[In the following essay, Stula examines Cranch's career as an artist who successfully translated Emersonian philosophy and Transcendentalism into a visual medium.]

In September 1841—just six years after completing his studies at Harvard Divinity School—the young Unitarian minister Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813-1892) confessed to Ralph Waldo Emerson: “I become more and more inclined to sink the minister in the man, and abandon my present calling in toto as a profession.”¹ Cranch's inspiration to abandon the ministry stemmed from his having “very vigorously” taken up landscape painting. Today, however, Cranch is best known as a poet linked with the New England Transcendentalists; that his involvement with the new philosophy led him from a fledgling career as a Unitarian minister to a career as a landscape painter is seldom considered.²

Despite the recent interest among literary historians in Cranch as a disciple of Emerson, his career as an artist has not been recognized and his paintings have received almost no attention. Perhaps this lack is partially due to the fact that the majority of Cranch's surviving paintings remain hidden away in private collections. Also responsible, however, are suggestions by scholars that Cranch was a dilettante. The scholarship of American Transcendentalism, greatly influenced by Perry Miller's The Transcendentalists: An Anthology (1950), has unfortunately accepted Miller's pronouncement that Cranch was one of “the most futile and wasted talents. … [H]e gave up the pulpit, not … to take on serious work, but to become, by deliberate intention, a dilettante.”³

Clearly this was not the case. Christopher Cranch considered painting his “chosen life profession,”⁴ and during his forty-five year career as a landscape painter, he met with success. He was elected “Academician”—the highest rank an artist could attain—at the prestigious National Academy of Design in New York. Along with fellow Hudson River School artists, he contributed to major American exhibitions, very often to critical acclaim.⁵ Cranch was also among an elite group of Americans in Paris in the 1850s to gain entrance to the highly competitive Salon; notwithstanding the formidable competition and absence of any connection to the French atelier system, he succeeded in having his American Sunset hung “on the line.”⁶ He exhibited at three Paris Salons as well as at the 1855 Exposition Universalle. In addition, Cranch wrote extensively on the role of art and the artist within the context of Transcendentalism; these writings comprise a coherent theory of art.

Despite his successes, Cranch's name is quite unknown among art historians today. Perhaps we may blame Cranch himself for not assuring his fame: in Henry James's words, it was not in his nature “to emphasise or insist.”⁷ Cranch's diffidence, more than any aesthetic qualities or deficiencies in his paintings, worked to insure his obscurity. Cranch was in fact a gifted painter. Possessed of a receptive mind, he was able to give voice to a wide range of ideas current in the philosophical climate of nineteenth-century America, of which Emersonian Transcendentalism was a significant part.

We are thus faced with the need not merely for revision, but for an initial consideration of Cranch as an artist who was a Transcendentalist. Cranch was the only New England Transcendentalist who painted and his landscapes readily lend themselves to a reading of Emersonian philosophy made visual. His most intense association with Transcendentalism extended into the late 1840s, a period which coincides with a fruitful time in his career as a painter. These paintings must be viewed in the context of his Transcendental interests.⁸ While Cranch's well-known caricatures of the late 1830s and early 1840s provide us with the most explicit link between Emersonian philosophy and his landscape paintings (for in drawing these caricatures, Cranch explored the visual potential of Transcendental ideas), only his paintings will be treated here.⁹

This essay will grapple with the question of what constitutes a Transcendental painting, if indeed such a thing exists. Many scholars have accepted luminist paintings (such as those produced by the American artists Fitz Hugh Lane, John Frederick Kensett, Sanford Robinson Gifford, and Martin Johnson Heade) as visual corollaries to the writings of Emerson and, by extension, to Transcendental philosophy.¹⁰ The relationship of luminism to Transcendentalism, however, is tenuous.¹¹ Instead, I will propose that Christopher Cranch, rather than any of the luminists, is the more appropriate link between American landscape painting and Transcendental thought.

Cranch's first career was in the Unitarian ministry. Upon graduating from Columbian College in 1832 he was confronted with having to choose between the three “learned professions.” Settling on the ministry, he enrolled in Harvard Divinity School along with John Sullivan Dwight and Theodore Parker and graduated in the summer of 1835. Although Cranch was never ordained, he set out as a supply preacher on the eastern seaboard, an undertaking that involved substituting for the permanent preacher at various parishes. Despite an inborn diffidence, Cranch became acclimated to preaching. During his first year he was exhilarated with his new career: “I have had some most glorious moments in the pulpit, moments which have carried with them an excitement I do not remember ever to have experienced elsewhere, or ever so deeply.”¹²

Cranch's exhilaration was short-lived. Experiencing doubts as to his suitability for the Unitarian pulpit, he complained: “I cannot forget myself. … Nothing goes from me that has not passed under the eyes of self. … I am not free enough.” His journals from these years are consumed with pledges to improve himself, to be bolder: he realized that his inborn reserve and diffidence “keeps me again and again silent.”¹³ Increasingly, the Unitarian ministry proved inhibiting. While his thoughts still flowed on paper, he had difficulty speaking publicly. He found himself virtually unable to preach.

The problem lay in what he termed his lack of “spontaneousness,” and the cure, he decided, was to be found in the West. Encouraged to travel to St. Louis by his cousin William G. Eliot, he commenced his ministry at large in 1836, substituting first for Eliot and then for James Freeman Clarke in Louisville. Cranch was especially content with his situation in Louisville, for he was able to combine preaching with his love of writing, which he did as contributor to, and substitute editor of, The Western Messenger. In fact, he was so satisfied that he considered permanent settlement in the West and even suggested that Clarke ordain him. Three months later, however, Cranch was once again on the road and in February of 1839 he returned permanently to the East.

Before heading west, Cranch had some insight into the “new views” of Unitarianism, but it was during his years in the Ohio Valley that he blossomed as a Transcendentalist. Cranch and Clarke had known each other briefly as students at Harvard Divinity School, but in the West Cranch discovered in Clarke a soul sympathetic to those liberating views that had been labeled “Transcendentalism.” Self-doubt and dissatisfaction with his career had been exacerbated by the restrictions that the Unitarian ministry placed on him. It is not surprising that by 1838 Transcendental precepts consumed Cranch's language; by 1840, recognizing that his theological views had undergone a complete metamorphosis, he burned twenty-four sermons and believed “others will follow before long. They are old clothes. I feel myself too large to get into them again. I do not stand where I stood a year ago.”¹⁴

Transcendentalism was a Romantic impulse. By the 1830s Unitarianism had lost its “emotional appeal” for many of the younger generation. Young Christopher Cranch wanted to trade dry, rational Unitarianism for something “more satisfying to the soul,” something that would allow him to express his religious views freely.¹⁵ Initially he sought emotion and intensity. To appreciate the wonder of God's creation entailed breaking away from convention and routine—what Thomas Carlyle called “Custom.”

