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Making the View from Lookout Mountain: Sectionalism and National Visual Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Matt Cohen
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Extract

Recent scholarship in the history of American art has uncovered the deep social, political, and economic context within which specific inividuals invented highly charged (and frequently contested) visions of the American landscape. Drawing attention away from the naturalizing tendency of criticism that emphasizes landscape painting as a reflection of national and transcendental ideals, this kind of analysis has brought new richness to the study of landscapes, weaving political and social history into the criticism of American art. Charting paintings as they function within the constellations of patronage, intellectual history, and reception, these new histories help us understand the cultural work of landscape in the 19th-century United States.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 25 , October 2000 , pp. 269 - 280
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2000

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References

NOTES

I thank Chris Labarthe, David C. Miller, David Steinberg, Robin Veder, Alan Wallach, and Jochen Weirich for reading and criticizing this essay.

1. The work of Alan Wallach, Kenneth Myers, Roger Stein, and many others likewise emphasizes the circumstances and conditions of the production of landscape aesthetics.

2. Miller, Angela, Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 4Google Scholar.

3. McGehee, C. Stuart, “‘The Property and Faith of the City’: Secession in Chattanooga,” East Tennessee Historical Society's Publications 60 (1988): 23–38, 24Google Scholar.

4. Council, R. Bruce, Honerkamp, Nicholas, and Will, M. Elizabeth, Industry and Technology in Antebellum Tennessee: The Archaeology of Bluff Furnace (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 52Google Scholar.

5. Ibid., 54, 65. See also Gaston, Kay B.'s article “The Remarkable Harriet Whiteside,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 40 (Winter 1981): 333–46Google Scholar. For more on early Chattanooga and East Tennessee, see Wheeler, William Bruce and McDonald, Michael J., “The Communities of East Tennessee, 1850–1940: An Interpretive Overview,” East Tennessee Historical Society's Publications 58–59 (1986–1987): 338Google Scholar.

6. Gaston, , “Remarkable Harriet Whiteside,” 335Google Scholar.

7. Council, et al. , Industry and Technology, xi, ch. 3Google Scholar.

8. Ibid., 65.

9. 1860 Census, Hamilton County, Tennessee; Council, et al. , Industry and Technology, 74Google Scholar; and McGehee, , “Property and Faith,” 25Google Scholar.

10. Gaston, , “Remarkable Harriet Whiteside,” 336–37Google Scholar.

11. Bishop, Budd, “Three Tennessee Painters,” Antiques 100 (09 1971): 432–37, 436Google Scholar. For more on early Tennessee artists, see Bishop, , “Art in Tennessee,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 29 (Winter 1970): 379–89Google Scholar.

12. See Myers, Kenneth J., “On the Cultural Construction of Landscape Experience: Contact to 1830,” in American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth Century Art and Literature, ed. Miller, David C. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 58–79Google Scholar.

13. Jenkins, Gary, in Taking the Old Mountain Road (Chattanooga: Goliath, 1994)Google Scholar, and Gaston both discuss Whiteside's suggestion for Chattanooga's name.

14. Quoted in Myers, Robert M., The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 163Google Scholar. For other stories, see Jenkins, Taking the Old Mountain Road.

15. On Italianism in Colonel and Mrs. James A. Whiteside, see Poesch, Jessie J., “Growth and Development of the Old South: 1830–1900,” in Painting in the South: 1564–1980, project dir. Ella Prince Knox (Richmond: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 1983), 80Google Scholar. Poesch's comments on Cameron's work, though brief, are a rare example of a discussion of this painting in a larger context.

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17. John Davis also points out that conversation pieces only gained substantial popularity after the Civil War. While Davis's reading of The Brown Family and its reception is useful, Southern domestic groups by Cameron and other artists cast doubt on some of Davis's generalizations about the appeal of American conversation pieces, given the contrast between Northern and Southern ideologies of commerce, family, and racial morality (“Children in the Parlor: Eastman Johnson's Brown Family and the Post-Civil War Luxury Interior,” American Art 10 [Summer 1996]: 50–83, 52Google Scholar.

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23. Wallach, Alan, “Making a Picture of the View from Mount Holyoke,” in Miller, , American Iconology, 80–91, 80Google Scholar. See Myers, Kenneth J., The Catskills: Painters, Writers, and Tourists in the Mountains, 1820–1895 (Yonkers: Hudson River Museum of Westchester, 1987)Google Scholar.

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25. Wallach, , “Making a Picture,” 84Google Scholar.

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27. Miller, David, Dark Eden: The Swamp in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 11Google Scholar.