Hailed by the Edinburgh Review upon its publication in Britain in 1820 as forming "an era in the literature of the nation to which it belongs," Washington Irving's The Sketch Book (1819–1820) established its author as the first successful professional writer in America. The Sketch Book presents a miscellaneous assortment of stories, sketches, and essays held together by little more than the rambling inclinations of its bachelor narrator, "Geoffrey Crayon, Gent." In his opening self-description, Crayon characterizes himself as "a lover of the picturesque." Having "wandered through different countries and witnessed the shifting scenes of life," he disavows "the eye of a philosopher" and sees himself as a modern tourist and amateur practitioner of the "sister arts," whose verbal "sketches" are meant simply for the entertainment of friends (p. 745).

Crayon's thumbnail self-portrait gives readers a clearer sense of the actual concerns of his book. "My heart almost fails me," he admits, "at finding how my idle humour has led me aside from the great objects studied by every regular traveler who would make a book." He then compares himself to "an unlucky landscape painter, who had traveled on the continent, but following the bent of his vagrant impulses, had sketched in nooks and corners and bye places" while neglecting "to paint St. Peter's or the Coliseum; the cascade of Terni or the Bay of Naples" (p. 745).

No better assessment of the book's appeal could have been anticipated by an author so consistently attuned to the domestic concerns of an emerging middle-class audience. That audience would award The Sketch Book overnight acclaim and enduring influence. In renouncing heroic history while promoting the pastoral and picturesque, helping to shape a taste for the novel, the romantic, the nostalgic and sentimental, Irving (1783–1859) served up a delicious concoction for an increasingly literate and avidly curious public. This public was no longer defined in neoclassical terms—as resolutely masculine, aristocratic, and impersonal. In an age of widening prosperity and vaulting individual achievement, it was now engaged in a quest for cultural moorings. Key to Irving's achievement was his pronounced pictorial sense, bringing to fruition a cultivation of the age-old analogy between literature and painting that had characterized the eighteenth-century British gentleman. Written for a public engaged in capitalist expansion, The Sketch Book allowed its readers to luxuriate in fantasies of a traditional society whose members knew their place, while offsetting class and status anxieties through associations with a landed aristocracy.

Thirty-seven years later, Herman Melville (1819–1891) published "The Piazza." Beneath its rather ornate and mannered surface, the story savagely mocked what had by then become a commonplace of American culture. Melville explicitly linked the cult of the picturesque and the quest for home, only to turn this popular version of cultural ideals and aspirations inside out by deconstructing the very nature of illusion and desire. Taking Irvingesque refuge from the modern urban world, his narrator removes to the Berkshires, purchasing an old-fashioned farmhouse fronting Mount Greylock—a "very paradise of painters." As he notes, "the country round about was such a picture, that in berry time no boy climbs hill or crosses vale without coming upon easels planted in every nook, and sun-burnt painters painting there" (p. 1). But alas, the house is without a piazza, that perfect symbol of middle-class pretensions, and the narrator puzzles over which side of the building to construct one, opting for the northern vista of the mountain over a southern exposure to warm breezes. The piazza is, as he tells us, a surrogate for the pew: love of scenery has become a substitute for religious worship. But Melville also aligns aesthetics with politics: his narrator sides with the French king in the democratic revolutions of 1848.

In any case, once situated before a rather austere and alien prospect, he becomes entranced with "some uncertain object I had caught, mysteriously snugged away, to all appearance, in a sort of purpled breast-pocket" (p. 4). The tendency to see the world as a series of carefully composed and suggestively detailed pictures—central to the picturesque aesthetic—provokes him to embark on an "inland voyage to fairyland." But after toiling up the mountainside, he encounters only "a little, low-storied, grayish cottage, capped, nun-like with a peaked roof," ensconced in a sublime setting, "among fantastic rocks." There he meets a "pale-cheeked girl" named Marianna to whom, after a prolonged silence, he manages only to say, "You must find this view very pleasant" (pp. 8–9).