Cranch credited his rapid conversion to Transcendentalism to two primary influences: Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson.¹⁶ He read Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (1836) and was most inspired by the religious pantheism he encountered in the chapter “Natural Supernaturalism.” There Carlyle encouraged a transcendence of mundane appearances in order to recognize the miraculous in nature, even when “Custom” persuades us that “the Miraculous, by simple repetition, ceases to be Miraculous.” Cranch first read Emerson's Nature (1836) shortly after it was published, and for him it was an eye-opening experience which he likened to a sunrise. He would re-read Nature several times over the course of his life. But it was Emerson's “Divinity School Address” (1838) that “drew the dividing line between the old and the new school of Unitarianism” and defined Transcendentalism for Cranch. He wrote of Emerson's address: “To some of my contemporaries it was dangerous heresy, to me it was a gospel of truth.” Even though some considered Emerson's doctrines heretical, as “downright atheism, mysticism, or perhaps nonsense,” Emerson remained for Cranch the “master mind of New England.”¹⁷

While Cranch was not as radical in his views or as outspoken as Emerson, he did encounter opposition as a result of his ties to Transcendentalism.¹⁸ In the spring of 1840, when Cranch delivered the commemorative poem he had written for the Quincy, Massachusetts, bicentennial, he publicly pleaded the case of Transcendentalism.¹⁹ In so doing he attracted the attention of several prominent Quincy citizens, including his father's cousin John Quincy Adams. By June, news of Cranch's Transcendental tendencies reached his father, William Cranch (1769-1855), the chief justice of the Circuit Court in Alexandria, Virginia, and Christopher had to defend his radical new views.

In his letter to his father Cranch played with semantics, avoiding any commitment to that dangerous term “Transcendentalism,” which he craftily assigned to the German school:

I know very little about this system of philosophy. … of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, etc., which is what I suppose to be the Transcendental philosophy, has always, from the very slight idea I have of it, struck me as a cold, barren system of Idealism. …

But somehow the name “Transcendentalist” has become a nickname here for all who have broken away from the material philosophy of Locke, and the old theology of many of the early Unitarians. … It has almost become a synonym for one who … preaches the spirit rather than the letter.

The name has been more particularly applied to Mr. Emerson.

Nevertheless, Cranch reassured his father that Emerson “seems to be very far from Kant or Fichte. His writings breathe the very spirit of religion and faith. … [T]here is nothing in anything he says, which is inconsistent with Christianity.” He added: “Since we cannot avoid names, I prefer the term ‘New School’ to the other long name.”²⁰

Cranch finally met Ralph Waldo Emerson in Boston in the winter of 1839-1840 when he attended the first three of Emerson's ten lectures on “The Present Age.” That March, Cranch initiated a correspondence with Emerson, sending him two poems for inclusion in the premier issue of The Dial. In his letter he expressed his gratitude: “I have owed to you more quickening influences and more elevating views in shaping my faith, than I can ever possibly express to you.”²¹ Emerson likewise was impressed with the young poet; he praised Cranch's verse and invited him to Concord to “compare notes a little farther, to see how well our experiences tally.”²² Cranch was one of the “many promising youths” about whom Emerson was enthusiastic.²³ For the next year at least they remained in contact, but by October 1841. Emerson's estimation of Cranch's work appears to have fallen and he distanced himself from the young poet. Despite the ensuing one-sided relationship, Emerson's writings remained an unceasing influence on Cranch.

From his first reading of Nature, Cranch became interested in exploring Emersonian concepts and phraseology through visual means, initially through caricature. Conservative Unitarians criticized the heretical ideas of Transcendentalism, but the popular audience objected more to the language of Transcendentalism, describing it as odd to the point of being incomprehensible. In his essay “Transcendentalism,” published in the Western Messenger, Cranch defended the language of the Transcendentalists, but his defense is in essence recognition that inarticulate passages did exist.²⁴ He too found humor in the wording, and these phrases provided material for the caricatures he and James Freeman Clarke began drawing in the 1830s. Emerson's phrase “Almost I fear to think how glad I am!”, for example, provided Cranch with the image of Emerson dashing across a lawn, stepping in puddles, and waving his arms—simultaneously running scared and exhilarated.²⁵ But perhaps Cranch's most famous image is his caricature of Emerson's line in Nature “I become a transparent eye-ball” (figure 1), which earned him the reputation of being the most playful of the Transcendentalists. Emerson is depicted as an enormous eyeball, optic nerve tied in a ponytail, perched atop a minuscule body in top hat and tails.²⁶ Cranch's sarcastic prophesy to Clarke—“We are linked in celebrity, and thus will descend to posterity as the immortal illustrators of the great Transcendentalist!”—ironically had come to pass: this image has been reproduced more often than Cranch's other caricatures or any of his paintings.²⁷

The details of their history notwithstanding, the significance of these caricatures is that, in choosing to create images from Emerson's key phrases, Cranch located his conception of Transcendentalism in the realm of the visual. It was probably a combination of the very material quality of the words Emerson used as well as Thomas Carlyle's graphic method of presentation in Sartor Resartus that convinced Cranch of the suitability of visual images to the expression of Transcendental ideas.²⁸ Cranch realized that the graphic actuality of language is precisely where the fusion between text and image occurs and similarly allows images to grow from the text. The expression of Transcendental philosophy through visual means, initiated in his caricatures, ultimately found the ideal vehicle in landscape painting. Before committing himself to a career in painting, however, Cranch first had to reach a crisis point.

The controversy surrounding Transcendentalism, combined with the demands of the Unitarian ministry, seriously affected Cranch; he suffered a mental and physical breakdown of sorts. Because of his affiliation with the Transcendentalists, he was unable to find pulpits to supply. By the summer of 1840, shortly after his poems appeared in the Dial, Cranch complained that “Most of the religious societies were afraid of the ‘New Views.’ The pulpits were barred against me.”²⁹ Continuing to encounter opposition from his ties to the new philosophy, and oppressed by the limitations of the Unitarian ministry, he lamented “a clergyman's life is the life of a slave. … He cannot own a soul, and a mouth of his own.” Cranch vowed never to be ordained. Confiding in John Sullivan Dwight that his career goals were changing, Cranch searched for alternatives to preaching and even expressed interest in joining Ripley's Brook Farm. The continual worry that the Unitarian churches were “ridding themselves of all their best ministers” hastened Cranch's abandonment of the Unitarian ministry.³⁰

The search for new vocations and rejection of the ministry was characteristic of the Transcendental movement. Emerson had left the ministry in 1832 to write and lecture. George Ripley and John Sullivan Dwight also gave up preaching for other pursuits. Cranch ultimately abandoned the ministry, but the break with his first career was neither easy nor well defined, occurring sometime between 1841, when he declared that he had “given up everything but the … glorious brush and palette,” and 1844, when he claimed that he was “completely free from the clerical yoke.”³¹

Nevertheless, trading a career in the ministry for one in the fine arts has been viewed as an unusual, if not extreme, conversion. Julie M. Norko, in her 1992 article, proposes that Cranch viewed art and religion as “conflicting interests” that ultimately resulted in his “movement from religion to aestheticism.” But the conflict, I would argue, is not between religious duty and aestheticism, or “vocation” and “inclination,” as Norko suggests, but rather between the new views Cranch had adopted and steadfast Unitarianism: Transcendentalism, in fact, could be aligned with the fine arts in its opposition to mainstream Unitarianism.³² For Cranch, preaching and painting were not separate activities but simply two sides of the same coin: celebrations of God in Nature. Painting, like prayer, became an act of devotion, and thus, Cranch's goals remained constant.³³ Released from the Unitarian ministry, Cranch allowed nature to take on the role of the pulpit and continued to express his new religious views through prayer, poetry, and painting. As a result, theology and painting intertwine.

