Landscape

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Defining Landscape Painting in Nineteenth-Century American Critical Discourse. Or, Should Art'Deal in Wares the Age Has Need of'? Author(s): Karen L. Georgi Source: Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 29, No. 2 (2006), pp. 227+229-245Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3841014Accessed: 16-04-2015 12:09 UTC

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Defining Landscape Painting in

Nineteenth-Century American

Critical Discourse. Or, Should Art

'Deal in Wares the Age

Has Need of'?

Karen L. Georgi



1. Karen Georgi, 'Making nature culture's other: nineteenth-century American landscape painting and critical discourse', Word <?L lmage, vol. 19, July-September 2003, pp. 198-213.

2. I am relying here on the work of several theorists of narrative. Their specific concerns vary, but they each contribute to what I take to be an overall understanding of narrative as a structure for representation that orders and gives meaning to the object represented. This conception of narrative implies the inherent fictionality of both historical and fictional narratives; both are comprised of a series of events and actions that are emplotted in such a way as to claim the truthfulness and reality of that particular story. See Paul Ricoeur, 'Life in Quest of Narrative', in David Wood (ed.) On Paul Ricoeur: 'Narrative and Interpretation (Routledge: London, 1991); Hayden White, The Content ofthe Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, 1987); Mieke Bal, Narratology: An Introduction, 2nd edn (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 1987).

Defining Landscape Painting in Nineteenth-Century

American Critical Discourse. Or, Should Art 'Deal

in Wares the Age Has Need of?

Karen L. Georgi

In 1855 Asher B. Durand showed his large, carefully finished In the Woods at the annual exhibition ofthe National Academy of Design. The canvas inspired a good deal of commentary in the critical press. And although American art criticism at that moment cannot well be described as provocative or even

particularly accomplished, the rhetorical choices are often instructive, as in the present case. In fact the response to this painting, in my opinion, stakes out some of the preeminent concerns and terms of debate for

landscape painting, and for art in general, in the decade that preceded the American Civil War. If, as I have argued elsewhere, nature only came to

signify the various weighty values (such as God, nationalism, republican liberty, and so on) commonly associated with it by means of the formal and discursive structure of landscape painting, then the genre itself

necessarily assumes considerable importance. How and with what aesthetic

parameters would such a genre with the capacity for eliding cultural

meanings with natural ones be defined? Which values would be transposed into the realm of apparently timeless, extra-cultural ideals? I will argue that the successful representation of nature, 'proper' landscape painting, denominated as such, required certain discursive decisions. Some forms were rhetorically given the power to say something, to have meaning

? to be nature, that is ? and others were denied the ability to stand for

anything beyond the mere physical existence of their referents.

My analysis begins with a discussion of the narrativity of the landscape's form. I will make proposals as to what this form consisted of, how it structured scenes of the outdoors as nature, and the relationship of such a form to the denomination landscape painting. The second main task will be to study the implications of non-narrative landscapes, in other words,

pictures that received critical disapproval in terms that we can read as

refusing to recognise their narrativity. Why were some landscape paintings given the label, considered replete with the requisite significance while others were said to 'mean nothing'? How, finally, might we read opposing judgements about the same painting?

In the Woods (Fig. 1) is a case study. For some critics the picture was

coherent, complete, and exemplary for its meaningful form, but for others it failed to be more than an accumulation of details. Identifications such as

meaningful and proper (or their opposites) will always be rhetorical,

subject to the standards and priorities ?

political and aesthetic ? of the critic who employs them. Such relativity extends also to my use of the

designation narrative. I do believe we can speak of a certain formal structure that is, or possesses, narrative qualities and hence generates both

meaning and what has been called a truth effect. However, its effects ?

meaning, truth and the like ? will not always be recognised by critics. In

fact, I will argue, it is these characteristics in particular that will be



Karen L. Georgi

Fig. 1. Asher B. Durand In the Woods, 1855. Oil on canvas, 154.3 x 121.9 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift in memory of John Sturges, by his children, 1895 (95.13.1). Photograph ? 1995 The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

230 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 29.2 2006



3. Mary Bartlett Cowdrey, National Academy of Design Exhibition Record, 1826?1860, vol. 1 (New York Historical Society: New York, 1953), p. 140.

4. 'Exhibition of the National Academy of Design', Knickerbocker, vol. 45, May 1855, p. 532.

5. Hayden White is relevant here for his stress on the selectivity of the narrative form, which renders reality as 'continuity rather than discontinuity', and consequently ideological for such a definition of reality. See White, The Content ofthe Form, p. 10.

6. For a thorough discussion of associationist theories, natural theology, and their relationship, see Andrew Hemingway, Landscape Imagery and Urban Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1992). He examines the centrality of these theories to the discourses of landscape imagery and the ideological constructions of naturalism in the UK. Angela Miller has addressed the relevance of associationism in the USA in her Empire ofthe Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825?75 (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 1993). For a discussion of natural theology in American landscape painting see Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825?1875 (Oxford University Press: New York, 1980).

Landscape Painting in Nineteenth-Century American Critical Discourse

denied, or said to be absent, by critics who wished to discredit a picture. In the instances where we can read a writer's evident desire to pronounce a

picture as something less than a landscape, and not simply to complain about poor colouring, or lack of atmosphere, and so on, the eomplaint is often that the picture lacks precisely those traits that can be considered narrative.

Durand submitted In the Woods and one other landscape to the National

Academy's 1855 Annual Exhibition. It was presented as a full-scale finished landscape painting, and was probably his primary work that year. In the Woods portrays a very restricted view of a forest glade. The painting indeed insists on the minutia of the forest interior and on the viewer's

placement emphatically in the woods, traits that registered also with its initial reviewers. The Knickerbocker, for instance, described the painting as if from inside the frame noting that 'we have an avenue (so to speak) of forest trees, rising on each side, and tangling their branches overhead'. Instead of the elevated viewpoint, which also frequently constructs an

ambiguous relationship between the space of the viewer and the scene within the picture, In the Woods establishes contiguity on either side of the frame. The viewpoint is dropped so that the foreground seems to

correspond visually to the beholder's ground. More to the point, all the elements of the painting are rigidly ordered by linear, one-point perspective (pictorial organisation that is, again, arranged fundamentally around the viewer). This creates the 'avenue' that opens in the foreground with an entrance into the woods only large enough for the lone hiker. Close rows of trees recede toward the vanishing point on either side, also

tilting inwards overhead. The trees and the undergrowth of the forest floor that occupy the most frontal plane of the canvas are cropped to suggest nearness. We are flanked by tree trunks whose bark and mossy growth are likewise delineated with a clarity and specificity meant to mimic the sharp focus of direct proximity. The vanishing point within the wooded interior

occupies the horizontal centre of the canvas. It is beneath the vertical

midpoint, however, reinforcing the sensation of continuity with the viewers' ground. This spot is a distant, luminous opening in the forest,

hazy enough to allow only vague suggestions of the world beyond. We are thus brought into the scene, given a very fixed and confined visual path, and supplied with an obvious endpoint.

