Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

effect, a finite spatial termination to the picture, and a suggestion of theinfinite and divine. Luminism became the most effective artistic solution tothe dual American need for the real and the ideal, for science and faith.Fitz Hugh Lane’s Off Mount Desert Island of 1856 is a good exampleof the luminist approach (Figure 4). This Maine coastal scene includes thetypical contrast between a sharply rendered but basically empty foregroundand a firm horizon line surmounted by a radiant, misty wall of clouds.Between these two features, the space seems trapped, as if within a hermeticallysealed shadowbox. Unlike the impressionist style that was soon to beimported from France, Lane’s precisely formed painting does not allow itslight to mingle with the atmosphere and circulate about. It creates a glasslikeplane that is somehow both tangible and intangible. His unusual lightreminds us both of atmospheric realism and of spiritual qualities. Indeed,it is quite possible that Lane, like his contemporary luminist genre painterWilliam Sidney Mount and other artists of the time, may have been involvedwith the popular movements of spiritualism or Swedenborgianism.Figure 4. Fitz Hugh Lane, Off Mount Desert Island, 1856, oil on canvas,Brooklyn Museum of ArtAlthough there are other interesting luminist painters I will notdiscuss, including Mount, Martin Johnson Heade, John Frederick Kensett,Sanford Gifford, and George Caleb Bingham, I cannot leave this topic withoutmentioning Frederick E. Church (1826–1900), the best known Western landscapepainter of the 1850s and 1860s. Cole’s only pupil, Church graduallyturned from the lyric landscapes of the Hudson River School to more epic106