8 in. (273 × 234 cm). Palace of Versailles, France
PLANETARY CONSCIOUSNESS
In Book of the Artists (1867), the eminent nineteenth-century art historian and critic Henry Tuckerman (1813–1871) introduced his biography of Frederic Church by quoting another painter, Charles Robert Leslie (1794–1859), commenting on the artistic “cultivation” of the planet: “It is but a very small portion of the earth’s surface . . . that has been cultivated, so to speak, by the landscape painter, because, indeed, all art has been confined within a narrow geographical limit.”31 Henry T. Tuckerman, “Church,” in Book of the Artists: American Artist Life (New York: Putnam, 1867), 370.
The statement aptly set the stage for Tuckerman’s lengthy discussion of Church’s Icebergs as an example of landscape painting that exceeded such limits by extending artistic imagination to a remote “portion of the earth’s surface.” There, the writer said, Church “went forth in pursuit of icebergs,” engaging in “the most wonderful chapter in the history of modern enterprise,” with “a vigilant eye” that “followed and explored the frozen and floating Alps, caverns, pyramids, or mosques of ice!” In effect, visiting the Arctic and seeing icebergs amounted to seeing all the world’s wonders at once.32 Tuckerman, 383, 384.
In a critical study of European imperialism and cultural expression, Mary Louise Pratt defined “planetary consciousness” as a modern mode of thought that combined knowledge about natural history and global circumnavigation with “a new territorial phase of capitalism.” According to Pratt, such consciousness was “propelled by searches for raw materials” as “coastal trade extended inland and nations began to seize overseas territory in order to prevent its being seized by rival European powers.” Church’s artistic voyages—to the Arctic, to South America, to remote parts of New England—in search of wilderness as material for painting partook of this acquisitive planetary impulse.33 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008), 11, 15–36.
In the nineteenth century, however, another kind of planetary consciousness began to appear, informed by growing awareness of large-scale anthropogenic environmental change. For example, in 1864, an American diplomat and historian named George Perkins Marsh (1801–1882) published the book Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action, examining human impact on a global scale. Widely considered a key founding text in environmental history and conservation, Man and Nature announced the author’s planetary perspective at the outset:
The object of the present volume is: to indicate the character and, approximately, the extent of the changes produced by human action in the physical conditions of the globe we inhabit; to point out the dangers of imprudence and the necessity of caution in all operations which, on a large scale, interfere with the spontaneous arrangements of the organic or the inorganic world; to suggest the possibility and the importance of the restoration of disturbed harmonies and the material improvement of waste and exhausted regions.34 George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (New York: Charles Scribner, 1864), [iii].
Investigating complex environmental relationships over time, Marsh expressed concern about the implications of humanity’s “modern ambition” to conquer “physical nature.” He also forcefully criticized myths about the abundance and inexhaustibility of the earth as a resource for humankind. Man and Nature appeared in print two years before the German naturalist Ernst Haeckel coined the term “ecology,” but Marsh already intuitively understood the concept, referring to “the organic and inorganic world” as “bound together by . . . mutual relations and adaptations.”35 Marsh, 36. Based on extensive research and international travel, Marsh traced more than two thousand years of human environmental impacts, noting the particularly devastating and long-lasting influence of the Roman Empire on the land, climate, and biodiversity of the Mediterranean region. Acknowledging the work of earlier scientists, including Church’s beloved Humboldt, Marsh nevertheless believed that they had failed to account for the global magnitude of human impact. He also rejected the idealism of earlier scientists who believed in the inevitability of human progress or the planet’s capacity to maintain equilibrium irrespective of human activity. As a modern realist, Marsh viewed nothing as given, foreordained, or absolute.36On Marsh, see David Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003); and Alan C. Braddock, “‘Man and Nature’: Visualizing Human Impacts,” in Kusserow and Braddock, Nature’s Nation, 199–202.