The alignment of religion with art was commonplace in the nineteenth century. Landscape, according to the American art critic James Jackson Jarves in his Art-Idea (1864), was “the creation of the one God—his sensuous image and revelation, through the investigation of which by science or its representation by art men's hearts are lifted toward him.” Art led men to God, so artists could in some measure replace preachers. Barbara Novak, referring to the artists of the nineteenth century as “priests of the natural church,” observes that “since artists were created by God and generously endowed by him with special gifts, the powers of revelation and creation extended to them too.” In fact Cranch would exclaim: “I feel, while painting, the joy of a Creator, as if I were the Spring, making the trees put out leaves and … calling up clouds and lighting them with sunset glories.”³⁴

Perry Miller implicitly supported the link between painting and religion in his alignment of Transcendental literature with religion. According to Miller in The Transcendentalists, after Unitarianism rendered theological disputation obsolete, the Transcendental “revival of religion had to find new forms of expression instead of new formulations of doctrine, and it found them in literature”—or in Cranch's case, in painting. “The self-consciously literary character of the movement should not deceive us into regarding it as no more than a school of aestheticians.” Miller cautioned; “worship remained the controlling motive.” Like Thoreau writing of the daily trials of life on Walden Pond and Emerson on nature, Cranch too was attempting in his landscapes, in Miller's words, to “create a living religion without recourse to … the obsolete jargon of theology.”³⁵

Cranch recognized that the role of the artist—like the poet or preacher—was to give his audience insight into “the light of that truth,” which was God manifested in Nature. In an essay published in the Western Messenger in 1838, Cranch addressed the need for a creative outlet which would align itself with religious aims. Emphasizing the close relationship between religion and art, he grappled with art theory, maintaining that the artist not only strengthens his own religious feelings through the act of expression but also makes spirituality available to his audience. Given the fusion of God and nature in nineteenth-century American culture, George William Curtis's comment that “some beautiful landscapes that I saw of [Cranch's] … made my heart ‘babble of green fields’ to itself for some days afterwards” demonstrates Cranch's success in his mission.³⁶

That Curtis was a Transcendentalist confirms Cranch's ability to speak to a Transcendental audience. In fact, several members of this community, including Margaret Fuller, John Sullivan Dwight, and Theodore Parker, admired Cranch's work. Both Curtis and Fuller would praise Cranch in their published reviews of his paintings, and Parker owned Cranch's Cascades of Tivoli, which he lent to the Boston Athenaeum for exhibition in 1850.

One of Cranch's first attempts at landscape painting is A River View of Upstate New York (1843), painted at the height of his immersion in Emersonian Transcendentalism.³⁷ He presents us with a pristine landscape broken only by the inclusion of a few tiny figures: a hunter stands on the shore with his dog while Native Americans pass below in a canoe. It is in every way a scene of man in harmony with nature, embracing Emerson's view of nature as commodity, in which the physical needs of man are supplied (the hunter and fishermen), and as beauty and spirit. The foreground consists of a rocky promontory and a storm-blasted tree; the latter, having fallen across the chasm, provides a natural bridge, facilitating the viewer's access into the scene. The fortuitously placed log and large rocks not only offer the viewer access into the landscape but a secure place to stand as well, encouraging direct contact with nature.

Cranch maintained that we “must enter the great temple of the invisible and spiritual through the door of the visible.” Here Cranch attempted to transcend sensual “understanding,” as defined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Aids to Reflection (1825), in order to access “Reason,”—an extension of Emerson's moral sentiment which was the direct and immediate knowledge of the spiritual. Once we enter into Cranch's image of the beauty and power of God in nature, we transcend sensuality. Like George William Curtis, whose admiration of Cranch's landscape led him to remember actual landscapes, and finally to relive his own past experiences in nature, we too transcend the visual before Cranch's painting. Internalizing such scenes of nature, the Transcendental viewer becomes mesmerized, so to speak: “We fall into trances and almost abnormal spheres of life when we yield ourselves to her [Nature's] power.” Then, “locked to the heart of Nature.”

[we] feel the same spirit thrilling through her and us. We breathe the same breath, we are filled with the same joy with which the Infinite Fountain of Love inspires her … as these revelations of God are incessant, a flowing river of delight and instruction; so the soul of man shall be a corresponding receiver thereof, and his interior nature be a true reflection of the Kosmos—the immense world of beauty that forever shines around us.

John Sullivan Dwight, like G. W. Curtis, a viewer well versed in Emersonian concepts, noted of Cranch's work, “Were there not these still mirrors to reflect the beauty of the heavens to us, it might be lost to eyes so seldom lifted upwards.”³⁸

Cranch's River View offers us the tranquility necessary for such reflection. Sailboats glide across the calm river under a blue sky accented with fair-weather cirrus and cumulus clouds. But Cranch's image is not the “still mirror” which so aptly describes luminist painting: here the light appears cool and palpable as it settles over the distant mountains, but one is aware of Cranch's short, curling brushstrokes, which cause the light to circulate and shimmer over the landscape. The image as a whole is not still or quiet.

As mentioned above, several scholars have linked American luminism with Transcendental philosophy as the luminist vision finds a corollary in Emersonian precepts, specifically to certain phrases found in Emerson's Nature.³⁹ The absence of brushstroke, for example, is a particularly fitting parallel to the absence of ego suggested by Emerson's description of becoming a “transparent eyeball” and allowing the currents of the Universal Being to circulate through him. When the artist's labor trail of brushstrokes is invisible—as it is in luminist painting—then, as Emerson wrote, “all mean egotism disappears.” The stillness and expansiveness inherent in Emerson's imagery, “my head bathed in blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,” find a visual equivalent in the hard, cool light of the luminists' landscapes and in the dominant horizontality of their compositions.

It is significant, then, in light of the alignment of luminism with Transcendentalism, that Cranch, who was immersed in Emersonian philosophy, did not produce luminist paintings. Only on rare occasions did he employ the extended format featuring the strong unbroken horizon line favored by the luminists. His delicate, rounded brushstrokes create a pattern offering quite the opposite effect from that achieved by the magically invisible stroke of luminist painters. Their crystalline clarity is traded for a soft shimmering or vibrating effect in Cranch's work. His landscapes are not composed of the spare outlines favored by Lane and Kensett, but rather are diverse to the point of appearing crowded. His paintings are filled with activity and sound.

The fact remains that Cranch, who did not participate in luminism, was both a painter and a Transcendentalist who endeavored to render visible Transcendental ideas. Cranch's brand of Transcendentalism bypasses the “transparent” aspect to celebrate a nature that is sound-filled and motion-filled—the nature Emerson called “ecstatic.” The luminist emphasis on the “transparent,” with its compositional structure privileging the horizontal and its absence of brushstroke, causes these landscapes to become quiet and still. In effect, time stops. This militates against the flux, the continual shifting and metamorphosing that Emerson celebrated as one of nature's methods. The stoppage of time plays no role in this aspect of Emersonian Transcendentalism where perpetual motion and change are evident everywhere in the natural world. As Emerson noted, there was “every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.”⁴⁰ It is this facet of Transcendentalism—in which the galvanizing flow of energy as the Universal Spirit moves through nature, or moves nature through us—that we see characterized in Cranch's landscapes. It is not surprising that Cranch found his voice in the Emersonian celebration of the energy in nature, for motion—wandering and searching—was a defining element in his personality and his career. Cranch's search for a vocation and inspiration were in essence his search for a voice.

