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19th century AD

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2001 by Alfred C. Harrison Jr.

In the second half of the nineteenth century a number of American landscape painters created works that featured simple, often severely horizontal compositions depicting lakes, rivers, beaches, and ocean, in which realistic transcriptions of the effect of light on atmosphere became vehicles for the expression of spiritual values. These works were executed in tiny brushstrokes, reducing the presence of the artist's hand and enhancing the illusion that the viewer was staring at a real scene. Many of these landscapes featured low horizon lines and generous expanses of sky creating a sense of a vast universe where the human presence played a minor role. A mood of tranquility and repose, the "peace that passeth all understanding," often prevails in these paintings.

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This subcategory of American art was lumped together with other landscapes of the period under the general heading of the Hudson River school until the art historian John I. H. Baur created the term "luminism" to describe it in several important essays in the 1940s and 1950s. [1] Such scholars of the following generation as Barbara Novak, John Wilmerding, and Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. extended the discussion of American luminism into the 1960s and 1970s, leading up to the landmark traveling exhibition created by Wilmerding in 1980 entitled American Light and accompanied by a splendid catalogue. [2] The exhibition introduced luminism to a wide audience and enshrined it as one of the leading cultural achievements of the nineteenth century in the United States.

American Light identified many painters who worked in this style, demonstrating that it was a popular way of painting landscapes, especially between 1860 and 1875. But the focus of the exhibition was entirely on painters living on the East Coast. A survey of early landscape painting in California demonstrates that many luminist works were also done there, both by such resident painters as Raymond Dabb Yelland, Norton Bush, and Charles Donnon Robinson, and by visitors such as John Ross Key and Gilbert Davis Munger.

San Francisco's two leading landscape painters, Thomas Hill and William Keith (1838-1911), were not luminist painters, although Hill did paint small-scale works like Mount Shasta and Castle Lake (Pl. V) that create the tranquil mood of a luminist painting albeit in compositions that celebrate Alpine sublimity. The most important artist to visit San Francisco, Albert Bierstadt, seldom painted luminist works because he favored more dramatic mountain subjects and lighting effects that border on the theatrical. In paintings like The Sacramento River Valley of 1872-1873 (Pl. IV) he comes closest to applying the luminist aesthetic to a California subject. However, the yellow light is exaggerated beyond the luminist canon, where naturalism is the rule.

Norton Bush was the first painter in California to devote much of his work to luminist landscapes. A native of Rochester, New York, he demonstrated an artistic talent as a child and eventually went to study with Jasper Francis Cropsey (1823-1900) in New York City in 1851. Two years later Bush visited the tropics on his way to San Francisco, where he set up his studio. In his early career he painted mainly California subjects, but in 1868 he painted several tropical scenes that sold immediately Gratified by this success, he went to Central America in April 1868 to refresh his stock of tropical images. One of the major paintings that resulted from that trip was View of Panama City (Pl. Viii), which he sent to the Mechanics' institute exhibition in San Francisco in August 1868. The painting (now destroyed) depicted a scene familiar to many Californians who had passed through Panama on their way West. In 1869 the opening of the transcontinental railroad made it unnecessary to travel through the tropics, but Bush' s lush transcriptions of jungle scenery remained popular throughout his career.

View of Panama City has trees framing the foreground in the tradition of the classical landscape founded by Claude Lorrain (16001682) in Rome. This conventional way of arranging the landscape gives dignity to the scene and connects it to a time-honored roster of subjects worthy of being painted. The poetic handling of the early evening light also lifts the rendering above the commonplace. As is often the case with luminist paintings, man is sparsely represented, and the distant city (see P1. I.) is camouflaged for the most part by the enveloping atmosphere. Luminist artists in general curtailed evidence of human activity in their landscapes in order to present nature in a pristine state--as it appeared at the creation of the world. The English romantic poets Words-worth and Coleridge popularized the notion that solitary communication with remote corners of the natural world could cleanse the city dweller's soul of the impurities of everyday life. Contemplation of the wilderness unsullied by civilization was t hought to have significant therapeutic powers. A landscape painting was a vicarious and less arduous way of having this experience. You did not have to swat mosquitoes in the tropics to achieve a Wordsworthian moment. All you really needed was a painting by Norton Bush.

19th century AD

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2001 by Alfred C. Harrison Jr.

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