Church owned a copy of Marsh’s Man and Nature and kept it at Olana (fig. 21), the grand eclectic mansion and estate that served as the artist’s rural retreat on the Hudson River, 120 miles north of New York City. It is therefore intriguing to consider the possibility that Marsh’s ideas about “restoration of disturbed harmonies” through tree planting and other measures might have informed extensive landscaping work Church undertook on the grounds of Olana. In Man and Nature, Marsh had much to say about deforestation as an environmental problem that adversely affected climate, soil, and other conditions, both in the present and in the past. Around Olana, Church planted thousands of native trees, so it is tempting to see Marsh’s influence there and a burgeoning ecological sensibility on the part of the artist.37 Raab, Frederic Church, 175–79.
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Description: Olana by Vaux, Calvert;Church, Frederic Edwin
Fig. 21. Calvert Vaux and Frederic Edwin Church, Olana, 1870–72. Near Hudson, New York
Indeed, the art historian Jennifer Raab believes that Church drew inspiration from Marsh by creating Olana as a “living system” with a “distinctly ecological dimension.” Taking a cue from Robert Smithson, a key figure in twentieth-century land art, Raab also compares Church with Frederick Law Olmsted, the principle designer of Central Park in New York. In 1973, Smithson praised Olmsted as “America’s first ‘earthwork artist’” for his “dialectical” approach to landscape, citing the architect’s pragmatic willingness to transform terrain on a large scale for the civic good, unlike today’s romantic deep ecologists, who, as Cronon also noted, regard any human intervention in the environment as unnatural and thus anathema. As a project that involved substantial environmental transformation, Olana did share certain elements in common with the picturesque design of Central Park, which Church knew well as a member of the park commission and through personal contacts with Olmsted and Calvert Vaux (1824–1895), Vaux being also the artist’s architectural collaborator in designing the Olana mansion.38 Raab, 175, citing Robert Smithson, “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape,” Artforum (February 1973), in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 157–71; “earthwork artist” quote on 164. On Central Park, see Braddock, “‘Man and Nature,’” 224–31. For Church’s membership in the Central Park Commission from 1871 to 1873, see Raab, Frederic Church, 173, 218n28; and Frederick Law Olmsted, The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, vol. 9, The Last Great Projects, 1890–1895, ed. David Schuyler, Gregory Kaliss, and Jeffrey Schlossberg (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 866n10. On Church’s collaboration with Vaux at Olana, see James Anthony Ryan, “Frederic Church’s Olana: Architecture and Landscape as Art,” in Franklin Kelly, with Stephen Jay Gould and James Anthony Ryan, The Paintings of Frederic Edwin Church (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1989), 133, 135–36.
Yet these very relationships pose a significant obstacle—or at least require critical qualification—concerning any claim about an ecological dimension at Olana. For one thing, unlike Olmsted’s massive urban public park in the center of New York City, Church’s Olana was a private rural residence designed primarily to express its wealthy owner’s wishes for a retreat, consistent with the therapeutic wilderness impulse discussed earlier. Born into prosperity as a legacy of family commerce in the New England timber industry, Church had augmented his fortune as a landscape painter of international renown and used it to construct Olana as a mountaintop getaway. Both Central Park and Olana originated in elite assumptions about picturesque aesthetics and social hierarchy, but only Olmsted’s design needed to negotiate the thorny complexities of urban politics and environmental conditions in order to serve the public. Frederic and Isabel Church (1836–1899) clearly communicated an understanding of their property as a privileged place of private seclusion far from the madding crowd by calling it “Olana.” Taken from Strabo’s Geographica (first century CE), another book in their library, “Olane” was the name of an ancient Roman colony and “treasure-storehouse” on the Araxes (Aras) River in an eastern province of the empire, near Mount Ararat in modern Turkey, where Noah’s ark supposedly came to rest. Such recondite associations reveal how the ecological dimension of Olana functioned within narrow constraints defined by its owners’ affluence and boutique vision. Their private estate differed substantially from Olmsted’s public park and Marsh’s far-reaching critical-historical investigation of human impacts on a global scale. To ignore these distinctions is to elide the political ecology of Olana as a monumental work of art for personal consumption, a “living system” on a limited scale but also insulated from the world as a suburban enclave.39 For the Strabo reference, see the Olana Partnership, “Church’s World,” Olana, https://www.olana.org/history/churchs-world/. On Olmsted, Central Park, and elite picturesque aesthetics, see Braddock, “‘Man and Nature,’” 229–30.