The New-York Historical Society's Landscape (1849) (figure 2) provides a visual counterpart to the flux in nature that Emerson celebrated. The scene is energized with activity, sound, and endless variety. A bald mountain looms large over the right side of the composition and is balanced by a smaller peak at the left; both are echoed in several rounded mountain peaks in the far distance. Deciduous and evergreen trees encircle a calm lake which erupts into a waterfall; it, in turn, dashes down either side of the large rock that obstructs the stream in its center. In the foreground is a storm-blasted tree trunk that lends an element of the sublime to the richly varied scene; its presence recalls the past violence of some storm and all of its attendant motion and thunder. The sublimity is balanced—in the Emersonian sense of the inherent balance of polarized forces in nature—by the calm sky above.⁴¹

But the scene as a whole is fictitious. It is not a transcription of an actual American view but rather a composite of several landscapes, and in this sense it is conceptual. Emerson had experimented with the possibility that nature may exist only in our minds, a projection instilled in us by God, and Cranch too had remarked upon the power of the mind independent of matter.⁴² In a parallel manner, a conceptual approach informs his image. Conceptual attitudes often bore two-dimensional results and Cranch's Landscape does in fact contain passages that militate against the compositional devices that attempt to locate the objects in deep space. Here Cranch attempted a Claudian composition⁴³ featuring a central pool of water framed by trees, all infused with a golden light; however, the conceptual underpinnings of this scene become apparent: the calm lake in the middle-ground tilts towards the picture plane and the distant mountains flatten in the hazy light and push forward. This wavering back and forth between two- and three-dimensionality warps the Claudian construct and militates against any sense of tranquility in the scene, or in the mind of the viewer.

The sound- and motion-filled nature that Cranch celebrates corresponds to Emerson's belief that “when God speaketh he should communicate, not one thing, but all things; should fill the world with his voice; should scatter forth light, nature, time, souls, from the centre of the present thought; and new date and new create the whole.” In keeping with the rush of sound as God's voice and varied presence fills the world, Cranch's paintings and poems are rarely silent. “Field Notes,” written in 1842, celebrates the wealth of sounds and species in nature. Cranch's choice of words for their phonetic qualities reinforces his portrayal of a sonorous Nature:

Heareth wisdom musical in a low-toned waterfall,
Or the pine grove's breezy rush,
Or the thrilling of a thrush, …

Or, of the endless variety of nature:

Vines that creep and spikes that nod,
Golden-helmet, golden-rod,
Orchis, milk-weed, elder-bloom,
Brake, sweet-fern and meadow broom. …(44)

In his paintings, including Landscape (figure 2) and Landscape with Waterfall (1851) (figure 3), sound is transmuted into visual activity as a sign of the continual flux in the natural world. In the painting from 1851, the dominant motif—a waterfall, which is the epitome of sound and motion—sets the tone for the scene. Placed against the picture plane, the cataract begins to invade the viewer's space, in essence moving sound into the foreground. The waterfall supplants the calm Claudian coulisse entirely.

At first glance the composition of Landscape with Waterfall appears Claudian, but on close observation one senses again a deviation. The river, viewed on an acute angle, twists the composition so that the river banks appear parallel to each other, retreating into the distance in a semicircular motion. The vanishing point appears to be located at the extreme left of the composition, at a point on the horizon hidden from view by the birch trees. Thus the resulting landscape appears to be in motion, oddly and slowly revolving.

During the late 1840s and 1850s Cranch was repeatedly drawn to certain motifs that include this “split waterfall.” That motif is featured in the New-York Historical Society Landscape and Landscape with Waterfall, discussed above, as well as in Autumn Landscape with Boy Fishing (1845, not illustrated). Given Cranch's immersion in Transcendental philosophy during these years, these landscapes can be read as visual expressions of Emersonian concepts of flux, polarity, and unity in variety. Because such images were intended to be “read” by the viewer, iconography is privileged over technique and other formal issues.

During these years, Cranch was fascinated by the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. In his journal entries from 1839 through the 1870s he grappled with Swedenborgian concepts.⁴⁵ In Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell (1758) Swedenborg took care to label natural symbols; he supplied links between individual species of trees, for example, and very specific moral attitudes.⁴⁶ Echoing Swedenborg's belief that every object in nature was attached to a moral law, Cranch, in his poem “Correspondences,” likened Nature to “a scroll,—God's handwriting thereon,” thus forging a relationship between word and image.⁴⁷ Like Swedenborg, Cranch endeavored to pierce through the externalities of nature to locate underlying spiritual messages. Certainly the correspondence theory was predominant in his mind when he began painting in the 1840s; it was not long before he was able to translate Swedenborgian concepts into visual form. While Cranch demonstrated little of Swedenborg's interest in assigning such specific attributes to natural forms, the emphasis on allowing external, sensual form to stand in for spiritual truths had ramifications on Cranch's iconography.

A “transcendental landscape,” then, might be replete with natural symbols, such as the waterfall. The split waterfall motif—best described as a stream that invariably splits around a central rock causing the water to rush around both sides before ultimately rejoining—appears to have held special significance for Cranch. A clue to the symbolism and emotional significance of this favored motif may be found in the last stanza of Cranch's “Enosis” (1840). In these lines he celebrates the inherent, though sometimes obscured unity between two kindred souls, perhaps between himself and Ralph Waldo Emerson:

We like parted drops of rain
Swelling till they meet and run,
Shall be all absorbed again,
Melting, flowing into one.(48)

The stream of water in the landscape, in an identical manner, when separated, will flow around an obstacle and ultimately be reunified.

For Cranch, the split/reunified waterfall, like the drops of rain flowing into one, can be read as a symbol of Transcendental friendship. While the waterfall is encountered almost exclusively in the landscapes of the 1840s and early 1850s—the period of Cranch's immersion in Transcendental philosophy—it appears in only one later painting: the Landscape Cranch painted as a gift for Emerson in 1874 as a testament to his lasting influence.⁴⁹ This image, above all else, must be read as a statement of the philosophical debts he owed Emerson and as a visual manifestation of his words.⁵⁰

It is significant that Cranch, after abandoning the waterfall motif for almost two decades, reinstalled it as the dominant motif in this landscape. The painting, which today still hangs on a wall in Emerson's house in Concord, Massachusetts, is a sunset landscape. The central body of water, colored by the setting sun, flows toward the viewer before cascading over a wall of large rocks in the foreground. The effect is that of the split waterfall. Painted several years after Cranch and Emerson lost contact, this landscape can be read as Cranch's attempt at renewing their friendship. This intention is apparent in the motifs Cranch chose: one strong, well-branched tree stands above the rest and towers over the landscape. The stream below, which breaks over the rock passage forcing the water into small streamlets, each separate from the other but composed of the same stuff, are ultimately reunited. The composition is balanced and Claudian: trees on the rocky banks frame the lake and waterfall. A golden light—warm, palpable, and in motion—envelops and unifies the scene. Cranch's palette and technique developed sophistication over the years; here his stroke is quite painterly, a result of his contact with Barbizon painting in the late 1850s, and he experiments with the interaction of reflected colors imbuing the foreground objects with a red hue as the sun sets behind them.⁵¹

Cranch's feeling for light, evidenced throughout his career in his landscapes, emerged in his poetry as well. “The Artist,” published in the Dial, is one who “breathed the air of realms enchanted” and “bathed in seas of dreamy light.”

