From Library Journal
The Hudson River School and their successors were the first American artists to create a specifically "American" type of artwork an artwork that celebrated the awe-inspiring panoramas of the untamed American landscape and incorporated deep feelings of national identity. This catalog accompanies an exhibition that travels both to Great Britain and to the United States and includes over 113 stunningly dramatic and truly "sublime" American landscapes. The book is divided into eight thematic sections and includes two scholarly essays. In the first, Barringer (history of art, Yale) compares the tradition of landscape painting in America and Britain, while in the second, Wilton (senior research fellow, Tate Gallery, London) explores the concept of the sublime and the formation of a pictorial language that Americans would come to embrace and identify as uniquely their own. While the essays and catalog entries are well written and informative, providing a geographic and historical context for the artwork, it is the stunning illustrations (including several two-page foldouts) that dazzle the eye and imagination. Recommended for all libraries. Kraig Binkowski, Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
None of the domestic cleverness of folk art is evident in American Sublime, a gorgeously illustrated and learned history of nineteenth-century American landscape painting, a sophisticated school rooted in British romanticism and American transcendence. Wilton, of the Tate Gallery, considers the influence of Edmund Burke's theory of sublimity and the surge in scientific development on American painters, while coauthor Tim Barringer, an art historian at Yale, discusses the profound effect on the painters' imaginations of a pristine land free of Western religious, literary, and historical associations. The American "instinct to find spiritual significance in nature" is manifest in the luminous beauty and high drama of the panoramic paintings of Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, and Jasper Francis Cropsey. But even as these painters and their colleagues, including Fritz Hugh Lane and Martin Johnson Heade, celebrated the glory of America, the frenetic growth of the nation transformed the land before their very eyes. By the time Thomas Moran was painting the Grand Canyon in 1892, the "wilderness aesthetic of the landscape painter" had become instrumental in protecting such sacred places from destruction. Wilton and Barringer's commentary is stimulating and important, and the exceptional plates are bliss unadulterated. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820-1880 FROM THE PUBLISHER
The painters who came to be known as the Hudson River School -- Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Frederic Edwin Church, Jasper F. Cropsey, Sanford Robinson Gifford, and others -- found inspiration in our young country's natural wonders and were the first to paint many of its still-wild vistas. As America was settled and the wilderness receded, their successors, most notably Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, carried their quest for the sublime to the Far West, communicating its breath-taking grandeur in brilliant views of Rocky Mountain peaks and vast canyons. Within a single generation these artists established the dramatic approach to American landscape painting that is celebrated in this stirringly beautiful book. The freshness of their vision, the intensity of their invention, and the energy of their execution were all born of the urgency these artists sensed in the life of America itself. Published to accompany a major transatlantic exhibition, American Sublime rejoices in America the Beautiful as seen in some of the country's most glorious landscape paintings. It contains a fully illustrated catalogue of all the paintings in the exhibition, with more than one hundred color plates, including three gatefolds. Biographies of the artists are included, and thoughtful and elegantly written essays cast new light on their ambitions and achievements.
FROM THE CRITICS
KLIATT - Patricia Moore
Breathtaking is the word for this book. The catalog of an exhibit mounted by the Tate for London, Philadelphia and Minneapolis in 2002, the work is presented first in explanatory essays by Andrew Wilton of the Tate and Tim Barringer of Yale's Art Department. Then follow 99 gorgeous full-color plates, several as double foldout pages. Many of the ten artists whose works are included here are familiar: Cole, Heade, Church, Bierstadt. Some are less so: Durand, Cropsey, Moran. Most have been dubbed members of the "Hudson River School." As the authors note, however, they have all demonstrably contributed to an artistic vision of the sublime, a sense of untouched Eden, of the "wildness" of a wilderness not quite yet invaded by American mechanization. Their images of the American landscape helped to create an idea of nationhood, a sense of the greatness of the continent. Highly recommended for all levels. KLIATT Codes: JSA—Recommended for junior and senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2002, Princeton Univ. Press, 282p. illus. notes. bibliog. index., Ages 12 to adult.
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