Et in Arcadia Ego

I’ve come to believe that we Americans have a long tradition of creating and celebrating such landscapes.See Aaron Sachs, “American Arcadia: Mount Auburn Cemetery and the Nineteenth-Century Landscape Tradition,” Environmental History 15 (April 2010), 206–35. It is not nearly so well known as the one that venerates the majestic waterfalls at Niagara and Yosemite, but it deserves to be, for at times it was even more central in American culture than the wilderness mythos—and it may well be more relevant today. The nature lovers of the nineteenth century, in particular, embroiled in their society’s desperate struggles over the transition from agrarianism to urban-industrial capitalism, bequeathed to us a cornucopia of productive environmental ideas, as well as actual...

~~In around 1767, Reynolds was depicted with particular sensitivity by Angelica Kauffman, a highly accomplished Swiss painter who specialised in mythological and historical subjects (fig. 199). After a period of...

In the spring of 1833 America’s first “foreign correspondent” stood on the “lofty turrets” of the Tomb of Cecilia Metella and saw before him the original of “one of the finest landscapes ever painted” ...