A sky more soft than Italy's
A halcyon light around him spread;
And tones were his and only his,
So sweetly floating o'er his head.(52)

Other poems, including “The Ocean” (1844), in which Cranch likens mankind to “Spirits bathing in the sea of Deity,” contain passages in which the senses are transcended. “The Music of Nature” (1836), begins with such a passage:

I wandered with a calm surprise
Half on the earth, half on the air,
And sometimes I went gliding where
The ocean meets the skies.
O, it was sweet to roam away!
No cumbrous limbs to clog the motion.(53)

These lines approach the light-filled clarity of the “transparent eyeball” aspect of Transcendentalism, yet even Cranch's closest approaches to luminism are not quiet or still. When gliding “half on the air,” or transcending the body and senses, as he does below, there remains a concern with motion and sound that breaks the characteristic silent stillness of luminism:

Whilst slept the limbs and senses all,
Made everything seem musical;
How could I cease to hear?(54)

As with Cranch's paintings, in which brushwork militates against any sense of tranquility, the concern with sound and motion in his poetry dilutes the power of the quiet mood evoked.

When Emerson first encouraged Cranch to break away from the Unitarian ministry to pursue landscape painting in 1841, he championed self-reliance.⁵⁵ Asserting his Romantic belief in the sacredness of the individual, Cranch broke away from institutional religion and pursued his inner calling to celebrate God's work as a painter of nature. Yielding to Emerson's precept to “insist on yourself,” Cranch asserts his presence in painting through the application of paint and through his arrangement of landscape elements. Applying paint in curving motions with his characteristic light stroke, Cranch achieves a roundness of form and a constant, albeit subtle, surface activity. He is present in all of his images. (Conversely, the luminists, through the suppression of brushstroke and rejection of conventional composition, became, in essence, “invisible.”)

For Cranch, as for Emerson, traces of the artist's life experiences, such as were carried in brushwork and compositional structures, were an essential part of true art. Nevertheless, in America at mid century, it was commonly understood that an artist must not assert himself in landscape painting to a degree that would cause the image to deviate from truth to God's creation. Cranch never privileged technique over content, which for him was the poetry or religious spirit in nature. Instead his presence was meditative, his “spirituality” was “of the still, contemplative sort; breathings, aspirations,” detectable in his “constant tendency to converse with the essence and souls of things through the outward form.”⁵⁶

In his essay “On the Ideal in Art,” published in 1845, Cranch refuted the popular Lockean notion that art is merely the skillful “imitation” of nature. He argued instead that visible nature must pass through “the refining fire of human genius, before she takes her highest degree,” developing Emerson's idea that “thus is Art a nature passed through the alembic of man.” Cranch acknowledged that “No one denies that Nature is the material basis of Art, that Nature must be accurately imitated”; however, it is “the Mind, the Soul, after all, which perceives nature; the eye is but an optical instrument.” No artist can be completely objective and imitative in the Lockean sense, but neither can he tamper with God's Nature: “Let us strive to imitate Nature: but there will be unconsciously imparted to the imitation a treatment which is strictly our own. Nor is this departing from Nature. For there is an ideal as there is an actual Nature.” He accepts that while attempting accurately and truthfully to transcribe the landscape onto his canvas, his conception, as well as the mark of his brush, will remain visible. His characteristic brushstrokes and complex compositional structure should then be read as an assertion of self and of the image of nature in the artist's Mind and Soul.⁵⁷

Ultimately, Cranch's art is a function of the compromise that “Art is neither wholly material nor wholly spiritual,” but rather “the beautiful child of the wedlock between Nature and the Soul; and she is the more beautiful, the more she bears a resemblance to both parents.”⁵⁸ Straddling the line between the real and the ideal in his theory of landscape painting, Cranch spoke as a New England Transcendentalist whose philosophy was located a distance from the materialism of John Locke—which stressed reliance on the senses, and correspondingly on the imitation of nature—and somewhat closer to the idealism of Kant—which emphasized the processes of the mind, of which imagination was a large part. These were issues that concerned Cranch as an artist over the course of his life.

Cranch's method had always required an intense communion with nature which was itself an act of devotion. Allowing nature to sink into his soul, he extracted its essence in “rare landscapes of soft mellow tone.”⁵⁹ His early landscapes of the 1840s and 1850s, the period when he was most closely associated with Transcendentalism, are encyclopedic and necessarily fictitious views that included every natural phenomenon imaginable in an effort to reveal the flux and endless variety in nature. In his later paintings, Cranch sought out quiet, arcadian landscapes—scenes of Venice bathed in light and tranquil views of the Hudson River (see figure 4)—that cultivate a mood of contemplation and a spirituality stemming from Transcendentalism. Yet all of his landscapes support an intimate dialogue between man and nature.

Rather late in his career, Cranch published an essay, “The Unconscious Life,” in which he continued to promote a form of painting that would rely on the imagination to filter sensory information received from its models (nature) but that was also the result of various unconscious, intuitive processes. This essay was published in 1890—just two years before his death—but it found its genesis in his “Commonplace Book” circa 1876, reflecting the direction Cranch's Transcendentalism took in the 1870s and 1880s.⁶⁰ Cranch explored the implications of the unconscious in directing the painting process. As paintings are often “injured, if not spoiled, by being overlabored,” he sought to locate the truest image in the “first fresh impression” without regard for technique or composition. In this context, even the roughest oil sketch would be valuable as a record of direct contact with God in nature. The unconscious allows the artist to intuit truth in nature, thus taking on the role of Emerson's moral sentiment, through these first impressions. An unfinished sketch would enable us to feel “how small things may suggest the greater—the drop of water image the firmament.”⁶¹

Over the years Cranch's painting style and technique gained sophistication, and his brand of Transcendentalism developed into a system in which painting and theology function as one. Nevertheless, one aspect of his life as an artist remained unchanged. Cranch, the Transcendentalist, was in communion with God when he painted his landscapes and sketched outdoors. Breathing the fresh air, opening his heart and mind to the beauties of the landscape, he received the moral sentiment. Transcribing nature onto canvas became an act of devotion, an integral part of the intimate relationship he found with the Universal Spirit in Nature. Christopher Cranch was unique in that he painted as a Transcendentalist. Whether he was painting the Grand Canal in Venice or a cedar tree in Fishkill, his goals were inherently religious. While Transcendentalism can be found, to a limited degree, in his paintings—that is, in his approach and in his iconography—it remains that for Cranch the very act of painting the landscape was Transcendentalism.

Notes

1. Christopher Pearse Cranch to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sept. 12, 1841, in Leonora Cranch Scott. The Life and Letters of Christopher Pearse Cranch (Boston and New York, 1917), 60.

