American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States 1820-1880

Ewing, New Jersey, U.S.A.: Princeton Univ Pr. New. 2002. Hardcover. 0691096708 .*** FREE UPGRADE to Courier/Priority Shipping Upon Request *** – – *** IN STOCK AND IMMEDIATELY AVAILABLE FOR SHIPMENT - BRAND NEW, PRISTINE, NEVER OPENED - 284 pages. "None of the domestic cleverness of folk art is evident in American Sublime, a gorgeously illustrated and learned history of nineteenth-century American landscape painting, a sophisticated school rooted in British romanticism and American transcendence. Wilton, of the Tate Gallery, considers the influence of Edmund Burke's theory of sublimity and the surge in scientific development on American painters, while coauthor Tim Barringer, an art historian at Yale, discusses the profound effect on the painters' imaginations of a pristine land free of Western religious, literary, and historical associations. The American "instinct to find spiritual significance in nature" is manifest in the luminous beauty and high drama of the panoramic paintings of Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, and Jasper Francis Cropsey. But even as these painters and their colleagues, including Fritz Hugh Lane and Martin Johnson Heade, celebrated the glory of America, the frenetic growth of the nation transformed the land before their very eyes. By the time Thomas Moran was painting the Grand Canyon in 1892, the "wilderness aesthetic of the landscape painter" had become instrumental in protecting such sacred places from destruction. Wilton and Barringer's commentary is stimulating and important, and the exceptional plates are bliss unadulterated. " (from Booklist) -- with a bonus offer-- .