Her response brings home instead a stark tale of suffering and woe. "Never, never shall I weary of this," she remembers first thinking on coming there. But things are different now. Her subsequent experience has been one of loss, isolation, monotony, and hard labor: "mostly dull woman's work—sitting, sitting, restless sitting" (p. 12). While listening to her, the narrator suddenly recognizes his own abode, far below: "The mirage haze made it appear less a farmhouse than King Charming's palace." Underscoring this moment of acute irony, the girl reveals her longstanding fascination with this vision: "Oh, if I could but once get to yonder house, and but look upon whomever the happy being is that lives there!" In the face of this uncanny revelation, the narrator can only declare, "Enough. Launching my yawl no more for fairy-land, I stick to the piazza. It is my box-royal; and this amphitheatre, my theatre of San Carlo. Yes, the scenery is magical—the illusion so complete." Yet for all his trumped up air of resolution, he must end on a sardonic note, forever after haunted by the girl's face "and many as real a story" (p. 12).

THE DIVIDED WORLD OF THE PICTORIAL MODE

By grappling with the darker, drearier aspects of the brave new world of capitalist expansion, Melville called into question the very home Americans yearned for as a pastoral/nostalgic evasion. For over three decades, what Donald Ringe called "the pictorial mode" dominated American approaches to representation, sugar-coating the pill of progress and undercutting the ideology of the picturesque. Notwithstanding Melville's lonely dissent, the pictorial mode continued to preside over the American cultural establishment for another couple of generations, reaching apotheosis in the publication of the massive two-volume Picturesque America in 1872, under the editorship of the venerable William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878). It would be years before the picturesque turned eventually into the byways of kitsch and camp.

Along with Irving and the novelist James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851), Bryant formed a triad of leading literary pictorialists, canonized in 1971 by Ringe's Pictorial Mode. As Ringe took pains to show, the style clearly derived from a theory of how we know the world promoted by the Scottish Common Sense school of moral philosophy, a staple of American higher education in the early national period. Writers like Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart, widely read by practitioners of the picturesque mode, held that "knowledge of the external world came only through sensation," leaving "nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses" (Ringe, p. 3).

These ideas were derived from the empirical tradition of the English philosopher John Locke. However, Locke's "simple ideas" suggested an underlying uniformity of perspective. Conversely, the Scottish clergyman Archibald Alison's Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790), not only emphasized the role of associations but based perception as well on the particular experience of the reader or beholder of a natural prospect or work of art in shaping the feelings of beauty and sublimity. Just how a viewer reacted to a landscape depended on whether, for instance, she or he had grown up in the country or the city. Crucial to Alison's model of taste was the capacity to relax attention, suspending rational and analytic faculties and leaving behind practical concerns in order to engage in "a kind of bewitching reverie, through all its store of pleasing or interesting conceptions" (quoted in Ringe, p. 5). One entered a wonderfully restorative half-sleep that allowed free play to memory and affect. Pleasure as well as social prejudice thus took the lead in bringing one to moral insight and even spiritual transport.

The pastoral, along with romance, had long upheld this role of pleasure in western literature and art. In associationism it gained a resourceful ally, imparting color and personal affect. Reliance on the presumed universality of sensation promoted by Lockean empiricism would increasingly be challenged by this emerging subjective dynamic. Nonetheless, for proponents of the picturesque, a commitment to the solidity and uniformity of the natural world continued to hold the upper hand, offering a middle ground between the established categories of the beautiful—grounded in symmetry, serenity, and the social virtues—and the sublime, involving a devotion to wild nature, with its dialectic of terror and transport. Natural objects were necessarily linked, after all, to particular ideas and emotions, providing the foundation for a stable notion of correspondence between nature and spirit. Still, if identification with landscape constituted a kind of "home-coming" for Americans, their feelings remained deeply divided between an earnest search for universal truth and the subjective aesthetic response to the particulars of place and time.

