landscape painting was practiced in America from its founding, but it did not become widely popular until the 1820s and 1830s when artists such as Thomas ColeÑoriginator of the so-called “Hudson River School”Ñpioneered a “national” style of landscape painting that depicted distinctively American scenery allied with almost microscopically close observation of nature. This attitude toward the natural landscape was part of a larger phenomenon that recent scholars have dubbed “landscape tourism.”
Landscape tourism became more popular as the virgin [i.e., pre-European contact] landscape increasingly disappeared: the subjugation of Native American populations, the development of the railroad, and the ever-expanding frontier of new settlement and development made “nature” less remote, safer and easier to reach and enjoy for both artists and tourists. The reverence for nature, therefore, cannot be disentangled from the very forces that were encroaching upon nature and destroying it.
Finally, despite the role of landscape painting in the possession and control of nature, we have identified a powerful cross-current of ecological inquiry built into the very enterprise of landscape painting. This cross-current of inquiry interacted in certain ways with scientific research, but it also broadened the scope of scientific inquiry and humanized it. The painter’s inquiry involved:
The Essay on Impressionist Painting
As I was going down to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art I wasnt too thrilled of going. I tend to think art museums are boring. Whats the big deal about seeing in artist that died before I even born? Then to have to stand to in line waiting, at this point I was really trying to understand why I was here, the only thing I could think of was that I forced to come here and I need a good grade in ...
Close, sustained observation of particular sites, from geology to botany;
An equal emphasis on the subjective experience of natural places, as dynamic, changing environments;
A faith in the interrelatedness of living things and natural systems, in other words, in the modern notion of ecology.
Source
Kirk Savage, University of Pittsburgh: The Case of 19th Century Landscape