2. Recent scholarship has focused on Cranch as a Transcendentalist within the context of his relationships with Ralph Waldo Emerson. Theodore Parker, and the Transcendental circle in general. J. C. Levenson was among the first to write about Cranch in “Christopher Pearse Cranch: The Case History of a Minor Artist in America.” American Literature 21(1950):415-426. Hazen C. Carpenter, in his article “Emerson and Christopher Pearse Cranch,” New England Quarterly 37(1964):18-42, traced the often one-sided relationship between the two Transcendentalists: Elizabeth R. McKinsey's study The Western Experiment: New England Transcendentalists in the Ohio Valley (Cambridge, Mass., 1973) offered insight into his psyche. These essays were followed by a series of articles published in the 1970s and 1980s by: David Robinson. “The Career and Reputation of Christopher Pearse Cranch: An Essay in Biography and Bibliography,” Studies in the American Renaissance 1978, ed. Joel Myerson (Boston, 1978), 453-472; David Robinson, “Christopher Pearse Cranch, Robert Browning, and the Problem of ‘Transcendental’ Friendship,” Studies in the American Renaissance 1977, ed. Joel Myerson (Boston, 1977), 145-153; Joel Myerson, “Transcendentalism and Unitarianism in 1840: A New Letter by C. P. Cranch,” CLA Journal 16(1973):366-367; Francis B. Dedmond, “‘A Pencil in the Grasp of Your Graphic Wit’: An Illustrated Letter from C. P. Cranch to Theodore Parker,” Studies in the American Renaissance 1981, ed. Joel Myerson (Charlottesville, 1981), 345-357; Francis B. Dedmond, “Christopher Pearse Cranch: Emerson's Self-Appointed Defender,” Concord Saunterer 15(1980):6-19; Francis B. Dedmond, “Christopher Pearse Cranch's Journal, 1839,” Studies in the American Renaissance 1983, ed. Joel Myerson (Charlottesville, 1983), 129-150: and Shelly Armitage, “Christopher Pearse Cranch: The Wit as Poet,” American Transcendental Quarterly 1(1987):33-47. Most recent is Julie M. Norko's 1992 article, “Christopher Pearse Cranch's Struggle with the Muses,” Studies in the American Renaissance 1992, ed. Joel Myerson (Charlottesville, 1992), 209-228. Recent monographs of Transcendental periodicals—The Western Messenger, The Dial, and The Harbinger—also contain substantial discussions of Cranch's role.

3. Perry Miller, The Transcendentalists: An Anthology (Cambridge, Mass., 1950), 179. It is unclear why Miller did not view Cranch's painting as “serious work,” but his pronouncements have had ramifications on Cranch's reputation. Lawrence Buell, for example, quoting Miller, refers to Cranch as a “would-be artist.” Literary Transcendentalism (Ithaca, 1973), 42, n. 42.

4. Christopher Pearse Cranch, “Autobiography,” unpaginated, unpublished MS, private collection.

5. Cranch exhibited widely during his career. For a listing of exhibitions in which he participated see James Yarnall and William H. Gerdts, The National Museum of American Art's Index to American Art Exhibition Catalogues (Boston, 1986). Cranch belonged to the group of New York-based artists who later came to be known as the “Hudson River School.” These landscape painters exhibited at the National Academy of Design, spent summers sketching along the Hudson River, and congregated at the Century Club in New York City. As a group, their paintings typically combined precisely observed detail with the ideal elements of the Claudian composition. Cranch was one of the least well known participants in the Hudson River School, but his work deals with the same issues and functions within the same parameters as that of the other Hudson River artists.

6. “On the line” refers to the exhibition practice of honoring certain paintings with a prime location on the wall, that is on the “line” that is eye-level. On the other hand, those paintings considered inferior by the hanging committee were “skied,” meaning that those painting were hung close the ceiling, far above the visitor's eye level and easily overlooked.

   The Paris Salon was held every other year during Cranch's stay in France (1853-1863), and his paintings were accepted for the Salon every year it was held: 1855, when he exhibited two landscapes; 1857, when he exhibited four paintings: and 1861, when he exhibited one landscape. Cranch returned to New York in 1863.

7. Henry James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends (Boston, 1903), 1:110.

8. In a letter to John Sullivan Dwight, dated July 22, 1841, Cranch wrote: “A friend of mine here, who paints very sweet landscapes, offers to give me some instruction in the practical parts of painting, and then I can go on of myself. I am all impatience to begin.” In the same breath, he continues: “Do you ever see Emerson? His last book has been a living fountain to me,” thus confirming the concurrence of Emersonian inspiration with the urge to paint. Cranch to Dwight, July 22, 1841, Cranch Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

9. These caricatures can be found in the collections of the Houghton Library at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, and the Albany Institute of History and Art in Albany, New York. For an in-depth treatment of Cranch's caricatures, see F. DeWolfe Miller's excellent study Christopher Pearse Cranch and His Caricatures of New England Transcendentalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1951).

10. Through the suppression of brushstroke and rejection of conventional composition, the luminists become, in essence, invisible. This elimination or suppression of self causes the artist to become transparent and allows the “currents of the Universal Being” to circulate through him as well as through the viewer without mediation. A visual corollary is provided to Emerson's “a light shines through us upon things and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all. Emerson, “The Over-Soul,” in Selected Essays, ed. Larzer Ziff (New York, 1982), 208.

11. In fact, so tenuous is the link between the luminists and Transcendentalism that Elizabeth Garrity Ellis observed that, while it is unlikely that luminist Fitz Hugh Lane (1804-1865) knew Cranch's caricature of Emerson's “transparent eyeball,” “Cranch's top-hatted creature towering over field and hills … has nonetheless dominated discussions of the luminist paintings [Lane] produced from the mid 1850s until his death in 1865,” thus suggesting a link between Lane's paintings and Emerson. Ellis, “Cape Ann Views,” in Paintings of Fitz Hugh Lane (Washington, D.C., 1988), 19.

    Most recently, however, an article published by Mary Foley in The American Art Journal puts forth a stronger case for Lane having some familiarity with Emerson's ideas. Until the publication of her article, only the fact that Lane's name had been found on a list of members of the American Union of Associationists tied him with a group of former Brook Farmers. Elizabeth Garrity Ellis. “Fitz Hugh Lane and the American Union of Associationists.” The American Art Journal 17(1985):89. Foley discovered Lane was also active in the Gloucester Lyceum after 1848, where he was appointed to the board of directors in September 1849. The fact that Emerson lectured at the Lyceum encourages the possibility that Lane may have heard him lecture or may even have spoken with him. Mary Foley, “Fitz Hugh Lane. Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the Gloucester Lyceum,” The American Art Journal 27(1995-1996):99-101. While Lane may have heard Emerson speak in Gloucester, there is still no evidence that connects Lane with Transcendentalism on a deeper level.

12. Cranch to John Sullivan Dwight, June 15, 1836, in Scott, Life and Letters, 26.

13. Cranch to Margaret Cranch (sister), Oct. 15, 1837, in Scott, Life and Letters, 40; Cranch to Julia Myers, Aug. 10, 1837, in Scott, Life and Letters, 35. Cranch's 1839 “Journal” begins with a New Year's resolution on Jan. 8, 1839: “I must begin to Live more in earnest, than I have done. … At present I only dream. Half of my existence seems to be dreaming. A deadly indifference hangs over me—like a lethargy.” “Journal.” Cranch Papers. Massachusetts Historical Society.

14. Journal entry of 1840, transcribed in Cranch, “Autobiography.”

15. Cranch to William Cranch, July 11, 1840, in Scott, Life and Letters, 50.

16. “Carlyle was an early love with me … [as was] Emerson. To these two great minds, among others, I was mostly indebted for the change that gradually took place in my theological belief. … These two leaders marshalled me the way my natural tendencies were impelling me.” Cranch, “Autobiography.”

17. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (Boston and New York, 1897), 235; Cranch, “Autobiography”; Cranch to Julia Myers, Feb. 4, 1840, in Scott, Life and Letters, 47.