NATURAL RELIGION AND THE IDEOLOGY OF THE PICTURESQUE

Here, indeed, was the foundation for a powerful ideology that naturalized a socially privileged way of interpreting nature, enabling devotees of art and landscape to "forget," as Kenneth Myers put it, that they had actually learned the mental skills enabling them to respond to nature morally and aesthetically (in Miller, American Iconology, p. 74). Painting played a central part in this process of naturalizing what had actually been socially constructed. Along with Bryant, Irving, and Cooper, the American romantic painter Thomas Cole (1801–1848), born in England, believed that going into nature afforded the opportunity of listening to the divine monologue. A painting by Cole of a sublime panorama in the Catskills or a poem by Bryant describing a picturesque forest interior turned this religious motive into the leading instigation of landscape representation. Hence Asher B. Durand's (1796–1886) Kindred Spirits pictured Bryant and Cole standing together in the Catskill wilderness in what appeared to be a forest chapel. Painted in 1849, following Cole's death, the scene is replete with the imagery of transcendence, suggesting how these two figures assumed a kind of prophetic vocation, seeing themselves—and widely recognized in turn by the public—as truth tellers. Bryant could not have been more explicit about this visionary capacity in his funeral oration for his friend: "The paintings of Cole are of that nature that it hardly transcends the proper use of language to call them acts of religion." And the connection to the character of the artist is naturally invoked, for these paintings "never strike us as strained or forced in character; they teach but what rose spontaneously in the mind of the artists; they were the sincere communications of his own moral and intellectual being" (quoted in McCoubrey, p. 96). In this view, not only was the painting a projection of the artist's genius, but it made landscape the privileged "expression" of moral and spiritual truths. Cole said of waterfalls, for example, that they present both "fixedness and motion—a single existence in which we perceive unceasing change and everlasting duration." Hence "The waterfall may be called the voice of the landscape" (quoted in McCoubrey, p. 105).

But there was another side to this quasi-religious aesthetic. These figures promoted the pictorial mode as a blueprint for society in general. Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight, British aestheticians writing at the end of the eighteenth century, had defined the picturesque as a concordia discors, or harmony of discords, reconciling liberty with order. American popularizers of the picturesque further conflated aesthetics with politics by associating its mixture of rough and irregular features with the new middle-class effort to balance communal need with an increasingly assertive self-interest, thus reconciling the Jacksonian ideal of the self-made man with the requirements of social stability. For the more conservative members of American society, the all-out battle for wealth and status seemed to threaten all vestiges of traditional order and religious authority; for them the picturesque aesthetic offered a way of containing the explosive force of competitive capitalism.

MARKET REVOLUTION AND WARNINGS OF APOCALYPSE

For Cole in particular, the American enterprise appeared to teeter on the brink of apocalypse. As with others still tethered to more traditional ways of seeing the world, the artist believed that history conformed to a continual cycle of rise and fall. The modern idea of progress as a continual upward movement had not fully taken hold. Cole's monumental series The Course of Empire, completed in the late 1830s and commissioned by the New York grocer Luman Reed, charted the development of an imaginary civilization (clearly Roman in appearance but in fact a thinly veiled allegory of the United States) from wilderness to pastoral to empire. But in the final two panels of the five-piece sequence, this proud civilization first succumbs to destruction by barbarian hordes, then undergoes nature's inevitable act of reclamation in a vision of Desolation that pictures a single column, surrounded by ruins, circled and entwined by vines and tendrils and seen by moonlight. Cole's redolent image of loss and longing resonated with a host of literary examples that manifested not a triumphant but an apocalyptic destiny for the United States, warning Americans in the age of the common man of the dangers of unbridled materialism and imperialistic pride. Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "The Ambitious Guest" (1835), Cooper's novel The Crater (1847), and even Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839) reflect this pessimism about the consequences of capitalism and democracy, the fear that, in an age of exuberant boundlessness, people could lose their moral bearings.

