The empire of the eye : landscape representation and American cultural politics, 1825-1875.
The empire of the eye : landscape representation and American cultural politics, 1825-1875.
Angela Miller.
Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 1993.
xii, 298 p., [8] p. of plates : ill. (some col.) ; 26 cm.
ND1351.5 .M53 1993
Miller’s book takes as its object of study the group of painters that she terms the “First New York School," but which is more commonly known as the Hudson River School. The work explores, starting with a study of painter Thomas Cole and moving to examinations of the New York-based painters who based their own work on his, how a relatively parochial, regional phenomenon, landscape painting of the Northeast, primarily New England and Upstate New York, came to represent the United States as a whole. Miller sees these artists as, at their cores, exemplars of American nationalism. The bulk of the book shows, through a careful analysis of contemporary art, literature, and other cultural production, how this vision came to be applied to the whole nation, with a particular eye to the racial and sectional tensions surrounding the American Civil War (1861-1865). Miller’s work takes the same dates as Barbara Novak’s landmark 1980 study, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875, a slightly earlier study that also sought to examine these well-known paintings in their cultural context.
Angela Miller.
Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 1993.
xii, 298 p., [8] p. of plates : ill. (some col.) ; 26 cm.
ND1351.5 .M53 1993
Miller’s book takes as its object of study the group of painters that she terms the “First New York School," but which is more commonly known as the Hudson River School. The work explores, starting with a study of painter Thomas Cole and moving to examinations of the New York-based painters who based their own work on his, how a relatively parochial, regional phenomenon, landscape painting of the Northeast, primarily New England and Upstate New York, came to represent the United States as a whole. Miller sees these artists as, at their cores, exemplars of American nationalism. The bulk of the book shows, through a careful analysis of contemporary art, literature, and other cultural production, how this vision came to be applied to the whole nation, with a particular eye to the racial and sectional tensions surrounding the American Civil War (1861-1865). Miller’s work takes the same dates as Barbara Novak’s landmark 1980 study, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875, a slightly earlier study that also sought to examine these well-known paintings in their cultural context.
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