18. In Maine, during the winter of 1840, Cranch wrote: “I came across some people who called Emerson crazy and sneered at … ‘transcendentalism.’ … I spoke in defense. I long to utter my mind to these Philistines, but I anticipate some squalls here. If it comes to this I shall clear out of Portland pretty quick” (“Autobiography”). Once labeled a Transcendentalist, Cranch encountered difficulty in finding pulpits to fill. He voiced his frustration to John Sullivan Dwight through sarcasm: “Let me advise you … to repent of your heresies, to renounce R. W. E. and all his evil works and return to good old fashioned Unitarianism.” Cranch to Dwight, Apr. 20, 1840, Cranch Papers. Massachusetts Historical Society.

19. Cranch's poem was published as Poem Delivered in the First Congregational Church in the Town of Quincy, May 25, 1840, the Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Incorporation of the Town (Boston, 1840).

20. Cranch to William Cranch, July 11, 1840, in Scott, Life and Letters, 49-51.

21. William Cranch to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mar. 2, 1840, in Scott, Life and Letters, 58.

22. Emerson to Cranch, Mar. 4, 1840, in Scott, Life and Letters, 60. Emerson praised “Enosis” and “Aurora Borealis” as “true” and “brilliant” and “one more authentic sign … of a decided poetic taste, and tendency to original observation in our Cambridge circle” (5n). Cranch was unable to go immediately to see Emerson so the visit did not take place until August. A letter from Cranch to Emerson dated Sept. 12, 1841, refers to additional visits “enjoyed with you under your roof and occasionally in Boston.” In Scott, Life and Letters, 60-61.

23. Emerson exclaimed to Margaret Fuller that Cranch, along with Henry David Thoreau and William Ellery Channing comprised “the best club that ever made a journal.” Quoted in William H. Moss, “‘So Many Promising Youths’: Emerson's Disappointing Discoveries of New England Poet-Seers,” New England Quarterly 49(1976):55. Moss also notes that “Emerson had followed this same pattern several times before in his relationships with young poets” at first enthusiastic and later disenchanted with their productions (47).

24. “Truth dawns like light upon nations,” Cranch explained. “All who are true … feel its coming, though they only feel, in dim, vague glimmerings of imagination and hope, but cannot think their dream into shape—much less speak it. … They are like infants who have but a confused inarticulate language of their own.” “Transcendentalism,” Western Messenger 8(Jan. 1841):405-409.

25. The original of this caricature in the archives of the Houghton Library. Harvard University, has been torn; the remaining portion, from Emerson's feet to his neck, is on the reverse of Cranch's “disagreeable things” cartoon (many thanks to Jennie Rathbun at the Houghton Library for locating this item). A “reconstruction” appears in F. DeWolfe Miller, Christopher Pearse Cranch and His Caricatures of New England Transcendentalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1951).

26. Several versions of this caricature exist: one, in the Houghton Library at Harvard University; a second version in the Albany Institute of History and Art in Albany. New York; a third in Cranch's 1839 “Journal,” Cranch Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, in which the name Ralph Waldo Emerson inscribed over the walking eyeball has been crossed out.

27. Cranch to James Freeman Clarke, May 20, 1839, Cranch Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. While Cranch's caricatures have a wide audience today, it remains unclear just who their intended audience was in the 1830s and 1840s. Cranch confessed to Clarke that he lent to his cousin William Henry Furness “my Emersonian scraps … and it seems by sundry external signs upon them … that they have been considerably thumbed and pocketed. Great men have looked upon them.” But it is not clear whether Emerson ever saw the caricatures.

28. In 1839, according to his “Journal,” Cranch wrote a “Sartorish letter” illustrated with images that have what Cranch called “a sense—a Carlylean graphic-ness and truth. There can be a touch of comicality in them too—to give them a relish.” Cranch, Jan. 9, 1839, “Journal,” Cranch Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

29. Cranch, “Autobiography.” Cranch complained of not having had a preaching engagement in the previous two months because “My name is expunged from the list of safe men. … I have the misfortune to have associated with Emerson, Ripley, & those corrupters of youth, and have written to the Dial, and these are unpardonable offenses.” Cranch to John Sullivan Dwight, Nov. 17, 1840, in Myerson, “Transcendentalism and Unitarianism,” 366-367.

30. Cranch to John Sullivan Dwight, July 22, 1841, Cranch Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. Cranch made several visits to Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, and although supportive of the venture, he never became a member: “I have … no plans; or prospects, save of the vaguest sort. I want to see something of Ripley's establishment, and know if there is any work held out there to me in which I can earnestly engage.” Cranch to Dwight, July 22, 1841, Cranch Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

    In the 1830s and until the early 1840s, before Cranch began to paint, he contributed poetry and essays to the various Transcendental periodicals: the Western Messenger, the Dial, and the Harbinger. This involvement not only demonstrated his commitment to Transcendentalism but also points to his increasing need for an outlet for his “new views” outside of the Unitarian pulpit. For a complete discussion of Cranch's involvement with Transcendental periodicals, see Robert D. Habich, Transcendentalism and the “Western Messenger”: A History of the Magazine and Its Contributors, 1835-1841 (London and Toronto, 1985); Joel Myerson, The New England Transcendentalists and the Dial: A History of the Magazine and Its Contributors (London and Toronto, 1980); and Sterling F. Delano, “The Harbinger” and New England Transcendentalism: A Portrait of Associationism in America (London and Toronto, 1983).

31. Cranch to Julia Myers, Aug. 2, 1841, in Scott, Life and Letters, 67; Cranch, “Autobiography.”

32. Norko, “Christopher Pearse Cranch's Struggle with the Muses,” 210. Norko proposes as her thesis:

    Cranch spent a large portion of his early years attempting to ignore or unsuccessfully reconcile his concept of duty with his natural inclinations. … His prose of the period after he accepted the call to preach Unitarianism in the Ohio Valley demonstrates the development of the tension between vocation and inclination. In the prose, missionary zeal confronts his eventual movement from religion to aestheticism.

    (210)

    Furthermore, Norko provides support for her view of painting as not only “inclination” but “amusement” for Cranch with the observation that Cranch's father would only tune his piano on “days of leisure”: “Perhaps [father] William Cranch's classification of the arts as leisure activities explains not only why Cranch could not be formally trained in them, but also why he could not seriously consider a career in them” (210). That few opportunities for “formal training” in painting existed in America in the 1830s notwithstanding, Norko never mentions a detail of critical importance: Christopher Cranch's older brother John was an artist who toured Italy with Thomas Cole and whose drawings can today be found in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

33. Further support for this alignment of nature and God can be found in the writings of the Hudson River School artists, of which the best known is Asher B. Durand's “Letters on Landscape Painting” (published in The Grayon in 1855), as well as in contemporary art criticism.

34. James Jackson Jarves, The Art-Idea, ed. Benjamin Rowland, Jr., (1864; Cambridge Mass., 1960), 86; Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875 (New York, 1980), 9; Christopher Pearse Cranch, “The Painter in the Woods,” Sartain's Union Magazine 10(Jan. 1852):44-45.

35. Miller, The Transcendentalists, 9. Miller cautioned that “unless this literature be read as fundamentally an expression of a religious radicalism in revolt against a rational conservatism, it will not be understood” (8). He also observed that “This inherently religious character of New England Transcendentalism has not been widely appreciated, mainly because most students are not acquainted with all the writings … [and] because all the insurgents strove … to put their cause into the language of philosophy and literature rather than of theology” (8-9).

36. Christopher Pearse Cranch, “Expression, the Mother of Sentiment,” Western Messenger 5(Sept. 1838):375; George William Curtis to John Sullivan Dwight, Dec. 22, 1845, in Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis to John S. Dwight: Brook Farm and Concord, ed. George Willis Cooke (New York, 1898), 237.

