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In contemplating a conclusive exhibition such as ‘American
Sublime’, Jefferson can never be far from the source of ideas,
for he had already discovered and embraced the idea of the sublime
long before. As early as 1765, at the age of 22, he had acquired
the key ‘works’ of William Shenstone, who first set out
the principles of the jardin anglais, and had absorbed Edmund
Burke’s Essay on the Sublime and the Beautiful. Jefferson’s
own library at Monticello indicates a voracious pursuit of landscape
and garden literature of the time. In a visit to the west of England
with John Adams in April 1786, he carried with him Thomas Whateley’s
Observations on Modern Gardening, the second edition (1770).
Such places as ‘Capability’ Brown’s Wotton and Moor
Park greatly impressed him. Sadly he had missed Brown, who died
in 1783, by just three years. But Brown’s reputation was still
at its height then. Noticeably too, Jefferson shows no liking for
picturesque ruins in his notes, nor, significantly in that vein,
did he ever include the books by Uvedale Price and Humphrey Repton.
Jefferson of course, was fundamentally a classicist, and embraced
pastoralism from that standpoint. There could be two agendas for
the expedition of 1805. The official, government purpose was scientific:
but the quest for a sublime landscape was certainly embedded in
the mind of Clark, who could not resist comparing the scenography
to that of Salvator Rosa, and was explicit in acknowledging the
sublime in these discoveries. The American public were for their
part not to be disappointed. The expectation was that the American
Sublime Landscape was indeed more magnificent, hence more insurpassably
transcendental than any previously European experience.
The globalisation of the concept had commenced, recognising too
the oppositions inherent in the sublime and the beautiful. Over
the following years up to 1820, the sublime principles of both Immanuel
Kant and Edmund Burke broadly consolidated the definition.
But there was, too, in the formation of the American version, a
more religious quest; a search for spiritual reaffirmation of ‘God’s
purpose’, an aspect, as Andrew Wilton avers, of ‘the broadly
devout American consciousness’, itself derived from the puritan
exodus from the post-Cromwellian British Isles through the later
17th and 1l8th centuries. The exhibition commences skilfully to
weave a primarily natural course through the development of American
landscape painting until l880: yet this reverie is traumatised early
by the nightmare sequence of Thomas Cole’s ‘The Course
of Empire’, five highly theatrical and ultimately disillusioning
tableaux representing human achievement and decline from the ‘Savage
State’ to the state of ‘Desolation’. As co-curator
Tim Barringer’s essay – The Course of Empires –
covering this development argues, a clear agenda to sanctify America’s
untouched wilderness – under threat but as yet uncontaminated
by European decadence – existed in Cole’s intention here.
Jefferson lived on into the l820s. Cole, in his ‘Course of
Empire’ sequence, laments the passing of ‘the peaceful
republic of self-contained rural communities’ proposed by Jefferson.
He realises that the kind of utilitarianism espoused by President
Andrew Jackson (author of the Indian Removal Act of 1830) had changed
that course forever.
This room, No 2, is a brilliant insertion plotted by Wilton and
Barringer together. It gives both a hard edge and a lingering pathos
to all that follows. Yet, not Cole, but Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900)
emerges as the outstanding and most prolific painter of the exhibition
period 1820–1880. Church was fortunate to be able to take stock
of such works from England as John Martin’s massive triptych,
‘The Great Day of Wrath’, ‘The Last Judgement’
and the ‘Plains of Heaven’, painted from l851–3,
and exhibited following Martin’s death in 1854 and in New York
in 1856. Such dramatised paintings were more evidently transferable
as an influence than the works of J M W Turner had been a generation
or so earlier. (One might here claim that England, not America,
seeded Hollywood: Spielberg, Stone, and other authors of the recent
spectacular genre of movies.) Church’s work consolidates the
majesty of nature over man, providing a golden filament that runs
through the exhibition after room 2. The oil sketch, ‘Landscape
with Sunset’ (1860–70) – see illustrations above
– boldly presents – as phenomenal – an unusual sunset,
noted near his home, casting a glow over the Hudson landscape, with
the distant Catskills a diffuse blur. Church is drawn by natural
phenomena – volcanoes, icebergs, thunderclouds, as he travels
the northern and southern American hemispheres.
And so begins our contemporary quest for the roots of an American
painting. It can indeed begin at this exhibition. Church, of course,
provides a trajectory of growing reconciliation with nature, once
humanity can experience her true power. But such paintings as ‘Approaching
Thunderstorm’ by Martin Johnson Heade (see illustration above),
executed in l859, have not been drawn by John Martin, or even the
Dusseldorf school, also familiar in the United States earlier. Heade
had taken over Church’s studio, and the two were friends. But
with Heade we find something new, if simpler, even minimal at times
by comparison. Heade, son of a farmer from Pennsylvania, has increasingly
captivated collectors of Americana in the later twentieth century.
The impending civil war, looming as this painting was made, seems
also to contribute to the sombre mood and dramatic hard edge colouring.
John Frederick Kensett (1816–1872) especially in his coastal
Connecticut scenes, reveals a similar skill that captures minutes
of ‘stillness’, contemplating a spatial quantum that is
undistractedly American (see illustration) as in ‘Eaton’s
Neck, Long Island’ (1872). Kensett had an admiration for Claude
(on his European tour in the early l840s he assiduously copied,
‘Seaport with the Landing of Cleopatra at Tarsus’, but
this exercise seems to have been purely academic. Kensett is moving
forward in exploring an American sense of space.
This is a powerful, scholarly, and enlightening exhibition. Wilton
and Barringer together at Tate Britain help us towards a proper
understanding of 20th century developments in American painting,
sculpture, and indeed land art. This last illustration (Kensett)
reminds one of Robert Smithson’s rejection of the picturesque
for the sublime. This exhibition will travel to Philadelphia and
to Mineapolis, albeit in abbreviated form. Sometimes it is good
to carry coals to Newcastle.
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