building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

means of transport allowed to come in to contact with these scenes and make them
famous. As a result, a shared desire arose to artistically celebrate these
landscapes. 266
The first steps in this direction were taken by George Catlin (1796‐1872), an artist
who devoted his entire life to the study of Indian culture and life beyond the
frontier. This trend was subsequently confirmed by painters of the Hudson River
School, such Thomas Cole (1801‐1848) and Frederic Church (1826‐1900), who
identified the natural environment as their preferred subject and painted it in a
cultured style, open to academic influence.
Nature became an element of national identity and, as the historian Perry Miller
explained, the United States became “Nature’s Nation”. 267
It was no mere chance that for many years the United States worked on an idea of
mystic union between religion, nature and politics, 268 and proved to be a bubble of
resistance towards accepting Darwin’s theories, presented in 1859 in The Origin of
Species. The Walden Experiment by Henry David Thoreau must also have been
interpreted with the logic of a search for a sincere bond between man and nature.
When Thoreau printed his book Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), in which he
spoke of his life experience in a cabin built in the woods near Concord, he did
restrict himself to drawing up a descriptive account of his adventures. As Lewis
Mumford carefully observed, he was able to look at the natural environment in a
sensitive and refined manner at a time when colonisation had focused its attention
only on those elements of the landscape linked to profit [Figures 133‐134] (search
for places to develop, mines, gold and forests for their wood): “In Thoreau, the
landscape was at last entering into the American’s consciousness, no longer as
266 See CZESTOCHOWSKI, Joseph S., The American Landscape Tradition, a study and gallery of
paintings, New York, Dutton, 1982
267 See MILLER, Perry, Nature’s Nation, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.,
1967
268 LEONARDI, Nicoletta, Il paesaggio americano dell’Ottocento, pittori fotografi e pubblico, [The
American landscape of the nineteenth century, painters, photographers and the public] Rome,
Donzelli editor, 2003, pp.42‐46
170