As explained by Olana historian James Anthony Ryan, the “primary function” of this “ornamental landscape” was “visual.” Writing in 1884 to his artist friend Erastus Dow Palmer (1817–1904), Church described his tree planting and landscaping there, saying, “I can make more and better landscapes in this way than by tampering with canvas and paint in the studio.” This humorously self-deprecating statement clearly discloses Church’s sense of the conceptual continuity between painting and landscape architecture as analogous picturesque media. It also expresses an ambitious desire to bring his pictorial vision to life in three dimensions, exemplifying again Cronon’s point about nature as human construction. While the tree planting around Olana reclaimed abandoned farmland, it did so primarily for aesthetic reasons. Church also developed a working farm at Olana, but Ryan emphasizes the ornamental, aesthetic aspects of this as well, noting that the artist was “creatively manipulating the views of pastures, fields, and orchards.” Church’s foray as a gentleman farmer mirrored Olmsted’s dairy and sheep meadow in Central Park, but the latter did not last and the former was for private rather than public purposes. In any case, both “farms” essentially translated pastoral aesthetics into physical space without questioning the historical legacy of imperialism and environmental exploitation in the manner of Marsh’s more comprehensive critical analysis of political ecology.40Ryan, “Frederic Church’s Olana,” 147 (including Church’s letter to Palmer), 148.
Not unlike Olmsted, Church designed miles of meandering picturesque carriage roads around Olana and even drained a wetland to create an artificial lake (fig. 22). One wonders what George Perkins Marsh would have said about this particular aesthetic invention, for in Man and Nature the historian listed “destruction of the forests, the drainage of lakes and marshes, and the operations of rural husbandry” as leading “elements of disturbance” “of the earth’s surface” and “atmosphere.” If Church undertook what Marsh called the “restoration of disturbed harmonies” in certain areas, he also produced new disturbances in order to realize his artistic vision—not unlike Claude Monet, the wealthy French impressionist master, who diverted water from a local river to irrigate his exotic garden at Giverny to the consternation of neighbors (see chapter 10). Consequently, I hesitate to align Church’s work at Olana closely with either Olmsted’s dialectical landscape at Central Park or the ecological implications of Marsh’s book. To do so risks historical greenwashing by making exaggerated claims of environmentalism about a project of landscape architecture with primarily personal, aesthetic aims.41 Marsh, Man and Nature, 13. On Monet’s diversion of water at Giverny, see Stephen F. Eisenman, ed., From Corot to Monet: The Ecology of Impressionism (Rome: Skira, 2011), 29–32.
~
Description: Olana by Vaux, Calvert; Church, Frederic Edwin
Fig. 22. Calvert Vaux and Frederic Edwin Church, Olana, 1870–72. Near Hudson, New York
Today, reinvented as the Olana State Historic Site, Church’s once-private estate is open to the public, so its character and purpose have changed since the artist lived there. In 2015, the managing entity, known as the Olana Partnership, received a $343,000 grant from the New York State Environmental Protection Fund for a project of landscape restoration taking into consideration “historic preservation, environmental factors, sustainability, and Olana’s use as a public park.” Now, under this new regime of public access and environmental sustainability, Olana has acquired a conscious “ecological dimension.”42 Melanie Hasbrook and Mark Prezorski, “A Year in Pictures: The Transformation of Olana’s Landscape in 2015,” Olana, December 1, 2015, https://www.olana.org/a-year-in-pictures-the-transformation-of-olanas-landscape-in-2015/.