The formal order of In the Woods, I suggest, emplots the raw material ofthe outdoors as nature; the disparate elements are pictured as a unified, coherent,

sequential and singular phenomenon, which also intrinsically embodies man's relationship to nature. The rigid perspectival composition of the canvas imposes a strict order on the natural world, banishing chaos in favor of symmetry, balance and harmony. The bilaterally symmetrical trees incline toward the centre at comparable angles, framing the scene with an

equilateral triangle whose base is formed by the felled tree in the

foreground. The horizontal is echoed by the stream and the other downed limbs on the far bank. The stability and harmony of this geometry guarantee the triumph of consonance over dissonance, imposing order over chance and disorder. This is a fundamental trait of narrative form; it ensures the singularity and cohesiveness of the given events/phenomena. In

addition, like their British counterparts, American landscape painters and audiences were influenced by associationist theories, in which an object's value was thought to come from its associations, not its inherent aesthetic

qualities. Accordingly, such a scene would have been seen as an index of

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 29.2 2006 231



Karen L. Georgi

the divine where the presence of God was implied by the geometric harmony that orders the material world. One ofthe operations of narrative structure, however, would have been to erase awareness of that activity of making cultural associations.

Nature as structured by this picture demonstrates the other definitive feature of narrative: temporal order and chronological sequence. The closeness of the foreground trees, the dim light and the lack of peripheral vision help to structure narrative time. We have progressed some way into this wooded space, implicitly leaving behind, temporally and spatially, an earlier moment. The future is indicated by the small opening ahead of us at the endpoint of our path. The past and future of the forest, too, are traced by the old, dead trees decaying on the ground, and the small new

growth and fresher green foliage. These temporal sequences of man and nature solidify the culture/nature opposition. Man's time is linear; the past is behind, we stand in the present, and look toward the future directly ahead in the distance. Nature's time, by contrast, is distinctly cyclical. Growth and decay, and all states in between, occur all around one another. New life springs out of the dead elements, at once completing and beginning the circle of nature.

Thus a carefully circumscribed image is presented; no inconsistencies in the type of nature, or type of view, or manner of interaction are

allowed, making the scene appear naturally complete and inevitable, with one conclusion, and one reality. This bit of woodland is not simply an accumulation of material from the world outside. Instead it is nature. That is to say, it is replete with meaning; it contains formal reference to divine order, to man, and to distinctions between man and nature. We will return to In the Woods to read the picture's reception and to consider the conflicting opinions about whether it did, for all viewers, narrate nature. Before analysing these conflicts in depth, however, I want to offer additional examples in order to help substantiate the notion of

landscape, or, more precisely, those pictures denominated as such, as narrative.

In 1848, Durand exhibited three landscapes at the Annual Exhibition ofthe National Academy of Design. One of these, The Fountain, appears not to have been very well received. Unfortunately we cannot look at the picture ourselves; it is presumed destroyed. Its reception, however, is revealing. The landscape was 'illustrative of [William Cullen] Bryant's poem "the

Fountain"', according to the Literary World, and thus might have been

readily adaptable to narrative form, because some manner of story was

already in place to offer the rudiments of coherence and selection. This was apparently not the case. Like two landscapes from the preceding year about which the Literary World complained, The Fountain did not come

together as a single picture. For their critic the picture was 'too much in the style of those the artist exhibited last year, which hardly deserved the name of landscapes, but should rather have been called portraits of two

huge trees with a background'. The reviewer's description intimates that

landscape refers to an integrative function. The stated shortcoming for which the label ought to have been withheld was, in this instance, the failure of the picture to make a whole of the disparate parts. It dissatisfied the critic because it contained distinct elements that remained discreet ?

portraits and background. Spatial discontinuity is also registered; the

background is an object itself and is juxtaposed with the disproportionate 'huge' trees. The middle ground is noticeably absent.


7. This is according to the Literary World, vol. 3, 11 March 1848, p. 106, where they noted in a preview that Durand was expected to send three landscapes to the annual exhibition of the National Academy. Their later installment also only discussed three pictures.

8. See David Lawall, Asher Brown Durand: A Documentary Catalogue ofthe Narrative and Landscape Paintings (Garland: New York, 1978), p. 68. This painting was also the subject of controversy between Durand and the patron George Austen. John Durand implies that the painting was destroyed in the aftermath of this incident. John Durand, The Life and Times of Asher B. Durand (New York, 1894; reprint Kennedy Graphics: New York, 1970), pp. 170-2.

9. I believe the critic was referring to the pendants, Landscape Composition, Forenoon and Landscape Composition, Afternoon, exhibited in 1847.

10. 'National Academy Exhibition (continued)', Literary World, vol. 3, 13 May 1848, p. 287.



11. Literary World, vol. 3, p. 287.

12. John Barrell has insightfully analysed the social meanings of different landscape perspectives and the signs of class and levels of reasoning ability enacted by landscape preferences. John Barrell, 'Public Prospect and Private View: The Politics of Taste in Eighteenth-Century Britain', in Simon Pugh (ed.) Reading Landscape: Country, City, Capital (Manchester University Press: Manchester, 1990), pp. 19?40. Extensive discussions of the politics of vantage point, types of views, and the performance of taste are also in J. Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730?1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1972); J. Barrell, English Literature in History, 1730?80: An Equal Wide Survey (St. Martin's Press: New York, 1983); A. Hemingway, Landscape Imagery and Urban Culture; Nicholas Green, The Spectacle cf Nature: Landscape and Bourgeois Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Manchester University Press: Manchester and New York, 1990).

13. We the spectator also possesses a surveying gaze, a mode of vision that sweeps from an elevated foreground viewpoint to the distant horizon. This manner of gaze immediately calls to mind Michel Foucault's influential ideas about hierarchical observation and surveillance. M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth ofthe Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Penguin: London and New York, 1977), pp. 170?228. Foucault's paradigm of supervision has been quite useful to landscape studies. The raised vantage point as a sign of mastery over the land, and its various ideological implications have been explored by Albert Boime, The Magisterial Gaze: Manifest Destiny and American Landscape Painting, c. 1835?1865 (Smithsonian Institution Press: Washington, 1991). See also Alan Wallach, 'Making a Picture of the View from Mount Holyoke', in David Miller (ed.) American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature (Yale University Press: New Haven, 1993), pp. 80-91.


