Thursday, September 8, 2016

Hidden in Plain Sight - Symbolism and the Hudson River School, by Thomas J. Illari

Copyright 2016 Hudson Magazine and Tom Illari, catskillcollectibles.com
Courtesy Tom Illari, catskillcollectibles.com


The Hudson River School artists were in search of an art form that would allow them to celebrate that which set America apart from Europe and this they found in the splendor of the American landscape. Over the course of the 19th century there was a remarkable change in attitudes toward nature, discoverable in all the arts, especially literature, painting and landscape architecture. It culminated in the Romantic landscape tradition in Europe and America in the 19th century. It was the golden age of landscape painting marked by a major change in the view of the relationship between man and nature.
The early Hudson River artists searched for the sublime and modified what they saw when they later applied the landscape to their canvases. They viewed the sublime as a manifestation of God’s power, to impress the mind with a sense of awe. They believed that there was a moral purpose for being an artist. Their goal was to recreate, not necessarily reproduce or just copy, what they found in nature. Their belief was that art itself is the process of creation and fundamentally religious. Rather than painting the actual landscape as first viewed by the artist their goal was to create their own allowing time to diminish unnecessary details.  They permitted themselves to embellish on those components of the landscape they wanted to emphasize by adding various elements, symbolism, and at times carefully hidden meanings within their landscapes. In the nineteenth century both the artists and their audiences were aware of the tradition of using symbols and they were fully able to understand and incorporate these into their works.

For example, in Thomas Cole’s series The Course of Empire he rejects the American nationalist pride by predicting its inevitable decline by showing in a series of five paintings the progression from wilderness  (The Savage State) to pastoral (The Arcadian State) to the empire (The Consummation of Empire), it’s demise (Destruction) and the landscape returning to wilderness (Desolation). This series could be taken as a warning that if we do not learn from history we are doomed to repeat it. And perhaps the next time our civilization collapses, it very well could be the last. Cole portrays the inevitable course of the empires of the past that have fallen into corruption, decadence and who brought about their own demise. It is a lesson in five panels outlining the historical course of empire building and a warning of what may be in store for his newly created country.


In Cole’s scene from Last of the Mohicans he uses enhanced geological features including imagery of a large phallic next to a dark cave to expose the sexual tensions in the popular James Fenimore Cooper novel that inspired the painting.

In Cole's painting The Oxbow the painting can almost be divided in half with the left side being an untamed wilderness with a storm passing through.  On the right side the storm has passed and everything is calm. It is an ideal rural scene, but the removal of trees has left scars on the hillside. On closer inspection, those scars are in the shape of Hebrew letters. For the viewer they spell Noah. Looking down, from God's perspective, the same shapes spell Shaddai, or the Hebrew word for God, or Almighty. Is Cole suggesting that the landscape be read as a holy text?
Aside from some of the obvious messaging, many Hudson River School artists used storm imagery that was originally used to represent the dark side of the sublime. However, as the 19th century evolved the storm imagery grew to symbolize civic discord during the civil war and to represent the coming crisis and tension of industrialization and technology that threatened a sanctified landscape.

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