Ultimately, the ecological implications of Church’s paintings far exceeded any activities he undertook at Olana in historical importance, even though he never used the word “ecology” and likely had only a minimal understanding of Marsh’s far-reaching ideas. Landscape for Church was a medium of romantic expression, not ecological investigation or environmental activism. Nevertheless, his paintings inadvertently acknowledged an important fact about modernity, namely that human impact extended to the farthest reaches of the globe, from the forests of Maine to the jungles of South America and the Arctic tundra. The painter’s artistic impulse to leave marks of humanity in remote places epitomized that fact. By thus recognizing anthropogenic effects even in the most remote places, Church contributed to an evolving planetary consciousness that pointed forward to the Anthropocene. In so doing, Church also grappled with the twilight of wilderness as an idea.
Epigraph: “nature, n.,OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2022, www.oed.com/view/Entry/125353.
 
1      Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 219, 223. On the “Rights of Nature,” see Daniel P. Corrigan and Markku Oksanen, Rights of Nature: A Re-Examination (New York: Routledge, 2021). For critique of the “nature” concept, see Steven Vogel, Thinking Like a Mall: Environmental Philosophy after the End of Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2015); Jedediah Purdy, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015); and Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009). »
2      On Twilight in the Wilderness, see the standard account in Franklin Kelly, Frederic Edwin Church and the National Landscape (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988), 102–22; see pages 14–16 for discussion of Church’s early depictions of sawmills and family ties to the timber industry. For other interpretations of Twilight in the Wilderness, all indebted to Kelly, see John K. Howat, Frederic Church (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 99–100; and Angela Miller, Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 128–29. »
3      On Twilight in the Wilderness as Church’s first major picture “where all such references [to human presence] are completely excluded,” see Kelly, Frederic Church, 108. For a classic study of the wilderness concept, see Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind [1967], 4th ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).  »
4      Kelly, Frederic Edwin Church, 119. For a historical account of incidents that led up to the outbreak of war, see David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861, new ed. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2011). »
5      Miller, Empire of the Eye, 129; Andrew Wilton and Tim Barringer, American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820–1880 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press in association with Tate Trustees, 2002), 56; Jennifer Raab, Frederic Church: The Art and Science of Detail (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 93. An exception is Howat, Frederic Church, 99–101, who does not repeat Kelly’s interpretation. »
6      “Mr. Church’s Last Picture,” New York Times, June 7, 1860, 4 (“solemnity”); “Fine Arts,” New York Herald, June 8, 1860, 10 (“gorgeous effects of twilight,” “magnificent,” “sombre”); “Church’s New Picture,” Harper’s Weekly, July 14, 1860, 435 (“profound skill,” “wonderful ability,” “solemn splendor,” and “oppressive gloom”). References to “sombreness” and “melancholy, but pleasing influence” occur in “Art Matters; Mr. Church’s New Picture, Twilight in the Wilderness,” New York Morning Express, June 7, 1860, 2. On Walters and the commission, see Howat, Frederic Church, 99; and Mary Carole McCauley, “Men behind Walters Art Collection Were Confederate Sympathizers, Officials at Baltimore Museum Reveal,” Baltimore Sun, March 15, 2021. Herman Melville, “The Portent,” in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1866), [11]. Kelly, Frederic Church, 122. »
