american romanticism: introduction. american romanticism often associated with the terms “american...
TRANSCRIPT
![Page 1: AMERICAN ROMANTICISM: INTRODUCTION. AMERICAN ROMANTICISM Often associated with the terms “American Renaissance” and “Transcendentalism” Poets: William](https://reader035.vdocuments.net/reader035/viewer/2022062301/5697bfa21a28abf838c96583/html5/thumbnails/1.jpg)
AMERICAN ROMANTICISM: INTRODUCTION
![Page 2: AMERICAN ROMANTICISM: INTRODUCTION. AMERICAN ROMANTICISM Often associated with the terms “American Renaissance” and “Transcendentalism” Poets: William](https://reader035.vdocuments.net/reader035/viewer/2022062301/5697bfa21a28abf838c96583/html5/thumbnails/2.jpg)
AMERICAN ROMANTICISM
• Often associated with the terms “American Renaissance” and “Transcendentalism”
• Poets: William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson
• Prose Writers: Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville.
![Page 3: AMERICAN ROMANTICISM: INTRODUCTION. AMERICAN ROMANTICISM Often associated with the terms “American Renaissance” and “Transcendentalism” Poets: William](https://reader035.vdocuments.net/reader035/viewer/2022062301/5697bfa21a28abf838c96583/html5/thumbnails/3.jpg)
VISUALIZING AMERICAN ROMANTICISM:
THE HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL• The first coherent school of American art,
the Hudson River painters, helped to shape the mythos of the American landscape
• Thomas Cole (1801-1848)
• Asher B. Durand (1796-1886)
• Frederick Church (1826-1900)
• Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902)
![Page 4: AMERICAN ROMANTICISM: INTRODUCTION. AMERICAN ROMANTICISM Often associated with the terms “American Renaissance” and “Transcendentalism” Poets: William](https://reader035.vdocuments.net/reader035/viewer/2022062301/5697bfa21a28abf838c96583/html5/thumbnails/4.jpg)
Thomas Cole,
“The Falls of
Kaaterskill” (1826)
• “
![Page 5: AMERICAN ROMANTICISM: INTRODUCTION. AMERICAN ROMANTICISM Often associated with the terms “American Renaissance” and “Transcendentalism” Poets: William](https://reader035.vdocuments.net/reader035/viewer/2022062301/5697bfa21a28abf838c96583/html5/thumbnails/5.jpg)
Thomas Cole, The Oxbow (View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm, 1836)
![Page 6: AMERICAN ROMANTICISM: INTRODUCTION. AMERICAN ROMANTICISM Often associated with the terms “American Renaissance” and “Transcendentalism” Poets: William](https://reader035.vdocuments.net/reader035/viewer/2022062301/5697bfa21a28abf838c96583/html5/thumbnails/6.jpg)
Asher Durand, “Kindred Spirits” (1848)
![Page 7: AMERICAN ROMANTICISM: INTRODUCTION. AMERICAN ROMANTICISM Often associated with the terms “American Renaissance” and “Transcendentalism” Poets: William](https://reader035.vdocuments.net/reader035/viewer/2022062301/5697bfa21a28abf838c96583/html5/thumbnails/7.jpg)
Asher Durand, “Kindred Spirits” (1848)
• In it Durand depicts himself, together with Cole, on a rocky promontory in serene contemplation of the scene before them
• In the foreground stands one of the school's famous symbols--a broken tree stump-- what Cole called a "memento mori,” i.e., a reminder that life is fragile and impermanent; only Nature and the Divine within the Human Soul are eternal.
• Tiny as the human beings are in this composition, they are nevertheless elevated by the grandeur of the landscape which surrounds them
![Page 8: AMERICAN ROMANTICISM: INTRODUCTION. AMERICAN ROMANTICISM Often associated with the terms “American Renaissance” and “Transcendentalism” Poets: William](https://reader035.vdocuments.net/reader035/viewer/2022062301/5697bfa21a28abf838c96583/html5/thumbnails/8.jpg)
Frederic Edwin Church,
“The Natural Bridge” (1852)
![Page 9: AMERICAN ROMANTICISM: INTRODUCTION. AMERICAN ROMANTICISM Often associated with the terms “American Renaissance” and “Transcendentalism” Poets: William](https://reader035.vdocuments.net/reader035/viewer/2022062301/5697bfa21a28abf838c96583/html5/thumbnails/9.jpg)
Alfred Bierstadt, “Emigrants Crossing the Plains” (1867)
![Page 10: AMERICAN ROMANTICISM: INTRODUCTION. AMERICAN ROMANTICISM Often associated with the terms “American Renaissance” and “Transcendentalism” Poets: William](https://reader035.vdocuments.net/reader035/viewer/2022062301/5697bfa21a28abf838c96583/html5/thumbnails/10.jpg)
Alfred Bierstadt, “Looking Up the Yosemite Valley” (ca. 1865-67)
![Page 11: AMERICAN ROMANTICISM: INTRODUCTION. AMERICAN ROMANTICISM Often associated with the terms “American Renaissance” and “Transcendentalism” Poets: William](https://reader035.vdocuments.net/reader035/viewer/2022062301/5697bfa21a28abf838c96583/html5/thumbnails/11.jpg)
VISUALIZING AMERICAN ROMANTICISM:
THE HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL• Though influenced by European Romantic painting, they
tried to define a distinct vision for American art • Began with the grand views of the Hudson Valley and
surrounding Catskill Mountains in NY• They celebrated the vast resources and magnificent
landscapes of the new nation (“Nature’s Nation”)• Depicting a wilderness in which man is small in
comparison but still formed an essential element in a divine harmony
• As Thomas Cole maintained, if nature were untouched by the hand of man--as was much of the primeval American landscape in the early 19th century--then man could become more easily acquainted with the hand of God
![Page 12: AMERICAN ROMANTICISM: INTRODUCTION. AMERICAN ROMANTICISM Often associated with the terms “American Renaissance” and “Transcendentalism” Poets: William](https://reader035.vdocuments.net/reader035/viewer/2022062301/5697bfa21a28abf838c96583/html5/thumbnails/12.jpg)
VISUALIZING AMERICAN ROMANTICISM:
THE HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL• Influence of Transcendentalists on Hudson River
School• Emerson had written in his 1841 essay
“Thoughts on Art” that painting should become a vehicle through which the universal mind could reach the mind of mankind,
• Thus: Hudson River painters believed art to be an agent of moral and spiritual transformation.