Wilderness as American scenery 1630-1960.
The Hudson River School was founded by Thomas Cole, Frederic Church's teacher and mentor.
Grassmere, lake district, site of Wordsworth's home in Cumberland, England.
• Retrogressive ideas in early colonial settlements
• Puritan attitudes about God, creation and paradise
• Naturalists redefine the character of life on earth
• Pioneers’ knowledge of soil, forests, springs and salt deposits
• Frontier violence and regeneration
Nineteenth century shift in attitudes about nature.
What were the contributions of romanticism to altering American attitudes about wilderness from the earlier prevailing protestant view of wild areas?
How
would you characterize the Puritan attitudes about Indians and wild areas of
the frontier?
How
does Nash support his contention that concern for wilderness arose in the urban environs of North America?
What
does sublime mean?
How
did Gilpin’s idea of the picturesque influence people’s ideas about
landscape?
What are the sources of the dominant antipathy Americans harbored for the wild frontier?
Answers.
Lackawanna Valley, by George Inness.
What were the contributions of romanticism to altering American attitudes about wilderness from the earlier prevailing protestant view of wild areas?
Exploration:
desire for solitude
urban growth
Education based on Eighteenth Century sentiments:
Reason and Romanticism
European literati and artistry
How would you characterize the Puritan attitudes about Indians and wild areas of the frontier?
Thomas Cole, The Last of the Mohicans, 1827.
Daughters of the Devil, Sons of Satan
Wild men, savage, dangerous, bloodthirsty and uncivilized, daemons
Devils to test the soul of those who would be as Christ (tempted in the wilderness)
A testing of the soul, as in the Journeys of Moses, Ezekiel, or Isaiah.
Puritans went to build a City upon the Hill, a New Jerusalem, not wade in the dark, endless and beast-filled forests, bogs, swamps and wastes.
How does Nash support his contention that concern for wilderness arose in the urban environs of North America?
All were sites of botanical gardens, museums, learned societies, and artistic markets for new writers,painters and lyricists.
"before the end of the eighteenth century a few Americans had discovered primitivism."
The philosopher of the Forest: Philip Freneau
p. 55.
What does sublime mean?
Frederic Edwin Church, Cotapaxi volcano, 1855.
"The idea that terror and horror in regard to nature stemmed from exaltation."
Burke, 1757, "...Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful." p. 45.
Kant: (1764) (1790)
"mountains, deserts, and storms, in particular --as aesthetically agreeable"
p 46.
Thomas Cole, The White Mountains, 1827.
"but a change in taste was altering attitudes...."
p 46
| How did Gilpin’s idea of the picturesque influence people’s ideas about landscape? | |
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Shoreline of Lake Tahoe |
Snow shed above Lake Tahoe |
What are the sources of the dominant antipathy
Americans harbored for the wild frontier?
Ideology
Appreciation and repulsion (1846) Edwin Bryant
p. 70.
It could be said the the maturing of the American mind, away from literalism and toward a more abstract appreciation for the qualities of the landscape and waterscapes of the nation, but that would be inaccurate.
A new view of nature was emerging in the European world, why that occurred is not entirely clear.
Something triggered a revolution in thought