7      Z., “Letter from New York,” Boston Evening Transcript, June 5, 1860, 1 (“hills of New Hampshire or the forests of Maine”); “Fine Arts,” New York Herald, June 8, 1860, 10 (“wilds and pine forests of Maine,” “minute fidelity to details”); “Church’s New Picture,” Harper’s Weekly, July 14, 1860, 435 (“profound skill,” “wonderful ability”); “Twilight in the Wilderness,” New York Tribune, June 13, 1860, 6 (“cunning force of hand” and “mechanism”). References to “unity” appear in “Art Matters; Mr. Church’s New Picture, Twilight in the Wilderness,” New York Morning Express, June 7, 1860, 2; “Fine Arts,” Albion, June 9, 1860, 273; “Art Items,” New-York Tribune, June 9, 1860, 5; and “Twilight in the Wilderness,” New York World, June 20, 1860, 5. »
8      “Fine Arts,” 273; [George William Curtis], “Church’s New Picture,” 435; “Twilight in the Wilderness,” New York World, 5. A poetic review by “W. G. D.” in the Evening Post (New York), June 21, 1860, unpaginated, contains two couplets that refer to conflict: “Though in the distant wilderness, / Which human footsteps seldom press, / Where there is no sign of human life / Or human care or human strife.” However, the poem’s language here and elsewhere is so broad as to encompass many possible interpretations, none of which necessarily relates to war. »
9      On romanticism and ideas about nature, see Tim Blanning, The Romantic Revolution: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2011), 16–23. Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” Atlantic Monthly 9, no. 56 (1862): 665. Perry Miller, Nature’s Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967). Regarding the long history of nature escapism, see Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). On Yellowstone and the establishment of national parks, see Dorceta E. Taylor, The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), 290–327; and Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 41–70. For more on Moran’s picture, see Alan C. Braddock and Karl Kusserow, “Introduction,” in Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Art Museum in association with Yale University Press, 2018), 15–24. »
10     William Cronon, “Introduction: In Search of Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 25. »
11      Kelly, Frederic Church, 103, quoting “National Academy of Design; No. 3,” Spirit of the Times, May 14, 1859, 157. »
12      Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness, or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground, 69, 70, 71, 72. »
13      Cronon, 79. Regarding Indian removal, poaching, and U.S. national parks, see Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness; Karl Jacoby, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); and Alan C. Braddock, “Poaching Pictures: Yellowstone, Buffalo, and the Art of Wildlife Conservation,” American Art 23, no. 3 (2009): 36–59. For detailed discussion of Moran’s painting and the Muir quotations, see Kusserow and Braddock, Nature’s Nation, 15–24, 206. The Sierra Club has begun to confront the racist legacy of its founder; see Rebecca Solnit, “Unfinished Business: John Muir in Native America,” Sierra 106, no. 2 (2021): 36–43. »
14      Kelly, Frederic Church, 114, 115: “Church was thus forcibly stating that the true essence and identity of North America lay in the virgin wilderness itself.” Such a statement about “the virgin wilderness itself,” left unexamined, differs little from those by nineteenth-century reviewers who praised Church’s work in virtually the same terms. On Indigenous communities of Maine, see Abbe Museum, “About the Wabanaki Nations,” https://www.abbemuseum.org/about-the-wabanaki-nations; Bruce J. Bourque, Twelve Thousand Years: American Indians in Maine (Lincoln: Bison Books/University of Nebraska Press, 2004), esp. 219–44 on the nineteenth century. For information about the Penobscot basket and other Indigenous basketry in Maine, see Maine Historical Society, “Penobscot Band Basket, ca. 1860,” Maine Memory Network, https://www.mainememory.net/artifact/23438; Jennifer S. Neptune and Lisa K. Neuman, “Basketry of the Wabanaki Indians,” in Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures, ed. Helaine Selin (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2015); and University of Maine Hudson Museum, “Maine Basketry,” https://umaine.edu/hudsonmuseum/home/miba__trashed/maine-basketry/.  »
