God's Land: Landscape Painting in 19th Century America

Join SOMACC's Mark Chepp for 2025's first SmART talk, a presentation investigating the cultural ideologies that inspired landscape painting in 19th century America. American landscape paintings from the 19th century can often appear as mere depictions of a scene encountered in nature. However, brimming beneath the surface of these works are political messages and religious philosophies, as well as historic insights into American expansionism and emerging Industrial Revolution technologies. This presentation will explore these underlying societal currents. The Hudson River School—the first native school of painting to arise in the new United States—matured during the first half of the 19th century, at a time when European Romanticism had significant influence on American arts and culture. Romanticism was an approach to understanding the world and humankind’s place in it. Unlike the 18th century Enlightenment, which searched for order and knowledge through empirical observations, Romanticism emphasized the self—one’s feelings and emotions—as it attempted to discover an essential spirituality in nature. However, suddenly around mid-century the invention of photography—with its uncompromising observational authenticity—upended the painter’s emotive artistic approach. The Romantic give-and-take between “primeval” and “tamed” landscapes now had to compete with these new, unedited and unvarnished images of that which is actually being seen. The soft filter of the artist’s eye was being challenged by the hard lens of the camera. Landscape images during the second half of the 19th century reflect the cross currents of antipathy and embrace, entwining the two mediums, with each attempting to emulate qualities specific to the other. So, the next time you look at an image of the American Scene from the 19th century, either painting or photograph, do not think of it as just a representation of nature. Think of it as a key—a key to understanding past religious, social and political beliefs, as well as a window into our nation’s character during that time.