A Brief and Incredibly Incomplete History of American Landscape Painting

Every year I take my kid camping at North-South Lake in the Catskill region of New York State. This park is home of the famous Kaaterskill Falls, a stunning two-tiered waterfall spanning roughly 260 feet. Its magnificent views and proximity to New York City make it one of the most popular outdoor tourist destinations in the region, a popularity it has enjoyed for nearly 200 years.

In 1826 Thomas Cole, the founder of the Hudson River School of painters, completed “The Falls of Kaaterskill,” an evocative and moody painting that contains an important lie. Perhaps all paintings lie to a certain degree but I’d like to hone in on one particular choice made by the artist for our purposes here. The painting is extremely grand. There is an emphasis on the vastness of the landscape, sharpened by the presence of a lone figure, easy to miss on first glance: a Native American looking impressively heroic from the precipice on which he stands. His presence in this picture is the lie; he was added by Cole as a flourish of fashionable and misguided nostalgia. At this time in history you were more likely to see the mostly white (and upper crusty) folk from the city at the Falls than you were to see the people native to its land. In fact, the spot became so popular with tourists from the city that by 1852 a large boarding house and observation deck were built to accommodate them. The Native Americans had been well and fully pushed westward by this point in time.

There is a lot to be said about why this particular lie in this particular painting is meaningful. And a lot has already been said about it by people much smarter than I. In fact Thomas Cole’s estate is currently holding an exhibition that is in conversation with this history. (On view May 2024 through October 2024.) For now though, I’d like to move past this singular painting and into the much wider role the Hudson River School held as America’s ad campaign for Manifest Destiny.

In the early 1800’s, the American colony might generously be described as “Coming of Age”-- it was an awkward teenager, no longer a brand new colony but also not quite grown up. It was during this time that Landscape painting became America’s greatest commercial; used not just as a means to justify the colonists’ claims on the land, but also as cultural affirmation against Europe’s Art Glitterati which had, until that point, effectively refused to acknowledge American art.

Prior to the 19th century, art in America–at least by Old World standards–simply didn’t exist. Though early American furniture, quilts and architecture might reasonably be considered art (I certainly consider them so), Europeans had centuries of marbles, oils, pastels, religious iconography, portraiture, cathedrals; they had Raphaels’ and Vermeers’. It was a history the new Americans decidedly lacked. There was a brief hit of “history” painting for things like Washington Crossing the Delaware but America’s history—again by Euro-centric standards—was too brief to make a meaningfully long run for this genre of painting, and for colonists concerned with national stature, this lack of history cast a long shadow.

But while the colonists lacked centuries of storied history to call on, they did have land, and lots of it. Enter Landscape painting. Manned at first by the Hudson River School painters, it became the zeitgeist of the times; a “declaration of Nationhood” as critic Robert Hughes phrased it, the very rhetoric of expansion. The painters of this time rendered Edenic images of America’s vastness. In an era without photography, landscape painting offered up America’s Great Plains and Grand Canyons, its Purple Mountains Majesty as evidence of greatness, a greatness that would quickly become tourist attractions, industry, and eventually subdivisions. The great paradox of paintings at this time is that many of the painters in this era were conservationists, their paintings seen as timeless largely because human expansion would inevitably alter or destroy their subjects. After visiting the continent, Alexis de Tocqueville supposedly stated “It is the consciousness of destruction, of quick and inevitable change, that gives such a touching beauty to the solitudes of America. One sees them with a sort of melancholy pleasure, one is in some sort of a hurry to admire them.”

And once the art had sufficiently advertised Eden, these painters fell out of favor as “provincial”, “conservative”, and “nostalgic”--terms that are often still applied to pastoral paintings. (There is a fascinating read on some of the later works of the Hudson River School painters, by Maggie Cao, called “The End of Landscape in Nineteenth Century America”.) The Hudson River School was replaced by Ashcan, Regionalism, Precisionism and eventually Abstract Expressionism etc etc. The romanticism of pre-industrial landscapes was too quaint for a nation now defined by its sublimation of the sublime, its insistence on industrial capitalism. For colonizers, the American landscape was never meant to remain pristine, it was territory to be owned and controlled. This was, after all, The American Promise.

I cannot admit a dislike of the pastoral. I have an immense soft spot for “quaint” and “romantic” paintings of the countryside–in fact I work extremely hard on my own property maintaining ornamental and vegetable gardens because I love living in the pastoral. I adore the aesthetic of a clothesline. But I don’t love painting them. In part, it is because of the history I’ve just outlined. Rather than keep with the tradition of idealizing the American landscape, I want to show what humans have done to it. My landscapes are dominated by man-made vistas, objects, or architecture. Straight lines, absurd colors, these are what I’m drawn to as paintings. If landscape painting was once a celebration of grand national landmarks, perhaps now the Capitalist heartbeat of our nation has turned the national landmark into something new; shopping malls, Dunkin’ Donuts, suburbia. Perhaps the function of American Landscape painting is to be conscious of its role in marketing colonialism, capitalism and the ensuing changes to our climate, food systems and the natural resources that were once so abundant. The art critic Robert Hughes wrote in his immensely enjoyable and rather large book, “American Visions,” about the relationship between painters and the American wilderness “…Its God is an American God, whose gospel is Manifest Destiny.”