Aesthetics of Nature: the Transformations of the American Landscape

The discovery of America, at the end of the 15th century, apart from involving the expansion of the known world, meant, in the imagination of European citizens, the appearance of a unspoilt and virgin space that had not participated in the history of the West, nor in the ups and downs that attacked the continent worn by the passage of years and war.
The New World was revealed to the eyes of all Europe as a privileged space where men could enjoy a free existence, away from the complexity of modern life and from the difficulty of surviving in a continent destroyed by religious struggles and national wars.
The emergence of the American continent awakened the dream that there, in the New Land, it would be possible to reconstruct the lives of men, away from civilization and close to the origin of the world. Because the journey to America was the journey back to a simple life, close to nature and away from the habits, laws and customs which beset the existence of those who did not participate in the privileges of civilization. The discovery of America meant the discovery of savage life, of savage man, both invested with the qualities and virtues that the Europeans bestowed on them.
America encapsulated the projection of all the desires that could not be realised in Europe, and the greatest of all was the desire to be free of any authority which infringed the rights of men demanded by humanism. There, those persecuted by the law, dissidents of any established ideology and religion, or those nostalgic for a lost world order, imagined a place that fulfilled all aspirations and permitted men their own resolution. America was, therefore, Paradise, Eden, Arcadia, the Promised Land, the only possible place where man could fully realize himself, far from decadent Europe.
In the New Land men had to be happy, as were the Europeans in their origin, because they were renewing the pact of alliance with nature, which imposes its own rhythm through the cycles and seasons. Those of the New Land were innocent and good as their existence kept faith with the will of nature and they knew nothing of the ambition and arrogance of a (Western) culture which had definitively moved away from simplicity and a primitive life, substituting it with the refinement of a civilized life.
This European dream, Arcadian and pastoral, which projected its imagination onto the lands of America, bore its fruit and crystallized in diverse literary forms, forms which had the theme of the Edenic and Arcadian dream where humanity, distanced from the values of civilization, realized its desires in proximity with nature, just as the Europeans believed was happening in America.
Jacopo Sannazaro, poet to the Court of Naples, wrote Arcadia in 1504, the first literary manifestation of this utopian spirit. The hero of the poem, called Sincere, disappointed by the artifice of the city, withdraws to Arcadia where he shares his life with shepherds; ingenuous beings who introduce him to the privileges of rural life. 50 years later, Montemayor’s Diana appeared which shows the desire of Europeans to rediscover the primitive values of natural life and their need to return to the ancient world, where the values of humanism prevail. And finally, Arcadia by the British Sir Philip Sidney, a poem that led to the taste for pastoral themes in poetry, theatre, fiction, opera, painting and architecture.
With the discovery of America the debate on natural man developed in Europe and the myth of Arcadia and Eden were modernised. The travellers to the Americas offered Thomas More the materials for his Utopia and inspired Shakespeare’s Tempest and the New Atlantis by Francis Bacon. In the same way, the island where Robinson Crusoe stayed for so many years is located on the coasts of America, at the mouth of the Orinoco. And Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin and Hegel imagined and pondered on what this place must be, identical to thought, which they called America.
The European ideal of a virgin land where man could realize his ideal of humanity reached North America, above all New England, in the 17th century, with the arrival of the Puritans, obliged to exile themselves from England after their defeat in the religious wars. This protestant sect hoped to create the Kingdom of God on Earth; not like the Anglicans who sought to ensure a place in heaven after death. The vision of the world of these new Americans was still theocentric, but their expansionist impetus and the desire to see their dream realized were the elements that provided courage and strength to bring about the ideal. An ideal that at the same time crystallized in the will to create a mission. Thomas Shepard’s Autobiography, a British Puritan who arrived in New England in 1635, makes it explicit that “in America, and not in Europe, I will be able to find my own realization as a political subject… The Lord hath shown His affection for me… leading me to the Land of Peace, the judgement place. Where the Lord hath made the savage Indians who conspired the death of all the English…”
The awareness that they were in a new world where something of supreme importance was being played out, of which they formed part, made the Puritans heroic and exemplary. Their first desire was to flee from England from a power that threatened them, and they knew that by settling in the New Land they would be able to construct the religious institutions according to their taste and need.
Seen from Europe, America offered governments perspectives for a rationalization of space and of social relations impossible to realize on the old continent, petrified by traditions and feudal law. America was, for the Puritans, the Promised Land to construct the Church of the Saints. For them the New World, where they settled without any inclination to return to their place of origin, was superior to the nostalgia for returning to the Old World, as it was constructed in the image of utopia.