15      Cronon, “Trouble with Wilderness,” 82, 84–85. Ramachandra Guha, “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique,” Environmental Ethics 11 (Spring 1989): 71–83. »
16      Cronon, “Trouble with Wilderness,” 80–81. »
17      Morton, Ecology without Nature, 1. See also Vogel, Thinking Like a Mall; and Purdy, After Nature. »
18      Paloma Alarcó, “Frederic Edwin Church, Cross in the Wilderness,Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza (Madrid), https://www.museothyssen.org/en/collection/artists/church-frederic-edwin/cross-wilderness; Kevin J. Avery, Church’s Great Picture: The Heart of the Andes (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993), 31, 33. On the cross motif as boundary marker, see Robin Kelsey, Archive Style: Photographs and Illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1860–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 53–55, 116, quotation on page 53. »
19     Pamela J. Belanger, Inventing Acadia: Artists and Tourists at Mount Desert (Rockland, Me.: Farnsworth Art Museum in association with University Press of New England, 1999), 62, 63. See also Miller, Empire of the Eye, 176; and Franklin Kelly and Gerald L. Carr, The Early Landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church, 1845–1854 (Fort Worth, Tex.: Amon Carton Museum, 1987), 60–64, 115–17. »
20     “Fine Arts: The National Academy,” Literary World, April 19, 1851, 8; G. W. C., “The Fine Arts: The National Academy of Design,” New-York Daily Tribune, May 10, 1851, 5 (emphasis in original). »
21      For discussion of Beacon, off Mount Desert Island, see Gerald L. Carr, Frederic Edwin Church: Romantic Landscapes and Seascapes (New York: Adelson Galleries, 2007), 101–2; Miller, Empire of the Eye, 176–77; and Franklin Kelly, Frederic Edwin Church (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1989), 26, 45–56. United States Coast Survey, Annual Report of the Superintendent of the Coast Survey (Washington, D.C.: Robert Armstrong, 1851–77). On Ross and Maury, see E. C. Coleman, The Royal Navy in Polar Expedition: From Frobisher to Ross (Stroud, U.K.: Tempus, 2006); Chester Hearn, Tracks in the Sea: Matthew Fontaine Maury and the Mapping of the Oceans (Camden, Me.: International Marine/McGraw-Hill, 2002). »
22      On View of Blackwell’s Island, New York, see Kelly, Frederic Edwin Church (1989), 160, 193. For extensive discussion of Church’s Parthenon series, including Parthenon, at Night, Athens, see Kenneth John Myers, Frederic Church: A Painter’s Pilgrimage (Detroit, Mich.: Detroit Institute of Arts in association with Yale University Press, 2017), 139–77; see page 169 for the royal visit. »
23      “Fine Arts,” New York Herald, April 8, 1878, 4; Christian Union, April 17, 1878, 336. For a reference to “Evening on the Sea of Galilee,” see “Organ News,” Musical Standard (London), June 28, 1879, 403. »
24      Howat, Frederic Church, 14. For a detailed discussion of the painting as a creative interpretation of Connecticut and Church family history, see Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, Hudson River School: Masterworks from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (Hartford, Conn.: Wadsworth Atheneum in association with Yale University Press, 2003), 9, 45–51. »
25      On Church’s trip to Newfoundland and Labrador and subsequent production of The Icebergs (1861) and related works, see Raab, Frederic Church, 87–121; Howat, Frederic Church, 91–96, 103–108; Eleanor Jones Harvey and Gerald L. Carr, The Voyage of the Icebergs: Frederic Church’s Arctic Masterpiece (Dallas, Tex.: Dallas Museum of Art, 2002); and Timothy Mitchell, “Frederick Church’s The Icebergs: Erratic Boulders and Time’s Slow Changes,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art 3, no. 4 (1989): 2–23. »
26      Michelle Filice, “First Nations in Newfoundland and Labrador,” The Canadian Encyclopedia, May 30, 2022, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/first-nations-in-newfoundland-and-labrador. See also Timo Koivurova et al., eds., Routledge Handbook of Indigenous Peoples of the Arctic (New York: Routledge, 2020); and John McCannon, A History of the Arctic: Nature, Exploration and Exploitation (London: Reaktion Books, 2012).  »