Cole's extraordinary allegory of inevitable corruption and destruction, coupled with the promise of redemption, was embedded in his very vision of the landscape itself. Typical of this dual message is Landscape with a Dead Tree (c. 1828), where the canvas is split into light and dark halves, suggesting a Manichaean struggle between sunlight and storm. The moral emphasis of this dramatic arrangement extends to the blasted tree in the foreground, organizing the entire composition as both a framing device and a way of accentuating the scene's air of contentiousness. The tree serves as a memento mori, or reminder of death; rooted in the earth yet seeming to reach toward the spiritual realm, it encapsulates the human condition, infusing the entire scene with a terrific energy. The sublime hurtle of space the painting depicts suggests the possibility of salvation through escape from the cycles of nature.

TOWARD A PASTORAL BALANCE OF NATURE AND CIVILIZATION

The far quieter images of picturesque prospects Cole increasingly turned to in the 1840s brought his audience back to their moral foundations in a world in which nature and civilization achieved an ideal balance. As early as 1823 James Fenimore Cooper had employed a version of this "middle landscape"—a blend of raw nature, cultivated land, and human habitations—in the opening of The Pioneers, the first of the Leatherstocking Tales, to guide his audience's understanding of the proper relationship to nature that must be forged for the American enterprise to succeed. The opening description of the novel anticipates its thematic concerns as a whole. Codified in the panoramic vision offered here—taking in all at once the course of civilization from sublime wilderness to picturesque harmony and pastoral promise—were the efforts of American elites to come to terms with the processes of modernization they themselves were advancing through the many agencies of the marketplace. These included the subjugation of nature through technology and industrialization, the rise of urban life, and the emergence of class consciousness and class conflict.

Moreover, in the works of Cooper as well as Cole we detect some of the earliest versions of environmental and preservationist thinking in the United States. Scenes of the White Mountains, the Berkshires, and the Catskills—the very sort, no doubt, painted by the landscape painters surrounding Melville's narrator in "The Piazza"—proliferated over the next several decades, taking on a deepening aura of nostalgia and idealization by the post–Civil War period. Where Cole's early work had been a warning to a nation he saw as in danger of succumbing to its own hubris, the work of his followers tended to turn apocalypse into millennium, the rise and fall of empires into progress toward perfection, hence testifying to the growing sense that the United States was an exception to the historical rule: rather than decaying, the country was thought to be flowering in the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. Asher B. Durand's grandiose canvas Progress (1853) stands along with great works of Frederick Church (1826–1900) like The Heart of the Andes (1859) and Niagra Falls (1867) as the climax of this confident vision of the course of American civilization. In a single sublime panorama Durand's painting skillfully orchestrates the unfolding of New World history from virgin wilderness to the prospect of a prosperous urban-industrial order, still embosomed in nature. The shift from Cole's Course of Empire series to this brilliantly unified image reflects a growing acceptance, clearly evident by the 1850s, of the new market economy and all it entailed.

IDEAL REPRESENTATION AND THE DARKER VISIONS OF AMERICAN LIFE

Meanwhile, the deeper, darker fissures in the American cultural landscape were to be noted only by Melville and a few other intrepid souls. As for American art, there is scarcely a dissonant note to be heard. Painting seems to have largely fulfilled its traditional function (initiated in the humanism of the Renaissance and renewed in neoclassicism) of reinforcing prevailing attitudes through idealization rather than offering critique or subversion—except that now such idealization went hand in hand with painting's ready commodification, as members of the rising middle class became the primary patrons of artists, buying smaller landscapes and genre works for their parlors. The extraordinary demands upon laborers made by the expanding capitalist economy are scarcely to be detected in American genre paintings portraying aspects of everyday life. While southern apologists for slavery might occasionally come up with images of northern "wage slavery," these were confined for the most part to such ephemera as political cartoons. At the same time, northern artists were capable of portraying chattel slavery through the pastoral iconography of benign paternalism.

