The transatlantic American landscape : ǂb episodes in an aesthetic and material history (1810-1860)

Abstract

Between the 1810s and 1860s, networks of artists and craftspeople contributed to the visual construction of U.S. scenery over a wide Atlantic space. Circumventing debates about national identity, these individuals produced a new type of pictorial object: the transatlantic American landscape. The present dissertation advances this concept to examine how the idea of U.S. scenery was constituted as much from outside the country as from within it, through constant exchange and reinterpretation between North America and Western Europe (particularly Britain, France, and Germany). It introduces four case studies: the transatlantic productions of a group of German landscape painters in Ohio and Pennsylvania before the Civil War; the transatlantic construction of the antebellum U.S. South as a tourist destination through pictures circulated across the ocean; the role of the media of lithography and watercolor in spreading American landscape imagery between New York, Louisiana, France, and Britain after 1820; and finally, the circulation of scenic French wallpaper in the antebellum United States and the landscape discourses it helped foster. The two major questions tackled by this project are: how did American landscapes and their pictorial representations constitute part of larger transatlantic visual, material, and intellectual cultures in the early nineteenth century? And how did Western European artists and audiences contribute to defining the aesthetics of views of America’s landscapes, both from Europe and in the U.S., while circulating them in a supra-national way? The following research intends to show that circulation was crucial to the construction of discourses about American nature before 1860 and that American landscape art was, first and foremost, an art intertwined with the northern Atlantic World, beyond considerations of national space or style.