View of Dover Plain, Dutchess [sic] County, New York, 1848 (Fig. 2) exhibited that same year, did not contain a similar weakness in the opinion of the

Literary World's critic. It was, by contrast

... one of the best pictures he has ever exhibited. It is fuli of truth as well as beauty, and so invested with the characteristics of the natural scenery of certain portions of our land, that almost every visitor who looks upon it could localize the scene.11

His terms state clearly that nature and not just the outdoors is offered to the viewer by this landscape. It both a beautiful picture, and one that gives us

truth; such truth as to allow 'every visitor . . . [to] localize the scene'.

Formally Dover Plain displays a structure that, although quite dissimilar from In the Woods, also imposes a meaning on the stuff of the material world. Durand encloses and delimits the world within a scene defined by a repoussoir frame that intentionally avoids picturesque formulas for

framing. There are no prominent foreground trees bordering the picture and overtly guiding our gaze. Instead, the frame escapes our attention and

displays a carefully centred, balanced view with the visual pretence to

happenstance ? an authentic glimpse. Durand nonetheless configured his

foreground forms carefully so that an unobtrusive elongated, horizontal oval border defines the view. Note the sweep of the earth in the

foreground that dips in the centre and rises on each side. On the left side of the canvas the boulders create a downward sloping line that finishes its descent just at the picture's centre, where it then curves upward with a

symmetrical slope formed by the cows, and finished by the grouping of

foreground trees at the right edge of the canvas. The upper border of the oval frame is created at the top of the picture by the sweeping curve of the cloudbank.

Inside, or behind this frame, the illusionistic space that recedes into the distance echoes perpendicularly the elliptical shape that delimits the frontal plane of the picture. That is, two elongated ovals are inscribed within each other, at right angles to one another. The are of trees on the left traces an oval line from the middle ground to the distant point near the horizon. The mountain ridge also appears to swing around along this same are. On the right side of the canvas, the corresponding curve from centre foreground to centre background is less defined, but is present in the band of shadow that runs along the low hills in the middle distance. The line is joined in the near distance by the same sweep of cows and trees that describe the surface oval. The centre point at the bottom of the frontal frame also corresponds to the centre point of the oval that defines the recessional space. Thus, Durand's configuration demarcates both surface and depth, constructing the entirety of the picture's fictional world as a complete (elongated) spherical form, like a universe itself.

Within this universe the land appears to be naturally domesticated, a

pastoral plane with no signs of overt cultivation, but yet available for man's use. The human and natural elements blend into one another with no apparent boundaries. The middle ground shepherd figure indicates nature's utility for man, and the well-dressed foreground group refers to man's understanding of nature's value and beauty. The expansive ground that the view-seekers survey is protected by a ring of mountains in the distance, large enough to create the sensation of enclosure and

security, but not so massive or imposing to be either insurmountable or limiting to the prospect of the figures. Dover Plain then creates a scene




Karen L. Georgi

Fig. 2. Asher B. Durand, Dover Plain, Dutchess [sic] Country, New York, 1848. Oil on canvas, 107.9 x 153.7 cm. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift on Thomas M. Evans and Museum, purchase through the Smithsonian Institution Collections Acquisitions Program (1978.129).

that is nature, a site of plenitude and harmony that provides panoramic scope, and continuity without rupture or ambiguity from foreground to background.

However, the formal elements of framing, viewpoint and the like are not what attracted the commendation ofthe critics. As we might expect, they did not name these narrative elements of the picture's structure. Instead the critics found Dover Plain so appealing because it gave them nature, it told them its morals, and did so with the appearance of reality. The writer for the Literary World makes this even more apparent in another passage of the same review. He claimed that Durand was 'admitted by universal consent to be one of the high priests of temple of Nature' not because he painted a subtle repoussoir, or created a pictorial space that mimicked the universe, but because he presented the (divine) lessons of nature to the viewer. 'Those better than he', the writer said, 'have transcribed [nature's]

pastoral teachings, her quiet lessons of beauty and grace, her gentle sermons in stones, and her harmonious tongues in trees.' The painting was evidently an exemplary landscape for others as well, because two years later it was chosen by the American Art-Union as one of the works to be

engraved and distributed to the organisation's members in 1850. I want to return now to In the Woods to trace its reception and analyse the

implications of the refusal on the part of some critics to see any meaning in this landscape. We have already discussed some ways in which the form


14. Literary World, vol. 3, p. 287.

15. The Literary World listed the works that the American Art-Union distributed as engravings to its members in 1850. They appeared in the following order: Leslie's 'Anne Page, Slender and Shallow', Woodville's 'Card Plavers', Leutze's Tmage Breaker', Cole's 'Dream of Arcadia', Durand's 'Dover Plains', Edmonds's 'The New Scholar'. 'Gallery ofthe American Art-Union', Literary World, vol. 8, 10 May 1851, p. 380.



16. We are now accustomed to associating Durand as much with the close, detailed forest interiors as with the glowing rural idyll. It seems that this was also the case for some of his patrons as early as 1857. Durand's patron Jonathan Sturges, in fact, sent him a cheque for $200 in 1857, saying 'I desire to add to the price of the wood picture. The trees have grown more than two hundred dollars worth since 1854.' Jonathan Sturges, New York, to Asher Durand, New York, 23 May 1857, Asher B. Durand Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Microfilm reel N20. In 1855, however, this was the first painting to concentrate so fully on an interior scene, almost entirely excluding the expected view of the horizon.

17. Durand's landscapes were almost unanimously considered serene and familiar, even when ? as occasionally happened ? they were criticised as repetitive. Often the paintings were lauded for the sake of Durand himself; they were the productions of an artist esteemed for his character and for his service as president of the National Academy of Design.


configured nature, and fused its putative meanings with the raw material ofthe outdoors. We need also to consider how its formal priorities and close-up aesthetic diverged a bit (in 1855) from conventional expectations for

landscape painting, and departed from Durand's familiar idiom. Instead of his characteristic depiction of the landscape as a warmly glowing rural idyll like Dover Plain, In the Woods denies a clear view of the world beyond in deference to the details and the confined feeling of a wooded enclosure. The vertical orientation of the canvas itself, which was an identifying trait

repeated by the critics, suggests that narrow focus replaces panoramic scope. Recall that the strict perspectival order ofthe scene gives the viewer a clear and definite progression. It also renders the remote aperture at the far edge of the forest the visual goal of the picture, promising a vista

beyond. But although this central point is offered as the desired destination and compositional focus, it is simultaneously withheld as a comparatively illegible and empty passage. We are denied a commanding view of the remote panorama. The viewer is thus pushed back into the canvas to linger over the carefully painted details of the wooded interior. The picture slows our looking; we are presented with countless objects close by, and nowhere else to look. Perhaps it even thematises such a mode of vision.