Melville's dark and foreboding vision of American society is rivaled in the 1850s by only one visual artist, David Gilmore Blythe (1815–1865), of Pittsburgh. Blythe's uncompromising images of street life and his portrayal of urban con men and hard-bitten urchins, drawing heavily on the loose style and satiric characterization of seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish artists like Adriaen von Ostade and David Teniers the Younger, present a world of anger and aggression, misplaced ambition, stupefying poverty, and anomie. The artist's scenes of everyday life in the Pittsburgh of the 1850s and 1860s stand out in stark relief against the mainstream of American antebellum genre painting, including the work of Francis W. Edmonds (1806–1863), William Sidney Mount (1807–1868), George Caleb Bingham (1811–1879), William Ranney (1813–1857), Lilly Martin Spencer (1822–1902) and Richard Caton Woodville (1825–1855) among a host of others. These genre painters relayed the amusing foibles and fatuities as well as lingering folkways of various American character types. Occasionally concealing political commentary, irony, or sarcasm, they nevertheless steadfastly uphold the optimism of the dominant ideology of the self-made man. As such they were an easy complement to the pastoral and picturesque vision shaping the antebellum American landscape tradition, often expressing an underlying nostalgia for a way of life rapidly passing away.

A similar set of tendencies was emerging in certain strains of local color writing, which found one important source in Harriet Beecher Stowe's (1811–1896) stories of New England village life, including The Minister's Wooing (1859), Oldtown Folks (1869), and Poganuc People (1878). In writing Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Stowe found that her vocation was "simply that of a painter," her object being "to hold up in the most lifelike and graphic manner possible Slavery, its reverses, changes, and the Negro character, which I have had ample opportunity for studying." As she realized, "There is no arguing with pictures and every-body is impressed with them, whether they mean to be or not" (letter to Gamaliel Bailey, 1851). The pictures she drew in her later work on small-town New England life were far less melodramatic than those that transformed Uncle Tom's Cabin—Eliza's escape with her little boy across the ice-choked Ohio River, the death of Little Eva, Tom beaten to death while praying for the forgiveness of his persecutors—but they too were certainly effective in engaging an audience conditioned by the vivid and detailed sketches of Washington Irving and the pastoral evocations of village life that were such a familiar theme in American genre painting.

Just how the conventions of the picturesque and pastoral were carried over into the representation of everyday life and functioned to conceal the conflict-ridden nature of American society is evident in Durand's Dance of the Haymakers (1851), a charming blend of landscape and genre that depicts a paternalistic agrarian community in upstate New York. The festivities, benevolently watched over from a respectful distance by the landowner and his wife, are reminiscent not only of the familiar vision of happy darkies dancing under the moonlight outside their quarters in the plantation South but also revealingly conjure up association with European peasant society. This reassuring image stands in blithe denial of the condition of virtual serf-dom American farmworkers had been reduced to in the Hudson River valley only a decade and a half earlier by the enormous estates owned by such "patroons" as Stephen Van Rensselaer III, the Schuylers, and the Livingstons. The so-called rent wars of the 1840s, in which the "serfs" rose up against their "masters," had finally broken the back of this oppressive system.