Soon after arriving in America, the utopia, cherished for so long, was revealed as an ill-fated place. Nature was in all senses inscrutable. The land, in many places still virgin, resisted the rudimentary tools with which they wished to tame it and confronted men in their unconscious and irrational arrogance. The forests, rivers and prairies were infinite and full of danger. Nature was considered an enemy and adverse to the aims and will of men. The forests of the east coast were the exclusive dominion of the natives, savage, uneducated, Godless and without conscience. Terror, which in England manifested itself through the ecclesiastical authorities, here, in America, was shown in the face of the native who, after an initial close and friendly relationship became the danger that hid in the forests of the east coast and established itself on the interior prairies. For almost two centuries, from the early 17th to the end of the 18th, the indigenous American Indians were massacred with an indescribable rancour and brutality: the only possible way of controlling the terror was to push the natives towards the West and level the forests and prairies where evil grew strong.

In order to establish a Christian colony not only was it necessary to subdue nature but also the inhabitants that populated it; men and women who in no way matched the image the new settlers had of them, an image that was the result of a tradition that went back to the Renaissance and that made the naked native the icon and the graphic representation of the new continent and of its peoples. To make the white American the true American, the European colonists rejected this traditional representation as an erroneous conception and achieved this by giving the first inhabitants the name of “Indians”, moving them from America to another hemisphere, to another people with dark skin and to another place of the British Empire. And they portrayed these natives, as Mary Rowlandson described them, in the midst of wild beasts with which they shared the land.
Mary Rowlandson, wife of a Puritan minister, who was kidnapped and held by the Indians, tells of her experience in the book The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, published in 1682. Written to praise the goodness and mercy of God, Mary Rowlandson composed a painful and terrifying text that reaffirmed the Puritans as God’s chosen people and excluded the Indians from the human race and confirmed America as the Promised Land of the Puritans. She describes the natives “as black creatures of the night”, “savage bears”, “ravenous wolves”, and “inhumane creatures” who live like “beasts scattered through the forest”, and who “search among the filth” to feed on “filthy trash”. For her the New Continent was an uncivilized, savage, immense and bleak country and with sinister swamps where the American Indians “roam”, ”roar”, “howl” and “destroy and devastate”. This text published in Boston, republished in England, was rediscovered in the 19th century and continued to be published until the early 20th century as the paradigmatic account of American captivity and the nature of the natives.

Just after arriving on land they had to resolve who those lands belonged to, given that their Anglo-Saxon traditions and agricultural practices were based on property of the individual, not of the community or tribe. Some of the recent arrivals affirmed that the owners were the natives but they were expelled, murdered or sold as slaves. Governor Winthrop of Massachusetts declared that all uncultivated lands should be of public domain, according to the unwritten law of England. In other words, they belonged to the king. Finally, the colonists decided to seize all lands, without consulting the natives, but with the representative of the crown, in other words, the governor.
In the Connecticut Valley the Puritan priests quoted the Epistle to the Romans 13:2: “Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.” The colonial governments formed an armed force of 240 men under the charge of John Mason. They were joined by a thousand Narragansett warriors. The historian Francis Jennings writes: “Mason proposed avoiding an attack against the Pequot warriors, which could overwhelm his inexpert and faithless troops. The battle itself was not his purpose. The battle is one of the two ways of destroying an enemy’s capacity to fight. The massacre can achieve the same end with less risk, and Mason had resolved that the massacre would be his objective.” Indeed, in less than ten years the natives of the east coast, from Florida to New England, were completely massacred and their lands burnt and devastated and their forests completely levelled so that they could never shelter their old inhabitants in their shadows.
The Puritans adopted a verse from psalm 2:8: “Ask of me, and I will give the nations for your inheritance, the uttermost parts of the earth for your possession.” From then, the colonising European states declared that their conquest was the will of God. The European immigrants seized the lands and set the natives to work as slaves. By 1637 there were already around 2,000 English colonists and once all the tribes settled on the east coast were massacred they decided to continue advancing inland, conquering new lands and annihilating the natives.
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As the colonists penetrated the continent, obliging the natives to abandon their lands in the East and move to the West, the colonists, to avoid any settlement of the natives, burnt and destroyed everything in their path: cultivated fields, prairies, forests, leaving desolation and desert behind them.

For many long years the efforts of the colonists were exclusively dedicated to taming nature, at the expense of its destruction: nature, with its secrets and dangers, was the primordial enemy that God had put in their destiny as another test for achieving the way to perfection. There were many years of struggle with the natives, who had to be prevailed upon to abandon their lands and the lands, with their vast extension, their forest vegetation and their violent orography, resisted the new owners, who with their inadequate resources did not retreat from the impulse of nature.