The critics writing at the time replied with some insistence to the close-up focus of this painting. The terms of their responses require consideration. Durand's paintings were generally welcomed equally throughout the critical press, but In the Woods drew some contrary opinions, by clearly partisan writers. Critics, both those in favour and those opposed to the

painting, made arguments about the pertinence, or irrelevance, of painting the minutia of the visible world. The ostensible point of this aesthetic

debate, that is to say, the criteria for judging the picture a success or not, or if it was in fact a landscape, centred for all parties around the issue of whether a landscape painting should dwell on the particularities of the material world. The question, however, seems also to have brought to the surface other points of contention. The writers expressing their respective responses to this aesthetic of minute detail did so in the language of class, labour and materialism. Consequently, I want to consider why the painting polarised critical opinion; what, if any, was the relationship between the form of the painting and the partisanship of its reception? And, how might we read the uneasy and indirect, yet evident, movement between aesthetic terms and economic ones?

There are two recurring rhetorical distinctions that are central to my reading of In the Woods. They are broad designations of formal types and

generic labels used habitually by the critical press at this moment ?

namely, the determination of the picture's status as landscape painting or study, and the age-old debate between imagination and imitation. These categorisations will open onto other significant rhetorical schemes within mid-nineteenth-century American landscape discourse, further

discriminating, in less overt terms, between formal types in order to sanction or discredit a picture's status as a proper representation of nature. What we are discussing, as mentioned at the outset, are the politics of which ideas get ascribed to nature, thereby granting those ideas the status of transcendent standards. Also at stake, more specifically with In the

Woods, is the relationship that the spokesmen for art will or will not forge between art and the broader society. We will begin with the overt debate over what to call Durand's In the Woods, and that will immediately become

inseparable from the second distinction between imagination and imitation




Karen L. Georgi

(and its various permutations). Opening like Russian dolls onto one another, these forms of categorisation, which operate in the critical reception as

binary oppositions, will not allow for easy disentanglement. However, this

entanglement is fundamental to the functioning of such oppositions and to the critical discourse in general.

To start, In the Woods led more than one writer to speculate about whether the picture was a study. For all who wrote about the painting however, even those who disparaged it, In the Woods was a 'faithful transcript' of natural

scenery. But it was not always considered a proper landscape painting. The review in the New York Daily Times points to the ambivalence that recurs in the writing on this painting. 'Durand exhibits two pictures,' the critic noted, 'No. 104, Summer Afternoon, and No. 113, In the Woods. The latter is a large upright picture, and might be a study. As such, it is a faithful transcript of nature. We fail to detect any other merit in the work.' The status of the picture was apparently open to speculation; was it a landscape painting or a study? The answer to this question seems also to have been relevant to the critic's assessment of its success. The value of the work, and whether it could be said to represent nature are both determined by what it is named. If it is a study, then it is a 'faithful

transcript of Nature', and from this and only this proceeds its limited merit. If it is not a study, the Times writer begs us to ask, then is it a

landscape painting? If it is a landscape painting, is it a less 'faithful

transcript' of nature? Why would it lose its already modest value if it were

something other than a study? What, in any case, makes the writer unsure about the picture's classification ?

particularly as its size and surface refinement were obvious signs of its finished character?

A more complete look at the reviews of 1855 is useful here. The uncertainty or hesitation voiced, perhaps a bit disingenuously, by the critic at the Times is one instance of several ? all of which engage the painting ofthe minutia ofthe visible world as a central basis for their aesthetic judgement and classification. Let us then return to the Times. Their critic remonstrates:

If the Academy did not contain within itself men of sufficient caliber, the short-comings of an exhibition might be bome patiently. But among the academicians and associate members are men of undoubted genius whose pencils, properly employed, might elevate the Arts throughout the world. Instead of such noble effort, we find them prostituting their powers on extrinsic labor. It is not by painting portraits - it is not by producing Indian Summers and green landscapes - it is not by sitting in a wood and depicting the trees therein with painful minuteness - that American artists can hope to rival their European brethren, or create a school of their own, with vitality in it. History, poetry, fable, and the inexhaustible treasures ofthe imagination, are the subjects of which the preceding should be but adjuncts. Fidelity to external Nature is but mere mechanism of Art, if it be not accompanied with internal sentiment and poetry. Lack of ambition and a tradesman-like desire to manufacture an article of general consumption - lack of industry, of study, if not of [?] in itself, are the Scylla and Charybdis ofthe academicians. Mechanical industry is well enough in its way, and gratifying, but a few moments might surely be snatched from the business of the world for Art alone, and the National Exhibition.20

The complaint of this writer is surely not an unfamiliar one. To begin, he

plainly asserts that the goal for American artists ought to be parity with the art of Europe

? implicitly, with regard to style and technique, and

explicitly, in subject-matter. We can also recognise here the conventional

practice of privileging the intellectual capacity of the artist over his manual or technical facility. According to this view, the artist demonstrates his mental ability, his 'genius', by expressing imagination or


18. 'National Academy of Design', New York Daily Times, 12 April 1855, p. 4.

19. Times, 12 April 1855, p. 4.

20. Times, 12 April 1855, p. 4.



21. According to the historian of American journalism Frank L. Mott, the Times intended to 'take a higher moral tone' in the growing market of penny papers. It was founded in 1851 by journalist Henry Raymond and bankers George Jones and Edward Wesley, and was characterised by its strong opinions and its 'morality and conservativism'. See Mott, American Journalism: A History of Newspapers in the United States Through 250 Years, 1690-1940 (Macmillan: New York, 1941), pp. 278-81.

22. Questions about vision and looking, what is visible, and techniques for seeing and their relationship to modernity have been much discussed in recent decades. See for example, Hal Foster (ed.), Vision and Visuality (The New Press: New York, 1988); Jonathan Crary, Techniques ofthe Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (MIT Press: Cambridge, 1990); T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1984).


sentiment ? qualities that possess no concrete visual substance. Representing outward, tangible reality, by this thinking, shows no such virtuosity; it fails to display man's (and art's) 'higher' powers. Instead, it exhibits the manual

competence belonging to any skilled tradesman. The Times critic also

complains, as critics were wont to do at this time, of the proliferation of

portraiture. Portraiture was routinely derided as uninteresting, and without significance to either the public or to the higher cause of art.