In contrast to the blatant idealization and denial of social realities exercised by Durand and many other genre painters from the 1830s into the post-bellum period, Blythe offered an uncompromising look at the darkest propensities of human nature, unleashed by urban poverty and degradation. Still, his apparent focus on human nature—betokening an innate conservatism—fell well short of the powerful ideological analysis of American society and its capitalist economy advanced by Melville in his works of the 1850s. In understanding these issues in systemic rather than strictly individual terms, Melville's analysis, albeit fictional, compares with that of his near-contemporary, Karl Marx. And as for landscape representation, Melville's trenchant attack on picturesque and pastoral conventions—as exemplified not only by "The Piazza" but also by "The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles" (1855)—may find its only clear painterly analogue in the work of Martin Johnson Heade (1819–1904), an artist whose vision took on definitive form in the 1850s and 1860s. Heade's landscapes, such as Approaching Storm: Beach near Newport (1865), and his scenes of jungle and swamp, such as Brazilian Forest (1864), herald a new tough-minded ethic that sweeps away all romantic sentiment about nature, paralleling the strenuous antagonism toward the wilds of North America that marks the heroes of the Boston Brahmin Francis Parkman's histories of New World exploration and conquest. Gone is the "rhetoric" of the picturesque and sublime, the literary attributes of drama and oratory, poetry and anecdote, biblical typology and moral allegory, that characterized Hudson River School painting. The commitment to the visual formulas of "character" and "expression," the heroic and hyperbolic style, indeed, all the anthropomorphic qualities imposed on the landscape by the pictorial mode here recede, so that the alien and elusive aspects of nature, now closely observed in all their transitoriness, can come to the fore. Heade's visions of nature bifurcate into the unabashed sensualism and taut formalism of his haystack series, on one hand, and the often unnerving ambiguousness and sometimes outright weirdness of his beach scenes. A work like Becalmed, Long Island Sound (1876) evokes the "dumb blankness, full of meaning" of Ishmael's white whale, the sense of a lurking menace that continually fades and reemerges in the beholder's perplexed consciousness.

THE QUESTION OF AMERICAN "LUMINISM"

From the 1960s on, a number of scholars of American art designated artists like Heade and the Gloucester, Massachusetts–based painter Fitz Hugh Lane (1804–1865), as well as John Kensett (1816–1872), Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823–1880), and others as "luminists." Luminism was a term taken up most notably by Barbara Novak in her influential American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience (1967) and solidified into a movement in the 1980 National Gallery of Art exhibition catalog American Light: The Luminist Movement, 1850–1875. Luminist paintings are noteworthy above all for the seemingly palpable presence of light diffused throughout the canvas, enveloping everything in a uniform glow that may in certain cases appear numinous or foreboding. As Novak first argued, the artist's presence in luminist paintings is expunged in the collapse of established visual hierarchies—that is, the sometimes unsettling optical effect of giving equal emphasis to every part of the picture plane that is further stressed by the airless atmosphere, minute brushstroke, and glistening surfaces of these works.

There is much to be said for luminism as a pervasive, largely unsystematic tendency not only among American artists during the mid-Victorian period but abroad as well. It makes particular sense in contrasting certain landscape painters like Heade and Lane with artists like Frederick Church and Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902), whose grandiose visions of American and foreign landscapes in the same period extended many of the nationalistic pretensions of the Hudson River School into an imperialistic and operatic mode. Over the years, however, the term "luminism" has lost a good deal of its cachet. Despite Novak's ingenious attempt to link it to New England transcendentalism, art historians were simply unable to tie it down to a consistent set of formal features that could be convincingly correlated with cultural and ideological trends. In order to grasp its significance, we have to look deeper into the underlying dynamics of American culture.

For one thing, the shift away from religious and moral concerns characterizing earlier generations of landscape painters toward a pronounced formalism conveying distinct psychological reverberations—a movement paced by growing interest in exotic environments like the polar regions or the jungles of South and Central America or in what had traditionally been called "desert" places—takes place at a number of levels in American culture from the 1850s and 1860s on. Heade's version of such "symbolistic" painting compares with the more overtly symbolic and obsessive images of Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847–1917) and Ralph Blakelock (1847–1919), working closer to the end of the century. Moreover, Heade's haystacks offer an interesting counterpart to the haystacks of Claude Monet in their preoccupation with changing light and weather effects, which contributed to the unraveling of the old "sister arts" alliance, based on the notion that literature and art were analogous forms of representation. This unraveling took place as effects relaying inward states of mind began to preoccupy painters far more than the traditional focus of art on heroic human events, portrayed in a "high style" of history painting originating in the Renaissance and revived in neoclassicism. The emerging modernist idea that all art should become a law unto itself, much like music in its disconnection from political, social, or moral concerns, was especially evident in the stylistic innovations emerging in Europe during the second half of the century—beginning with the Barbizon School of painting and extending to impressionism and tonalism. From the 1850s on, increasing numbers of American artists went to Europe to study painting, falling under the influence of the latest styles.

