I’ve been reading a lot about Americans’ attitudes towards landscape/nature over the past 200-ish years. In the 1700’s it seems that painting landscape just wasn’t something that was considered acceptable. It wasn’t until the very late 1700’s that Americans realized that they had something uniquely different from Europe, and they began to (sort-of) celebrate it.
Romanticism was in its heyday during the first half of the 19th Century, and the paintings pictured above were created during this time. Many artists during this time wanted to celebrate pastoral nature, the agrarian landscape, evidence of the people’s control over the land for production purposes. They weren’t quite ready, it seems, to depict full-blown wilderness in a positive light, as it was still dangerous and frightening. In these images, we see lots of human activity on the fringes between wilderness and civilization.
Urban development was looked down upon as well as wilderness. The rural farm life was seen as the most virtuous. Cities and industry were depicted far in the distance, with these pastoral and leisurely images in the foregrounds. Picnics and farms were common subjects during this era.