building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

monuments 225 created a picturesque atmosphere, which conjured up the landscape
scenarios portrayed by well‐known American artists from the Hudson River School,
such as Thomas Cole (1801‐1848) and Frederic Church (1826‐1900). The cemetery
represented a moment of reflection, in which man showed his respect for nature
and, at the same time, his thoughts of death and passion for the ancient world. The
reproduction of tombs in past styles (especially Greek, Roman and Egyptian) set in a
seemingly natural, but skilfully designed scenario, offered an opportunity to fulfil
the imaginary scenes of the most famous landscape artists, even though on a
reduced scale.
In this sense, the movement of public opinion linked to American rural cemeteries
appeared as something really innovative, of which Europe had no comparable
examples of intentions or needs, with the partial exception of England. As Thomas
Bender observed, the American “rural cemetery” not only denoted the idea of a
cemetery situated outside the town, according to the romantic conventions of
English landscape gardening, but it also expressed an ideological background “in the
emerging urban culture” 226 . In The Making of Urban America, John William Reps
showed his surprise at the recreational purpose the first rural cemeteries were used
for, but in both the culture of that period and often in current practice, “a visit to
the local cemetery was considered de rigueur for the tourist, and the popular press
carried numerous articles on these romantic burial grounds” 227 . Such ideas were not
applied to rural cemeteries at a later date, but rather they began at the same time:
“a month after the consecration of Mount Auburn, Henry Bellows, in his oration at
the Harvard Exhibition on October 18, 1831, declared that rural cemeteries . Writing in 1849, Andrew Jackson Downing
asserted that thirty thousand persons visited Mount Auburn in a single season.” 228
The trend, which encouraged the construction of new rural cemeteries in the
225 Many monuments were built in the Bellefontaine Cemetery of St. Louis and notables figures were
buried there: William Clark, explorer of the Louisiana Territory, Brig. Gen. Richard B. Manson, first
American governor of California, Thomas Hart Benton, politician, Sara Teasdale, poet. Louis Sullivan’s
Wainwright Tomb (1892) is also to be found here.
226 BENDER, Thomas, “The "Rural" Cemetery Movement: Urban Travail and the Appeal of Nature”,
The New England Quarterly, Vol. 47, No. 2 (Jun., 1974), pp. 196‐211, p. 196
227 Ibid.
228 Ibid., cit. p. 197
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