THE BOSTON AESTHETIC TRADITION

Such tendencies had actually long been present in American painting, stemming in particular from the work of the painter-poet Washington Allston (1779–1843). Allston stood as nothing less than a fountain-head of the distinctive New England aesthetic tradition. Born into the South Carolina "rice" aristocracy and educated in Newport, Rhode Island, and at Harvard, he returned permanently to Boston in 1818 after establishing his career in England as a history painter. Once home, he became his generation's leading "man of genius," the primary conduit to his contemporaries—especially the nascent Boston Brahmin set—of romantic ideas (above all those of his good friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge) in the nearly two decades before Emerson delivered his epoch-making essay Nature (1836). Allston's promotion of romantic theory, though alloyed with certain conservative elements, became a catalyst of change against the dominant empirical model of reality encoded in the pictorial mode. Crucial to his transformation of pictorial style was Coleridge's "coalescence of subject and object," a romantic epistemology that decisively moved visual art away from a preoccupation with mimesis into a world of symbolism and romance.

Accordingly, Allston pushed beyond the longstanding sister arts tradition in which the "heroic" moments depicted in history painting ensured its place at the head of the hierarchy of artistic genres. Allston recast the ideal but essentially imitative subject matter of "monumental" biblical, mythological, or historical events into expressive, psychologically charged forms. The artist's later paintings—"cabinet" works for the most part, including ideal landscapes and portraits—evoked elusive moods and soulful states of mind through atmospheric effects conveyed by the visual and tactile qualities of the paint itself (e.g., color, light, and facture or paint surface), so that they challenged his contemporary New England audience to develop new ways of seeing, experiencing, and thinking about the world. The artist's admirers distilled new moral values and civic ideals from Allston's work, which also furnished them a shared form of inner experience. Serving as a medium of truth between one beholder and the next by way of the material medium of the painting or text, the alembic of the poet or artist's imagination gained priority over conventional meaning or didactic intent. The timeworn topoi of art thus gave ground to a cult of genius, the collective pursuit of originality and personal freedom.

As beholders of Allston's paintings became aware of how meaning was inextricably tied to differences in media (and content to form), they reconfigured the age-old analogy between the visual and the verbal that lay at the heart of the sister arts ideal. As a result, iconography, the conventional connection of motifs with themes and of images with concepts that had constituted the core of the classical doctrine of ut pictura poesis ("as a painting, so also a poem"), inevitably receded in importance. Now beholders tended to be stirred less by what was represented than by how it was imagined. The "poetic" responses of those beholding paintings like Allston's Moonlit Landscape (1819) mapped new areas of experience for which music stood as the dominant figure, specifically because of its nonrepresentational character.

Hence, while many cultural figures in Boston lamented Allston's failure over a nearly twenty-six-year period to complete his "masterpiece," the immense history painting Belshazzar's Feast, the influence of his personal example, aesthetic ideals, and "musical" reveries went much further. For not only did the artist exemplify the failure of the old sister arts analogy and all it stood for, as epitomized by his titanic struggle with Belshazzar's Feast; he fundamentally shaped the religion of art of such figures as Elizabeth Peabody, James Jackson Jarves, and Charles Eliot Norton, while looking forward to the modernist formal experimentation that blossomed at Harvard around the turn of the century and involved such figures as William James and Gertrude Stein, George Santayana and Wallace Stevens. Allston's later art thus instigated for an emerging New England elite the very shift in center of gravity his old friend Washington Irving had accomplished for a new middle-class readership. Unlike Irving, however, whose writings were steeped in nostalgia and grounded in eighteenth-century British models, Allston's contribution to American literary and artistic representation—for all its grounding in tradition—looked forward to twentieth-century developments.

See also Americans Abroad; Labor; Landscape Architecture; Nature; Philosophy; Romanticism; Slavery; Transcendentalism; Wilderness

David C. Miller