Once dominated by the perseverance and necessity of the new Americans, and with all risks not yet overcome, a new relationship emerged with the defeated enemy. When nature ceased to be hostile for man it transformed into a “landscape”. The landscape is a construction which has passed through symbolic filters, cultural legacies, old memories, ancestral memories, aesthetic experiences and literary presences. It is a complex form, and the more elements that contribute to it the richer it is. We can say that the landscape is at once reality and the appearance of reality. It is reality insofar as it is made up of real things; but it is also appearance insofar as the things are only manifested through imagination and the delusion of our senses, given that our senses, rather than transmitting reality to us, to some extent produce it.
It is necessary that the vision of nature is not conditioned by shortage and need so that it can awaken other interests, whether artistic, symbolic, religious, aesthetic or scientific. And in the new landscape the new Americans projected their desires for simplicity, solitude and authenticity and transformed it into a symbol of a transcendental nature that maintained the originating principles of truth and virtue unharmed.
After decades of struggling with the land, of casting out and destroying the natives, nature gave way and began to offer its generosity. Eden opened to life and showed its beauty and magnitude and, after the tests that God put in their way, he awarded them with a favourable and fertile land which fulfilled all the expectations that man had of it. Nature was considered the natural temple of America, and “the miserable need for destruction” of the early days was compensated with religious veneration; given that nature was considered the revelation of the holiness of God, and the natural spectacle and its phenomena was offered to him as a theatrical performance in which all were its protagonists. Sydney Andrews, writes: “I do not think that that I will ever contemplate anything as beautiful before finding myself in the celestial city. The columns of this temple sublime as nature were not constructed by man, but were the result of the intervention of Providence, growing inexorably, until the chosen people discovered them, in the heart of the promised West”. As appears in this painting by Leutze,

After the War of Independence, the new Americans took the forest as the cradle of the nation and transformed the Puritan legacy in secular terms. The poets, novelists and painters of the first generation took the infinite extension of the landscape as the theme for their works: savage nature offers a tutelary benevolence to those who know how to recognise in the mountains, valleys and rivers the most precious of themselves. Theology transformed into community ethics, and religion into philosophy and aesthetics of nature. In the retreat of the forests is found the forgotten truth. The painters Cole, Durand, Bierstadt, Church, the novelists Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Henry Wadsworth, Hawthorne, Thoreau, the philosophers Emerson, Longfellow, and the poet William Culler Bryant, narrated the adventures of the first pioneers and glorified the almost eternal trees that, as symbols of freedom, populated the millenary forests. As in this fragment of the poem The Antiquity of Freedom, by Bryant, intimate friend of the painter Cole: ”Here are old trees, tall oaks, and gnarled pines…/ In these peaceful shades / Peaceful, unpruned, immeasurably old / My thoughts go up the long dim path of years / Back to the earliest days of liberty.”
Thomas Cole, the founder of the Hudson School, of Puritan training and ascendance, inaugurated the genre of American landscape painting. Certainly Cole’s natural surroundings were not at all appropriate for the Edenic and pastoral vision that could serve him as a model. Sailing along the Hudson, to Cole and his disciples the panoramas that lay before their eyes were a rare synthesis between a theatrical idea of the wild and an old image of modern industrialization. Their landscapes were imaginary, it could be no other way, as what they sought would have to be found in the far east, not on the Atlantic coast.

Thomas Cole was a native of Lancashire, in England, and moved to America a few years after he was born. Descendant of an old family of “dissidents” (the old Puritans who opposed the English monarchy), he never stopped reading that kind of edifying literature typical of the Puritan sect, especially the work of John Bunyan, theologian and Puritan preacher who wrote Pilgrim’s Progress

Where he describes allegorically and on a Calvinist doctrinal basis the dangers and stages that the Christian goes through to reach the bosom of Christ.

This work, Pilgrim’s Progress, was John Cole’s source of inspiration for the series of paintings on initiation in life as a pilgrimage: from innocence to experience until epiphany.

The cycles of history that make up the vast theme The Course of Empire describe the course of history that goes from primitive Arcadia to the decadence of civilizations, when grass grows again between the stones of the fallen walls.
Asher Durand, disciple of Cole and President of the National Academy in New York, second generation theologian, decided to dedicate himself to painting in order to “reflect without compulsion on the elevated vault of Heaven.” His celebrated Letters on Landscape Painting are a perfect illustration of the diluted transcendentalism he preached in his painting.

“The emergence of our land, beyond its magnificent structure and its functions which ensure our well-being, is replete with noble and holy lessons, only learnt through the light of revelation. It is impossible to contemplate our Earth without arriving at the conviction that the Great Architect of these glorious images has placed them before us as divine attributes.”
In this work “Progress” is an idyllic and pastoral image, in the style of Claude Lorrain, Fragonard or Turner. Progress barely fells any trees, but the panorama continues to maintain the light of Puritan divinity.