27      Chris Jordan, “Midway,” Chris Jordan Photographic Arts, http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/midway/#CF000313%2018x24. See also Anna Turns, “Saving the Albatross: ‘The War Is against Plastic and They Are Casualties on the Frontlines,’” Guardian, March 12, 2018; and Rob Nixon, “Three Islands: An Environmental Justice Archipelago,” in Kusserow and Braddock, Nature’s Nation, 412–15. For discussion of Jordan’s work in relation to economic theories of expenditure and excess, see Amanda Boetzkes, Plastic Capitalism: Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2019), 234–37. Regarding ocean waste, see Julie Decker, Gyre: The Plastic Ocean (London: Booth-Clibborn Editions, 2014). »
28      Modern English (Dalton Diehl, Gary Frances Mcdowell, Michael Frances Conroy, Richard Ian Brown, Robert James Grey, Stephen James Walker), “I Melt with You,” lyrics © Cohen and Cohen, recorded on the album After the Snow (4AD / Sire Records, 1982). On the song’s original meaning, see “Modern English Debut Quarantine Version of ‘I Melt with You,’” Post-Punk.com, July 6, 2020, https://post-punk.com/modern-english-debut-quarantine-version-of-i-melt-with-you/»
29      On Keyes, see Clara Chaisson, “In These Paintings, the Earth Gets Tagged Out,” NRDC on Earth, May 11, 2017, https://www.nrdc.org/onearth/these-paintings-earth-gets-tagged-out»
30      On the history of graffiti, see Chloé Ragazzoli, Ömür Harmansah, Chiara Salvador, and Elizabeth Frood, eds., Scribbling through History: Graffiti, Places and People from Antiquity to Modernity (London: Bloomsbury, 2019); and Jennifer Baird and Claire Taylor, Ancient Graffiti in Context (New York: Routledge, 2010). »
31      Henry T. Tuckerman, “Church,” in Book of the Artists: American Artist Life (New York: Putnam, 1867), 370. »
32      Tuckerman, 383, 384. »
33      Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008), 11, 15–36. »
34      George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (New York: Charles Scribner, 1864), [iii]. »
35      Marsh, 36. »
36     On Marsh, see David Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003); and Alan C. Braddock, “‘Man and Nature’: Visualizing Human Impacts,” in Kusserow and Braddock, Nature’s Nation, 199–202. »
38      Raab, 175, citing Robert Smithson, “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape,” Artforum (February 1973), in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 157–71; “earthwork artist” quote on 164. On Central Park, see Braddock, “‘Man and Nature,’” 224–31. For Church’s membership in the Central Park Commission from 1871 to 1873, see Raab, Frederic Church, 173, 218n28; and Frederick Law Olmsted, The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, vol. 9, The Last Great Projects, 1890–1895, ed. David Schuyler, Gregory Kaliss, and Jeffrey Schlossberg (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 866n10. On Church’s collaboration with Vaux at Olana, see James Anthony Ryan, “Frederic Church’s Olana: Architecture and Landscape as Art,” in Franklin Kelly, with Stephen Jay Gould and James Anthony Ryan, The Paintings of Frederic Edwin Church (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1989), 133, 135–36. »
39      For the Strabo reference, see the Olana Partnership, “Church’s World,” Olana, https://www.olana.org/history/churchs-world/. On Olmsted, Central Park, and elite picturesque aesthetics, see Braddock, “‘Man and Nature,’” 229–30. »
40     Ryan, “Frederic Church’s Olana,” 147 (including Church’s letter to Palmer), 148. »
41      Marsh, Man and Nature, 13. On Monet’s diversion of water at Giverny, see Stephen F. Eisenman, ed., From Corot to Monet: The Ecology of Impressionism (Rome: Skira, 2011), 29–32. »
42      Melanie Hasbrook and Mark Prezorski, “A Year in Pictures: The Transformation of Olana’s Landscape in 2015,” Olana, December 1, 2015, https://www.olana.org/a-year-in-pictures-the-transformation-of-olanas-landscape-in-2015/»
8. Nature: Wilderness Trouble
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