By Traci Calabrese

Re/Framing the View:

Nineteenth-Century American Landscapes:

By Traci Calabrese, Manager of Donor Relations, New Bedford Whaling Museum

Jasper Francis Cropsey (American, 1823-1900), Sunset on Greenwood Lake, 1877. Oil on canvas. 14 ½ x 24 ½ in. Douglas and Cynthia Crocker Collection. Image courtesy of Christie’s New York.

Drawn from regional private collections and the New Bedford Whaling Museum collection, and supplemented with a few strategic institutional loans, Re/Framing the View: Nineteenth-Century American Landscapes includes works by Thomas Cole, the Peale family group, Thomas Eakins, William Bradford, John F. Kensett, Martin Johnson Heade, Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, Jasper Francis Cropsey, George Inness, Francis A. Silva, Sanford Robinson Gifford, and Edward Mitchell Bannister, among many others.

Without even seeing the exhibition, which runs from October 28, 2022-May 14, 2023, the title, Re/Framing the View: Nineteenth-Century American Landscapes begs the question: how and why are we reframing? What’s missing? What are we not seeing? What was happening in the nineteenth century that fueled the movement to memorialize the american landscape? The industrial revolution in America arguably fueled technological innovation and urbanization to such an extent that the wild, ethereal, natural beauty of the American landscape was itself degraded. Landscape painters of the time, such as Thomas Cole encouraged his peers to get out into nature. He feared that the American wilderness was being swallowed up whole by growth and development.

As we continue our attempts in 2022 to exit a global pandemic, we are at times forced into our homes, behind closed doors. We similarly experience a resurgence, and a new respect, for time spent in nature. Disruptions to the natural environment by manufacturing, industrial pursuits, and commuting to jobs, radically diminished in many previously busy spaces. Animals returned to habitats long compromised, smog dissipated in urban settings, and the environment literally took a breath of fresh air. Humanity, in turn, seemed to collectively embrace

natural landscapes as an escape, a renewal, and an untouched solace for our souls. Returning to our natural environment during a time of collective crisis again begs the question of what crises these artists themselves may have been escaping? By focusing on the natural landscape, were the artists, perhaps, turning a blind eye elsewhere? Re/framing the View is a timely exhibition recalling the beauty of the landscape and the social and environmental cost of acquiring and destroying it.

At first glance, the sweeping vistas and wide-open spaces captured in the art provide a sense of vastness and untouched civility, quiet and solicitude, majestic tranquility. The landscapes are gorgeous renditions of natural beauty with color and light and pleasing compositions. They are beautiful. However, a number of juxtapositions present themselves in the exhibition providing room for thought on the intersections of accepted norms in American culture during the nineteenth century, and by extension, modern social tensions, including gender, race, and environmental impacts. When reading the names of the painters in the exhibition, you will notice that the nineteenth-century American landscapes are dominated by male artists. Tramping around the “rugged,” interpreted “masculine” wilderness, was not acceptable or ladylike, and therefore women were excluded from the art of landscape painting unless working directly with a male counterpart. As represented in the exhibition, societal norms for women at the time were relegated to personal and commercial pursuits that focused on still life painting, maybe printmaking, or maybe the painting or embroidering of objects with local flora and fauna.

The paintings also evoke a sense of ownership over the land. They reflect an acceptance of the destruction of Native American homes, lands, and cultures, as a natural consequence of “our” settlement, expansion, and industrialization. Native Americans present in the paintings are limited, and when “Indians” are included in the landscape they seem passive in their interaction with it. Obviously such a scenario is divergent from the practicality of tribal lives and livelihoods as well as the traditional spiritual relationships many tribes closely held within their natural environments. The placement of “Indians” in American landscape painting of this period feels contextually, almost as an extension of the right of Manifest Destiny, that, as lands now “American” and “ours,” Native peoples themselves became so owned as well. Addressing vibrant Native American lives today, the exhibit includes handcrafted, traditional Native art forms by contemporary Aquinnah Wampanoag artist Elizabeth James-Perry. Perry forces us to consider Native lives in the natural environment preceding Old World arrivals and influences upon New World lands and peoples. She creates forms that enable conversations re-interpreting colonization, settlement, development, and urbanization as affecting tribes all across the continent, and here in Massachusetts.

Re/Framing the View: Nineteenth-Century American Landscapes asks us to consider not only what we are seeing in the landscape, but also what is missing. It asks us to answer this question not merely in what may be missing from nineteenth century American landscape painting, but also what may be missing, excluded, or misunderstood in viewing our landscape environments today.

Evelina Mount, Fuschia, 1884. Oil on panel. 12 x 5.875 inches, The Long Island Museum of American Art, Stony Brook, NY, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ward Melville.