Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

managed to transfer the heroic aims of traditional history painting to theart of landscape.Cole seems to have been largely successful in disguising from hispatrons his true idealistic, nonrealistic interests and methods. His oftensweeping landscapes present an ordered, serene, balanced world governedby a benign Creator (who is nonetheless immanent in His creation). Cole’scompromise solution was taken up by a number of other succeedinglandscape painters who are referred to collectively as the Hudson RiverSchool—Asher B. Durand, Thomas Worthington Whittredge, and JasperFrancis Cropsey, among others of the first generation. Their collective stylewas famously characterized bycritic James Jackson Jarves as“idealizing in composition andmaterializing in execution,”whereby they recomposeddetails of their sketches sothat “though the details ofthe scenery are substantiallycorrect, the scene as a wholeoften is false.” Graduallya few of the Hudson RiverSchool painters—especiallyDurand—broke away fromCole’s formula to let thecompositional structure oftheir pictures take shapefrom the components of alandscape themselves (Figure3). By the mid-1850s, Durandadvised younger artists tostudy nature, not the work ofother artists, to learn to paintlandscape.Figure 3. Asher B. Durand, The Hackberry Giant, 1864,oil on canvas, Yale University Art Gallery,New Haven, CT.LuminismThe national predilection for the specific and recognizable reachedits greatest but most paradoxical expression in the peculiarly American styleof painting known since the 1950s as luminism. This approach is usuallyassociated with landscape painting (as a kind of further development of the104