Landscape met less frequently with this objection, but occasionally (usually from committed Europhiles) it too was considered mundane and inferior to 'history, poetry, fable, and the inexhaustible treasures ofthe imagination'.

In this way, the Times offers the still common (at that moment) conservative opinion about how best to help American art flourish; artists should work to 'rival their European brethren' by following the priorities established by the old masters. Such standards would also appear to leave little doubt about why this critic would like to designate In the Woods a

study. Given this, it is tempting to pass over the distinctions that the Times sets up between external appearance and imagination, mechanism and

sentiment, landscape and history, and write them off as the conventional

opposition between head and hands, intellectual and manual labour, ideal and real. From this quarter, we might also expect the allusions to class and the distaste for labour. However, although this is in fact the case, and the message of the Times is an elitist one that calls for deference to the established traditions and patrons of art, and denounces those who do

otherwise, there is also a fairly insistent analogy to the production and

exchange of material goods that should catch our attention. These artists, the Times tells us, do not lack ability, they are 'men of

undoubted genius'. But for this critic, a certain type of painting, which he labels 'extrinsic labor', constitutes a dire misuse of this ability, and

consequently the work of these men becomes ? if we attend closely to the

language of this passage ?

something distinctly other than art. In

particular, it becomes commodity production. References to this effect

pervade the paragraph. The first and most extreme instance of this analogy makes evident the critic's unflattering intentions; to him they are

'prostituting their powers'. In the sentences that follow, the denigrated 'extrinsic labor' is identified as that which engages the material of the visible world, the detailed rendering of objects. Durand's painting is named obliquely, but unmistakably as exemplifying this erroneous path; it is the outcome of 'sitting in a wood and depicting the trees therein with

painful minuteness'. Throughout the remaining sentences, this manner of

degraded painting is never identified with the terms of art, but with a

vocabulary drawn from the world of commodities. It is called 'mere

mechanism', or an 'article of general consumption' and 'mechanical

industry'. Likewise, the artists' activity is described, in addition to

prostitution, as one of 'producing' and of 'manufacture' ? it displays 'tradesman-like desire'.

Such a reading still might not surprise us; it is in some ways only a more

thorough version of the familiar tension between intellectual manual labour, ideal and real. What is of interest, I suggest, is that the criticism surrounding this picture, here and in passages to be presented shortly, is not quite the debate of head versus hands, but one of head versus eyes. In other words, the faculty or skill rendered inferior, and antithetical to imagination and a

proper landscape painting is the visual and not, or not only, the manual. There is moreover a link that is constructed, however incompletely,




Karen L. Georgi

between the visual and the manual, or between picture that focuses on

reproducing the details of the visible world and the objects of that vision.

And, finally, these material objects cannot be read only as those of the natural world; there is an awkward and unresolved equation

? or, rather there is not yet an equation, but the signs of anxiety

? that the 'material' refers also to commodities, 'articles of general consumption'.

To sort through this relationship between the visual and manual, or the notion that the intellectual is being opposed to the former instead of the

latter, I want to expand the sample of critical reception. A larger sample will also allow us to pursue the odd and partial correspondence between detailed replication of the visible, and its material objects. There are numerous instances of exhibition reviews from this moment that also invoke the dualism of head versus hands, art versus imitation, painting versus study as fundamental tools of criticism. They offer, I believe, an

example of the way in which this discourse was generally used, showing us

simultaneously the ambiguities in the dualism itself, and the subtle but

significant socioeconomic rhetoric it mobilised around In the Woods. These texts come from a few extended commentaries penned in the years just preceding the exhibition of In the Woods. All of them read like manifestoes on the principles of art. They are not concerned exclusively with Durand.

Rather, they encompass a somewhat broader scope, pointing to the

pervasiveness of the issues under consideration and to the fact that Durand's reception is representative of the larger discourse. Our focus will be on the formal distinctions of the 'real' and the 'ideal', and the role of these terms in landscape criticism at this time.

A considerable portion of mid-century writing on the landscape, in the

press as well as in Durand's own texts, demonstrates an anxiety about the definition of the genre that is frequently voiced in the terms of this real/ ideal opposition. Broadly speaking, the concepts real and ideal have been at the core of aesthetic catep-orisation, valuation and debate for

23 centuries. In the sub-discipline of American art history, these terms have assumed a central place in landscape interpretation since Barbara Novak's seminal work in the field. She recognised in mid-nineteenth-century landscape paintings, and the context in which she inscribed them, 'the

age's demands for a blend of the real and the ideal'. In brief, according to this paradigm, landscape paintings display dual tendencies. On the one

hand, we find the depiction of minute details and particular scenes with, for instance, identifiable vegetation and rock structures. On the other, there is an emphasis on the broad view, with the use of recognised compositional devices and historical allusion meant to evoke grander sentiments. In many ways, the examples of critical writing offered here do fit this model; the critics repeatedly display a simultaneous interest in the minute and particular alongside the idealised and transcendent. Although it is evident that these were central concerns of landscape production and

reception, my interest in their role in mid-nineteenth-century landscape definition lies elsewhere. I believe that they operated in a more dialectical manner and consequently I want to consider whether opposition

?

inherent even in the use of the semantic opposites, real and ideal ? is an

apt metaphor for the relationship between these two formal types, or

stylistic tendencies in the landscape. Consider, for example, the manner in which the following remarks on

Frederic Church cloud the ostensibly clear relations between real and ideal. In the Literary World's 1850 National Academy review, Church's


23. Linda Nochlin notes in her study of Realism that a division between 'true reality' and 'mere appearance' has been 'part ofthe main-stream of Western thought since the time of Plato'. Citing Hegel as well, she identifies this opposition as having permeated aesthetic thought, defining art in his words as that which 'digs an abyss between the appearance and illusion of this bad and perishable world, on the one hand, and the true content of events on the other'. Linda Nochlin, Realism (Penguin: Middlesex, 1971), pp. 13-14.

24. Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture, p. 68. In her earlier American Painting ofthe Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience (Praeger: New York, 1969) this categorisation is fundamental to her study, as the subtitle suggests.



25. Literary World, vol. 6, 27 April 1850, p. 425.

26. Literary World, vol. 6, p. 425. Such words bring to mind the complaint frequently voiced by J. M. W. Turner's critics in the UK. Turner's colours were often called exaggerated, and at the expense of nature. There was evidently a similar tension between imaginative, idealising treatment and the demands of portraying the actual scene. I would not venture to say, however, whether Turner's critics employed the real/ideal opposition in the same manner or for the same rhetorical ends that I am analysing here with regard to Church. For more on Turner's reception see Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The Paintings ofJ.M. W. Turner, revised edn (Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Tate Gallery: New Haven, 1984); Ian Warrell '"The Wonder-working Artist": Contemporary responses to Turner's Exhibited and Engraved Watercolours', in Eric Shanes (ed.) Turner: The Great Watercolours (Royal Academy of Arts: London, 2000), pp. 32?45; A. Hemingway, Landscape Imagery and Urban Culture.

