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1. A Condensed History of Landscape Painting We artists live ideally We breed our firmest facts of air: We make our own reality— We dream a thing and it is so. The fairest scenes we ever see Are images of memory: The sweetest thoughts we ever know We plagiarize from Long Ago. —James Whitcomb Riley, “Orlie Wilde” (1916) The fine art of painting landscapes, for the sole purpose of recreating pleasing natural scenery, has been pursued in America for fewer than 175 years. Beginning in the 1850s, the Hudson River School painters created idealized depictions of nature, aesthetically influenced by romanticism. Like their contemporaries , American writers Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) and Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882),the visual artists revered our country’s unspoiled beauty, believing that God was manifested in nature. Reflecting early American exploration and colonization, Hudson River School artists often depicted humans existing in harmony with nature. Paintings by Thomas Cole (1801–1848), the credited founder of the art movement, were the first to feature the Hudson Valley’s splendor and disappearing wilderness , particularly in autumn. After Cole’s early death in 1848, a second generation of Hudson River School artists ventured far from the eastern valley. Superstar painter Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902) painted the far West, and Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900) created colossal scenes of South America.They both became known for their immense realist-style landscapes: “Thousands of people would line up around the block and pay fifty cents a head to view [a] solitary work.”1 Indiana became a state in 1816,but the pioneer survival lifestyle allowed no dallying with creative artwork until the 1830s. “In the early nineteenth century the notion of a landscape was relatively foreign to a farmer, who looked on the land as territory, property, and most of all raw materials.”2 Before that, artist-illustrators accompanying explorers on military or scientific expeditions, like Karl Bodmer (1809–1893) and Charles Alexandre Lesueur (1778–1846), created visual images primarily to keep records of their journeys. The earliest significant artists to permanently reside in Indiana and create landscapes were George Winter (1810–1876) and Jacob Cox (1810–1892). Winter’s works used landscapes as backdrops for his documentation of Potawatomi and Miami Indian lifestyles. Cox, on the other hand, became an accomplished portrait and landscape artist while running his tinsmith business. James Farrington Gookins (1840–1904) and John Love (1850–1880) opened the state’s first art school in 1877.“The Indiana School of Art was a significant Painting Indiana III 4 evolutionary step beyond the quasi-apprenticeship mode of art instruction that had formerly existed.”3 A very different interpretation of the landscape was taking place in Europe. Paving the way for the development of Impressionism were the French painters of the Barbizon School, between 1830 and 1870. Artists led by Theodore Rousseau (1812–1867) advocated painting directly from life,rejecting classical studio landscapes based on epic narratives and religious themes.Jean-Francois Millet (1814–1875) included peasant figures as an integral part of his landscapes , thus shifting his art’s emphasis from rich and influential citizens to those with no social status. A simultaneous group of Italian painters active in Florence, known as the Macchiaioli, also stressed the importance of painting on location. They considered their outdoor work, however, as source material—inspiration for larger works to be painted in the studio. Created primarily as value studies, to emphasizedarksandlights,thesketcheswere“rarely larger then 10" ×15",[and] usually painted on cardboard or wood. Often the artists used the mahogany panels of disassembled cigar boxes as painting supports. These [were] sometimes left unprimed,so the reddish color of the wood [lent] a warm undertone to the painting.”4 The Barbizon School,Macchiaioli,and later French Impressionist painters were adamant that painting should be done directly from nature. Unlike the American Hudson River School artists,who created compositions synthesized from various scenes or images, the French painters stayed true to their on-site subjects, painting what they saw. Rejecting the academic art rules of the time, the first Impressionists in the 1870s were interested in capturing the fleeting effects of sunlight by painting realistic scenes of modern life on location. Instead of concentrating on the rigid lines and contours taught in studio painting, their compositions were built with loosely brushed colors, often thickly applied. As cameras were becoming more portable and widespread, photography “produced lifelike images [albeit only in black and white] much more efficiently and reliably [than paintings].”5...

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