Book Description

During the nineteenth century, American artists, writers, and philosophers collaborated in the formation of a culture devoted to the country's natural splendors and the meanings these might harbor for its citizens. Arguably, the earliest and most influential of such pictorial and literary mergings took place in the Hudson River School, the subject of the essays gathered in this volume from the Trout Gallery of Dickinson College. The artists and writers discussed in this anthology range from Thomas Cole, the founder of the Hudson River School, to Stanford Gifford and Washington Irving. After an introduction to American landscape, the essays treat notions of divine presence in nature, the spread of imagery through prints, and the transformation of the Catskills into "a resort and a refuge." Offering innovative scholarship in accessible language, Within the Landscape lends itself to use as a textbook in courses on nineteenth-century American art and culture.