37. This image can be found in Nancy Stula, Lured by the Muses: Christopher Pearse Cranch, 1813-1892 (New York, 1997).

38. Christopher Pearse Cranch, “Ralph Waldo Emerson,” undated, unpaginated MS. Cranch Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society; Cranch, “Painter in the Woods,” 44-45; John Sullivan Dwight, review of Cranch's Poems [1844], The Harbinger 1(July 26, 1845):105-107.

39. John I. H. Baur identified luminism in his 1954 article “American Luminism: A Neglected Aspect of the Realist Movement in Nineteenth-Century American Painting,” Perspectives U. S. A. 9(1954):90-98; but Barbara Novak, in American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience (New York, 1969), first stressed the links between luminism and the transparent and tranquil aspect of Transcendentalism. More recently, Novak has stated: “There is perhaps little direct influence. But we can claim affinity. Luminism is the purest visual formulation of mid-century transcendental philosophy.” Nineteenth Century American Painting: The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection (New York, 1986), 30.

40. Emerson, Selected Essays, 44. Barbara Novak, in a footnote to her discussion of luminism in American Painting of the Nineteenth Century, acknowledges that several scholars (including John McCoubrey and John Kouwenhoven) have “put forth the idea of flux as the essentially American quality.”

    If a dominant American quality is, as I maintain, not flux but an absolute in time and space that fortifies the constant existence of both thing and thought, it is perhaps because we have indeed had an awareness of flux that has engaged us even more intensely in a search for the underlying absolutes. … For Emerson, the task seems to have been to find that unity beneath the flux.

    (300n)

41. This painting was completed just after Cranch's return from Italy in 1849. While the Italian landscape and ruins had been a source of associations, the pristine wildness of the Catskills and Adirondacks put Cranch in touch with the power of God. The sublime, with its attendant rawness and power, spoke of Creation itself.

42. In his “Commonplace Book,” circa 1872, Cranch wrote: “If Mind has this tendency and this power of making a magic lantern of itself, with eyes … to see its own hidden pictures thus made real—does it not argue a power independent of matter … ?” Cranch, “Commonplace Book,” 26, Cranch Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

43. “Claudian” composition refers to the compositional structure employed by the French artist Claude Lorraine (1600-1682). This landscape structure consists of framing trees, a middle ground punctuated by water—usually a central coulisse—and a distance bathed in a golden light. Nineteenth-century American artists found Claude's compositions especially well suited to conveying the aesthetic of the beautiful. Cranch, as a young art student, studied Claude's Liber Veritatis in the Library of Congress, admiring his landscapes for their “truth” and “ideality.” Cranch to John Sullivan Dwight, June 9, 1841, in Scott, Life and Letters, 71.

44. Emerson, Selected Essays, 188: Christopher Pearse Cranch, “Field Notes,” in Poems (Philadelphia, 1844), 82-86. This poem is dated July 1842.

45. Cranch delved into Swedenborg's Arcana Coelestia: or Heavenly Mysteries Contained in the Sacred Scriptures (Boston, 1794) very early, in 1839, and while he denied that he had become a “Swedenborgian,” the theologian's influence is nonetheless apparent in several of his poems of this period as well as in his paintings. In his “Commonplace Book.” circa 1872. Cranch continued to graple with Swedenborg: “All depends on which side we approach him. If on the philosophical, common sense side he is a help to us. … [T]hrow out his contradictions of statement and then strain his philosophical creed through the seive of Reason … and Swedenborg become a great light in our hands.” Cranch, “Commonplace Book,” 11, Cranch Papers. Massachusetts Historical Society.

46. Swedenborg set forth that “Vines and laurels correspond to affection for truth … while olives and fruits [trees] correspond to affection for good.” Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell (New York, 1900), 79.

47. Christopher Pearse Cranch, “Correspondences,” Dial 1(Jan. 1841), 381.

48. Cranch, “Enosis,” in Poems, 51-52.

49. This oil on canvas, c. 99" x 12", is owned by and can be seen at the Ralph Waldo Emerson House in Concord, Mass.

50. Cranch's letter to Emerson, dated Apr. 27, 1874, which accompanied the painting, is transcribed in Scott. Life and Letters, 280-281.

51. Cranch spent ten years in France, from 1853-1854, and during this decade he was inspired by the painters who worked in the area around Barbizon and in the Forest of Fontainebleau. This group of painters often took unassuming landscapes for their subjects and developed an approach characterized by broad brushstrokes that obliterated fine detail.

52. Christopher Pearse Cranch, “The Artist,” Dial 3(Oct. 1842):225. When published in 1844 with his collection of Poems, “halcyon” was replaced so that line 12 reads: “Their wealth of light around him spread.”

    In an 1872 entry in his “Commonplace Book,” Cranch sings a “Prayer to the Sun-God … I worship thee—Joy of the Universe! Today, by thy light, let me paint as I never painted before, And the joy of thy light, And the joy of my work, shall be my best reward! N.Y. Feb. 7 1869.” “Commonplace Book,” 6-7. Cranch Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

53. Cranch, “The Music of Nature,” in Poems, 14-20. The poem is dated June 1836. In an undated manuscript entitled “Dreams,” Cranch described a similar sensation, but one in which he cannot transcend the senses as walking on air required extreme physical exertion: “I have a strange vivid dream, now and then, of walking in the air. I don't mean that flying sensation some have, but a plain rising and stepping, only accomplished by strong effort of will and usually just a few feet above the heads of my companions. … I sink only when I relax my will and muscular effort.” “Dreams,” undated, unpaginated MS, Cranch Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

54. Cranch, “The Music of Nature,” 20.

55. Emerson wrote to Cranch in Oct. 1841: “that the beauty of natural forms will not let you rest but you must serve and celebrate them with your pencil, and that at all hazards you must quit the pulpit as a profession, I learn without surprise. … The Idea that rises with more or less lustre on all our minds, that unites us all, will have its way and must be obeyed.” Emerson to Cranch, Oct. 10, 1841, in Scott, Life and Letters, 62.

56. John Sullivan Dwight, review of Cranch's Poems, 105-107. Of Cranch's nature. Dwight wrote: “There is nothing in him which could by any possibility tyrannize over others. You feel that here is a gentle nature … who would rather sit silent hours and days than impose the influence of his speech, and who would suffer all the consequences of inaction, rather than take the lead” (106).

57. Christopher Pearse Cranch, “On the Ideal of Art,” The Harbinger 1(Aug. 23, 1845):170-171; Emerson, Selected Essays, 47; Cranch. “On the Ideal of Art,” 170-171. For Cranch, genius was the artist's “God-given privilege of infusing … Imagination into the dead materials it has collected together, breathing upon dry bones and clothing them in the garb of life and beauty.”

58. Cranch, “On the Ideal of Art,” 170-171.

59. Cranch, “The Artist,” 225.

60. Christopher Pearse Cranch, “The Unconscious Life,” Unitarian Review 33(Feb. 1890):97-122. Excerpts from the first draft of this essay are found in Cranch's “Commonplace Book” entry for Nov. 11, 1876, Cranch Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. An essay also titled “The Unconscious Life” was read before the Sunday Club of Boston on Oct. 12, 1880 (Minutes of the Sunday Club, Cranch Papers), before the essay was published in the Unitarian Review.

61. Cranch, “The Unconscious Life”; Cranch, “Painter in the Woods,” 44-45.