27. According to Franklin Kelly, the painting was based on an oil sketch 'certainly executed on the spot' in Vermont the previous year. F. Kelly, Frederic Edwin Church and the National Landscape (Smithsonian Institution Press: Washington, 1988), p. 26.


contribution to the exhibition received lengthy notice, almost equal to that of Durand, whose work headlined this installment. Of the four paintings discussed, Twilight, lShort Arbiter 'Twixt Day and Night' (1850) was

apparently the most challenging. The critic was openly pleased with the

picture, yet found it flawed in relevant ways. He claims that this painting was 'his [Church's] best work ... and [it] is a striking picture'. The

passage continues with the critic's delighted delineation of the scene, followed by this verdict:

Parts of this picture are painted with exquisite beauty. The whole side hill in the foreground, with its rich verdure, the scattered bushes overspread, and the low stone wall creeping along its side midway towards the top, is most truthfully and capitally executed. But we protest against the 'effects' ofthe picture. We have no faith, and we take no satisfaction in the phenomena of nature on the canvas. They are not within the province of true landscape painting, except as studies which reveal principles for application by the artist. Surely there is enough of beauty in nature that is known and can be appreciated without the necessity of resorting to rare spectacles which common experience exclaims against. The first word which an observer is apt to give utterance to before such a sunset scene as this, is 'how unnatural;' 'who ever saw such contrasts of color?' And it is no help so far as the unsatisfactory effect of the picture upon such an one is concerned, for the artist to say, 'I saw it just as it is, and painted it accordingly,' because a picture must vouch for itself, and must be able to make its appeal to the direct senses of all who are capable of understanding it. A landscape that

The critic's exclamations against the unnatural contrasts of colour are not

necessarily excessive; the picture does indeed present a vivid orange and

yellow patch to depict a corner of the sky aflame with the sunset. These intense hues are bounded by the muted purples of distant hills and cool

greens of those in the middle ground. Although hyperbolic, the picture attempts to reproduce the visual spectacle of a dramatic sunset with attention to actual appearance of colour, texture and modelling of the clouds in contrast to the flat and silhouetted forms of the hills, and

passages where the brilliant orange recurs in subdued form as pools of reflection. However, while the critic's statement is overtly clear, the real and ideal are not so easy to separate. The first lines certainly refer to the careful attention paid to the material objects of the scene, but the 'effects' against which the journal protests are both too factual and too

painterly. The word 'effects' itself implies a manner, a manipulation of formal elements on the canvas. It also refers here to the purportedly 'unnatural' 'contrasts of color'. However, the critic also states that such

'phenomena of nature' may be useful 'as studies', intimating that it is

something to be seen and recorded from fact, but used later, presumably idealised according to the painter's discretion. And, moreover, he suggests that the painter claimed to have seen this sunset 'just as it [was]'. But he then dismisses this contention as irrelevant on the grounds that the proper painting will be complete in and of itself. It ought not to need any reference to the outside; the verbal testimonials by the artist and by extension, the fact-ness of the sights he claims to have recorded, are extraneous.

We thus read the Literary World's reviewer clearly using both categories, and even playing them off one another. Notice again that this critic also claims that the genre itself has certain limits by which it is defined and that he possesses the authority to exercise this delineation. Church's

'phenomena', in his opinion, were inappropriate. For reasons that he refers to with more ambiguity than is readily apparent, they were 'not




Karen L. Georgi

within the province of true landscape painting'. My point is that the apparent clarity of his meaning

? what he likes and does not like, and why ? rests on a

rhetorical distinction between the depiction of visible matter and imaginative treatment. Yet, as we see here, these putatively unmistakable classifications are used in a relatively vague and shifting manner. In other words,

although the definition of landscape painting seems to have been dependent on a discourse of the factual and the idealised, where they operated as each other's antitheses, this is not quite the case.

Another representative review also makes the point. The National

Academy's 1852 annual exhibition again elicited from the Literary World a

lengthy meditation on the state of painting in America. Contrasting the art of the Old World with that of the New, the writer exercises some common maxims that rest, once more, on the dualism discussed above. The words with which he expresses them, however, are significant. The critic warns that although 'the feeling of the American' prefers the 'freedom of the grand old forests . . . [and] the energy of the wild life . . . its boundless expanses and the magnitude of objective . . . there is danger in following this feeling, of becoming too palpable in the treatment, of

relying rather on the attractiveness of the scene than on the artist's own

thought and inner feeling'. With regard to his evident preference, that the real and ideal must coexist and balance one another, the critic's advice is plain enough and his definition of the landscape is duly registered. Yet it remains obscure when, for example, the attention to natural fact crosses a

boundary and becomes 'too palpable'. In other words, the material fact is

necessary, and evidently inherently American, but it must be tempered (or is it replaced?) to some degree, and by a vague and unquantifiable use of artistic agency. Perhaps we cannot even be sure that it is the elements of the American wilderness themselves that are the object of the critic's material component. It is, after all, the 'freedom', 'energy' and

'magnitude' that he actually refers to here, and not the forests and wildlife. How, finally, do we distinguish between the feeling of the American' and the artist's feeling? In the former usage, the word stands for the inclination toward the material world, but in the latter it refers to the

opposite. Again, then, we find considerable inconsistency accompanying the use of the dualist categorisation.

In the critical writing from this moment similar examples abound. I

suggest that such prescriptions that discouraged alternatively ? and

contradictorily ? too much attention to detail and too much imagination

are objections to something the ostensibly opposite pictorial tendencies of the real and ideal have in common. Instead of actually opposing one another as the poles in an aesthetic spectrum, they might better be understood at this historical juncture as critical terms that refer, in their

negative usage, to the same objectionable quality ? that which was, in

short, impertinently eye-catching. Both the illusionistic replication of the minutiae of the visible world and virtuoso demonstrations of colour and bold design make an overt appeal directly to the eye. Both were decried for pandering to popular taste, instead of cultivating 'elevated' sentiments. Here we must attend to the words of those who praised In the Woods in order to more fully apprehend why such an appeal to the eye was at this moment disparaged.

