Angela Miller

Nature's Transformations: The Meaning of the Picnic Theme in Nineteenth-Century American Art

BETWEEN 1830 AND 188o, the five decades that witnessed the development and demise of a native landscape school, numerous American artists painted picnic pastorals. Although the Smithsonian Institutions Bicentennial Inventory of American Paintings Executed before 1914 lists three picnic paintings before 1830, the volume swells after that date; more than fiftyeight works whose titles include the word picnic can be securely dated between 1830 and 188o. The actual number, therefore, is undoubtedly larger. Picnic paintings almost always depicted an extended family or a gathering of friends, including sedately flirtatious young couples, taking a meal in a rural setting. Combining genre and landscape, the picnic theme sentimentalized the stages of family life-childhood, youthful romance, motherhood, philosophic old age-and the pleasures of nature. On one level, the popularity of picnic scenes reflected the then-current fashion for outdoor excursions that were not only physically and

Thomas Cole and Jacksonian America : The Course of Empire as Political Allegory

Thomas Cole (1801–48), is best known for his role in placing the landscape genre in America on a secure artistic and intellectual foundation. Associating the beginnings of landscape art with the concurrent appearance of popular democracy, scholars have generally assumed that Cole shared the cultural and nationalistic premises of the native landscape school that developed under this influence. Other inaccurate assessments have followed, in particular the belief that Coles political sympathies were democratic. To take this for granted, however, is to overlook not only the anti-Jacksonian sentiment that Cole occasionally vented in his journals and letters, but also the veiled political and topical content of his wellknown cycle, The Course of Empire . This neglect of the political content of Coles art is part of a broader tendency to approach American landscape art as a genre lacking social or political content, as a transparent reflection of natures central role in national culture. The reappraisal of such assumptions begins with Cole, whose ideological challenge to the next generation of painters was made in the language of landscape. This challenge will be considered briefly in my conclusion.

Death and Resurrection in an Artist's Studio

Angela Miller In Thomas Le Clear’s Interior with Portraits (fig. 1), two children stand in Sunday dress before a large painted landscape.1 They are being photographed, a fact revealed by the apparatus on the table to the right, whose stooped and hooded operator presents his backside to the viewer. Within the painted backdrop all is misty indistinctness; in front of it we witness a certain awkward formality. The young boy, stiffly posed, stares out at us with unsmiling seriousness. While he nestles his right hand in his sister’s long skirt, he places the index finger of his left hand in his vest pocket in an unrealized gesture of Napoleonic command.2 His rigid posture seems to register the severity of his situation, midway between the nurturing feminine world of home and the demanding responsibilities of manhood. He is probably about seven, the time when most young boys graduated from short to long trousers. The girl, perhaps age ten, strikes the protective pose of elder sister, resting one hand on her brother’s shoulder while grasping his forearm with the other, gently but knowingly locking him into place. Her gaze and body are inflected toward the camera. Outside the realm of the painted backdrop that frames the children, all is picturesque confusion. A crumpled newspaper lies open on the floor; a cane is propped against the chair on the far left next to a man’s hat. An open secretary against the wall reveals a clutter of papers, one sheet resting on the writing surface as if prepared to receive a rushed note. The door into the hallway is ajar, allowing a curious black-and-white hound to enter, nose alertly pointed in the direction of his presumptive master. This peripheral world of motion, hurried human actions, and social comings and goings impinges at several points on the more staged scenario that unfolds at the center of the painting. Two chairs interrupt the backdrop’s fictive space; one of them holds a purse, hat, and scarf, possibly belonging to the children’s mother. The objects to the left of the painting within a painting and on the chair suggest the presence of unseen parents. They may be standing outside the picture frame, where we are also positioned, and the young boy may be looking at them for reassurance. Parents, nervously superintending the proceedings, were by many accounts a perennial, if ineffectual, presence in the photographer’s studio. “Ah, woe is me!” wrote one contemporary familiar with these difficulties. “Who is to silence the baby that screams ever, or still the boy who is never still, or quiet the girl whose rompings are innate? Oh, for some potent drug to harmonize the whole.” Though such extraordinary measures as those illustrated in a cartoon from a British magazine (fig. 2) were not needed for this

Honoring a Range of Voices

American artists, but to allow the reader access to the multiplicity of creative processes through which individuals or groups grapple with ideas and transform them into art forms that speak powerfully to particular people at particular moments in history. I have integrated works in a wide range of media, including architecture, into a single narrative, rather than isolating them in separate media-based sections, in order to convey the interconnectedness of what have been variously described as fine art, folk art, popular art and mass culture, and the built environment within which these cultural products circulate. I have also incorporated the work of Native American artists throughout the book within the context of a critical examination of the processes and effects of European colonization. The land claimed by Europeans on the North American continent was inhabited by many different peoples, all of whom had developed intricate systems of communication that drew heavily on images to express their identity, their place in the world, and their political power. The relationships that grew out of these early encounters between Europeans and Native Americans are complex, and are central to an understanding of the history of the United States-political, economic, and artistic. So, too, are those that developed as a result of the importation of vast numbers of slaves from Africa. Through this book, I join many other scholars in calling for a broadening of our understanding of the multiple traditions that make up this countrys cultural legacy. My own nationality and place of residence-I am a Canadian living in southern California, close to the Mexican border-has also affected the shape of my book. Initially I had proposed a text on the social history of North American art (Canada, the United States, and Mexico), patterned after the courses I had been teaching for the previous ten years. While Thames and Hudson decided to focus on the United States, Framing Amer-

American Expansionism and Universal Allegory: William Allen Wall's Nativity of Truth

ACHILLE LORIAs words of 18891 speak not only to the promise but also to the central paradox of the nineteenth-century myth that the United States was both the child and the parent of history: the redeemer nation could fulfill its historical mission only by transcending the very agencies that had given rise to it. Marking the beginning of a new dispensation, historys most recent republic, although conceived without sin, still bore the burden of the European past. The Nativity of Truth, or The Spirit of the Age (fig. 1; terminus ante quem 1853), a hitherto unpublished painting