There were critics commenting on In the Woods who expressed attitudes

nearly opposite to those we have already seen. They defined the painting as a model for the genre, instead of a dubious study. Significantly, this


28. Literary World, vol. 10, 8 May 1852, p. 332.

29. I am grateful to an anonymous reader for bringing to my attention Kay Dian Kriz's The Idea oj the English Landscape Painter: Genius as Alihi in the Early Nineteenth Century (Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art: New Haven and London, 1997). In Kriz's analysis ofthe construction of artistic genius and its relationship to producing an ideal English identity, it is clear that eye-catching effects in British art production and reception drew as much critical debate as they did in the USA. It is worth noting that, although the specific issues and discursive strategies differed, bold colour and intricate surfaces seem to have suggested a relationship to consumerism and the commercial marketplace to British and American critics alike.



30. 'The National Academy of Design', Putnam's Monthly, vol. 5, May 1855, p. 505.

31. Putnam's, vol. 5, p. 506.

32. Both terms 'substantial' and 'positive' refer to the tangible and factual. The word positive recurs throughout this review and in each case it is meant to distinguish the new art from the old. The reiteration of the term seems to invoke scientific modes of knowing in addition to referring to that which is visually present.

33. Putnam's, vol. 5, p. 506.

34. Putnam's, vol. 5, p. 506.


designation is also based on virtually identical points of reference; the same issues of class, labour and materialism are in play, but from an antithetical

point of view and with a contrasting verdict. Apparently aesthetic

judgements, and definitions of the genre of landscape painting could not occur without these signposts. Putnam's Monthly, like the Times, began its

commentary with musings on the state of the National Academy of Design. It too found the institution wanting, but for quite different reasons. The critic sup-o-ests:

The appellation 'Academy,' assumed by it, is surely a misnomer, for it sustains in nowise the position of an institution for the education of artists. It has had life and antique schools; but those are small parts of the requirements of the art-education, if, indeed, of positive use. It is like the Royal Academy in London, in imitation of which it was organised, simply and solely a society of artists united for mutual benefit [...]

Now, however, that it is at liberty to adopt new arrangements it seems worth while to ask if it can do more than it has done. Artists themselves must indicate the direction in which it can move with advantage to them, but we think that there can hardly be a doubt that, if the Academy were to establish some elementary schools on a liberal plan, free to all, and embracing more than mere antique and life schools, elementary instruction in painting, including the methods of using the materials of Art so eagerly desired by all tyros and really of essential use in giving them confidence in their own ability, classes in perspective, and familiar lectures on the principles of design, particularly for mechanics and those who in their avocations need the application of those principles, the public would cheerfully sustain it in the work.30

The Academy's shortcomings, according to Putnam's critic result from the institution's artistic narrowness, its Royal Academy derived agenda that

emphasises antique and life schools. Nearly the opposite of the Times's

complaint, this writer calls for a 'positive use', stressing the need for a more populist, industrial-oriented curriculum. Such an inversion of the

priorities, and almost the words, of our first critic by the present one continue throughout the review. Whereas 'external Nature' was denounced by the Times as 'mere mechanism', Putnam's calls for just such an emphasis

? and on behalf of the mechanics themselves, who the former had obliquely disparaged. The 'history, poetry, fable, and the inexhaustible treasures of the imagination' of the Times correspond in Putnam's to

'rhapsodies, dreams, and studio vagaries', which, according to the latter, 'will not satisfy a public sentiment accustomed to find in all other things some substantial positive truth'. Note that we are still very definitely dealing with an understanding of art as a vehicle of 'higher meaning'; that which will 'satisfy' the public is, after all, contained within, literally bracketed by, 'sentiment' and 'truth'. However, the content of this

meaning is denominated 'substantial, positive', and corresponding to that which one might 'find in all other things' presumably outside the world of art. And, in fact, this critic leaves little doubt about the nature of these 'other things', noting that 'it hardly matters whether or no the materialism of the times is an error. So long as it is the spirit of the age, Art, to be in any way successful, must carry it out'. A few sentences later he reiterates his point, unmistakably linking his notion of the proper direction for art and art education with the commercial aspect of his moment. 'If [the artists] seek encouragement,' he recommends, 'they must deal in wares the age has need of'.

The antithetical leanings of these two critics persist in their opinions of Durand and his picture. The Putnam's reviewer continues his general remarks, commenting explicitly on what he defines as the old and new




Karen L. Georgi

schools ? a theme that is already evident above in his statements about the

Academy. These definitions form the premise for his review of In the Woods so I will summarise them briefly. Perhaps the most telling aspect of the distinction he draws between the 'old system' and the 'men of present labor' is the opposition of Cole and Durand ? a somewhat unusual idea at this moment. Thomas Cole is classed by this reviewer with Vanderlyn, and

together they are designated as 'pendants of the old system . . . They were not new men ? not American, therefore'. Instead of Cole's usual place as the founder and exemplar of the 'American School' of landscape painting, he is both rearguard and un-American. For the critic at Putnam's, like so many of his peers, these last two terms were meant to be

synonymous. They had, however, not yet been used very often to name Thomas Cole. But I believe the definition of the 'new school' that our writer wanted to construct required this antipathy between Cole and American painting, and Cole and Durand. Again, the new and progressive art, according to this critic, is determined by oppositions that are very similar to those the Times writer used to designate what was proper art ?

and again the difference between the two lies in their preference. Cole 'must be classed', Putnam's reviewer asserts, 'as a sentimentalist, and inclined by both feeling and study to the masters of the last phase of

landscape'. He continues:

For instance, in the 'Youth,' [painting from the Voyage of Life series, Fig. 3] there is not an individual object in the picture which ever had its prototype in the natural world - not a tree, shrub or mountain form is there, which is not palpably a creation of the artist's imaginative brain. With Durand, on the contrary, there are no objects, with the exception occasionally of his cloud forms, which are not actual, real. This makes the distinction between the old school and the new - with that, things were types, and so long as they were understood, it matters not how imperfectly they were expressed; with this they are individualities, with the rights of the individual, and its influence in the general result.37

Instead of lauding the imaginative in art, Putnam's critic belittles it as

imperfect expression and as a form of generalisation that is unrelated to the 'actual, real' world. Worse yet, this manner of painting apparently does not respect individuality. We should not bypass the connection between this 'new school', with its attention to the 'actual, real' 'objects' or 'things' and the 'rights of the individual' ? a conceptual leap that the Putnam's writer renders a near equivalence within the brief space of a few sentences. For him, painting the objects of the material world represents the 'rights of the individual and [his?] influence in the general result'. The new school thus stands as more than a stylistic shift away from imagination toward a putatively factual portrayal of visible matter. It stakes a claim to

being truly American; it is a form of painting that replicates on canvas the official populism of American democracy.

Against this lofty backdrop delineating the new art, Durand is heralded as the 'first among those "men of present labor"'. The phrase in quotes was

evidently intended to reverberate with additional significance for the reader. In the present context, the denomination calls our attention once more to the association (here with positive connotations) of production, class, and an aesthetics of the tangible. Without belabouring the point, we need only return to the question of naming Durand's In the Woods.

Putnam's, as noted, did not share the skepticism of the Times about the

genre of this work. For them the picture was a model for landscape painting. 'Durand appears to better advantage than ever before', they


35. Putnam's, vol. 5, p. 506.

36. Putnam's, vol. 5, p. 506.

37. Putnam's, vol. 5, p. 506.




Fig. 3. Thomas Cole, Voyage of Life: Youth, c. 1838-40. Oil on canvas 27.5 x 22.5 cm. Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Museum of Art, Utica, New York (55.106).

claimed, 'and, if we should select from the whole range of his works one which marks the man, it would be his large picture, "In the Woods'". For this critic, art and its purportedly higher meaning and fundamental value (here inseparable from populist political rhetoric), thus bear an

entirely different relationship to the same aesthetic qualities, which the first reviewer invoked as well. Whereas the first critic was at pains to

separate meaning from both the style and the manual labour implied in the

making of detailed renderings of the material of the visible world, the second insisted that this was precisely where meaning lay.

Thus we seem to have constructed a correlation between a populist, self-proclaimed progressive definition of art and a preference for the careful attention to the objects of the material world. Accordingly, the true landscape painting focuses on the minutiae of the visible nature. The details, however, are not an end in and of themselves; recall that we also saw that 'higher meaning' has in no way been abandoned as the

objective. The relevant distinction rests with the manner of reaching this

goal. For those who shared the opinions of the Putnam's writer, meaning is in the 'actual, real' stulf of the world. Representation (of nature) is thus defined stylistically and ideologically as that which focuses on the

specificity of objects, rendering the visible distinctions in tangible matter in order to give identity to the subject and to confer its power to make

meaning, to have an 'influence in the general result'.


38. Putnam's, vol. 5, p. 507.



Karen L. Georgi

This definition of representation also, to reiterate, seems to be nearly the

opposite of the aesthetic and political priorities that comprise the Times's

conception of art. The elaboration of particularised visual information is not merely a secondary quality in painting for them; it renders the

representation meaningless and denies it the status of art, making it

instead, as we saw above, commodity production. My point, however, is not to construct partisan camps of art writers that might allow us to

identify and contrast progressive and conservative ideologies. The situation is neither so straightforward nor so static. These are not simply questions of style or of the political leanings of one or another faction ? which

were, after all, component parts of a relatively unified dominant class. This

may be part of it. But more specifically, there seems to have been

awareness, on all sides, that the manner in which a painting could or

ought to represent the world was changing. The anxiety showing through in these sharply divided opinions points to a shift in the relationship between visual appearance and the creation of abstract value. The material substance of the world was being put forward as a value in and of itself, as

something that contained significance, or the possibility of meaning. Formerly such significance resided in more abstract, less popularly available media ? such as the learned conventions of painting, for

instance, or the studied subtleties of 'largeness of manner'. Materialism and the corresponding concern over appeals to the eye (again

disparaged in the form of both the overly imitative and overly imaginative) came to the fore as the terms for aesthetic valuation and labelling of

landscape paintings at a moment when similar questions pervaded the broader social and economic spheres. It is certainly the case that a culture of

consumption was at this moment settling in, and that material goods proliferated with some more or less fundamental consequences for individual self-consciousness and social identification, not to mention real economic

prospects and labour conditions. But, we might also identify a much

earlier, or perhaps later, date for this transformation. I do not wish to

suggest, however, that conditions of consumerism were just then a factor, and that their concurrence with Durand's In the Woods explains the painting and its reception. Regardless of when or if we choose a particular time for these changes, there is a continuing thread in American society, a recurring complaint against the influence of materialism and an anxiety about the

ability to read surfaces. We seem hardly to have left it behind yet. However, what we can read in Durand's painting, and the responses it drew, is the

relationship at this moment of art to these factors, and by extension, to the

larger society as well. There is, as noted above, a type of vision that materialism demands; close attention to the details of the surface, to the

objects of the material world, ensures the looker's understanding. Meaning, by such thinking

? whether that be personality, values, class or the

significance of nature ? must be sought in the visible objects. The material surface demanded careful scrutiny as the location of value and identity. It is this manner of vision, and this understanding of the physical stuff of the world that, I believe, the form of In the Woods insisted on.

The two opposing opinions we have read then suggest entirely different

relationships for art to society. The debate we have been looking at

implies that art had some say in the definition of representation in general, or how, in the broader world beyond the gallery, meaning and value would be assigned to visual signs. The question at this juncture was:

should, or should not, art, with its lofty status as a transcendent good,


39. For analyses of the rapid growth of consumer culture and its consequences in mid-nineteenth-century American culture see Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (Vintage Books: New York, 1973), pp. 89?109; Stuart Blumin, '"Things are in the saddle": Consumption, Urban Space, and the Middle Class Home', The Emergence ofthe Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760?1900 (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1990), pp. 138-78; Karen Halttunen, Confdence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle Class Culture in America, 1830? 1910 (Yale University Press: New Haven, 1992); Katherine Grier, Culture and Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-Class Identity, 1850?1930 (Smithsonian Institution Press: Washington, 1989); Martha McClaugherty, 'Household Art: Creating the Artistic Home, 1868-1893', WinterthurPortfolio, vol. 18, 1983, pp. 1-26.

40. Richard Bushman, for example, argues that during the course of the eighteenth century, there was a fundamental shift in which a growing number of moderately wealthy, and even humble, people began to surround themselves with luxury articles meant to demonstrate their refinement. Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (Vintage Books: New York, 1993). This corresponds to the chronological frame suggested by Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J.H. Plumb in The Birth of Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Europa Publications: London, 1982).




sanction by adopting, the mode of vision utilised by the commodity? Could

representation be defined by materialism? That is, would the surface of the visible object be allowed to be meaningful in and of itself; could it be elevated and authorised as the carrier of significance? To answer in the affirmative would also invest the commodity with inherent meaning. Putnam's seems fully to have promoted this view. Although they maintained an overtly populist agenda, they also ? which seems ironic from a

present-day perspective ? asserted that a proper representation entails an

aesthetic of materiality. Art, and all the authority that it carried, was to share the same manner of looking, the same formal priorities, as those

required by the commodity. By contrast, the language of the conservative critics puts them in the role of resisting art's participation in the 'materialism of the age' by insisting on a pictorial vocabulary that checks the power ofthe purely visual, and downplays the significance of objecthood.




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