One of the celebrated works by Durand, “Kindred Spirits”, is a manifesto of the sublimity of the Hudson Valley, a homage to the memory of Thomas Cole where the landscape brings together the diverse favourite places of Cole and is an exhaustive inventory of the most frequent symbols and emblems. Standing on the precipice, Cole, with palette and stick, is accompanied by the poet William Cullen Bryant. The painting shows the spiritual affinity between the poet and the painter and also the transcendence of nature for the constitution of an American identity.
The return to nature and the attention with which it was considered by Americans in the early 19th century was an idea and an aspiration that had been manifesting itself in Europe since the mid-18th century, since Jean Jacques Rousseau proposed the need to move away from the artifices of civilization which uprooted man from nature and separated him from himself. For Rousseau, as he affirms in The New Eloisa, the sensitive natural order announces “the presence and supreme intelligence of God.” The spectacle of the natural garden allows dialogue in solitude with oneself, prompts an approach to the most intimate and secret of ourselves and what we have in common with other men.
However, the idealization of the landscape in America happened when the presence of man and civilization had made their impact on the heart of nature. When the great Holm oaks, the giant sequoias, the towering fir trees and the extensive prairies ran the risk of extinction was when they aestheticized, preserved, institutionalized and consecrated. This was the case of Yosemite National Park, established by a Congressional decree in 1864 as a national sanctuary. Virgin and local nature was still preserved unspoilt in the heart of the American West – it could be in no other place – and awaited discovery as an “antidote to the poison of industrial society.” For its complete conservation the mines that had been exploited since the 18th century were closed and the Ahwahneechee Indians who had arrived from the east, fleeing from the Puritan hordes, were removed by force. The discovery of Yosemite immediately received poets, painters and photographers who venerated the place and redeemed America from the ignominious Puritan natural destruction. The photographer Carleton Watkins, the painters Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, Frederick Church and the poet John Muir portrayed the forests, mountains and valleys of Yosemite as the natural cathedral of the West.
The photographs by Carleton Watkins exhibited in New York in 1862 had unprecedented success. The gorges and precipices
left the visitors astonished who, accustomed to the epic stories of Fenimore Cooper, saw the photographs as the miraculous appearance of the forests of the West as a sign from God that he had forgiven the Americans and was offering them another opportunity to understand the divinity of their landscape. Although they also showed the impact of man in such a sacred place, they marvelled at the magnitude of the sequoias and saw in them the red columns of the temple of North America.

The idea that the age of the forests is calculated in millennia, and that these were contemporary to the start of the Christian era, strengthened the feeling of its natural holiness.

A correspondent of the Boston Daily Advertiser, in an ecstasy associated with the custom of celebrating the mass of the tabernacle, which takes place in the forest, related the birth of the trees with the birth of Jesus Christ and affirmed: “What an eternity lies before us! The age of these forests is that of the Christian era; perhaps when the angels saw how Bethlehem was illuminated with the Star of the East, their seeds broke the gangue of humus and saw the light on the surface of the Earth.”

Lying in the immense territory of the United States, the national parks would be from that time great dykes that defended the wild space and affirmed the identity of the American people. Modern man, in order to be so, from that moment on had to revere the natural landscapes, as this bestowed on him a dimension close to the sacred, the exhibition and the abstraction of the profane course of life.

Albert Biersadt, of German origin, arrived in America as a very young child, studied painting in Berlin, at the height of recognition of Romantic painting and must have known the work of Caspar David Friedrich. He was the painter who from the moment he discovered the great forests of the American West took them as the exclusive motif and theme of his work, which always takes us back to the German Romantic landscape artists such as Carus, Rungew, Friedrich, Kersting, etc.

As Barbara Novak affirms, German idealism had been too intense to continue influencing the group of American artists, highly inclined to a form of visual transcendentalism.

The Romantic poets and painters liked to experience the sublime feeling provoked by nature when it ascends mountains and delves the abyss. The experience of the mountains has an initiating nature. The dangers confronted, the anguish overcome, the sorrows, provoked an almost religious exaltation.

On a trip to the West that included a short visit to Yosemite, Bierstadt had made notes on the valley and the Rocky Mountains, and back at his studio created this painting that ingenuously shows the images of a far and exotic West with the mass of the mountains of the park. An American style georgic idyll: in other words, a syncretism taken from diverse places, real and imaginary, reconstructed with the verisimilitude necessary to be admitted, if not as real, at least as possible.

Fifteen years later, as a result of the exhibition of photographs by Carleton Watkins, Bierstadt returned to Yosemite, and the character between picturesque and sublime offered him the transcendental nature he had been seeking. Thanks to the use of light and to welcoming and, at the same time, arrogant and proud nature, the landscape transformed into an originating space, in the primordial place, close to Eden, not free from the dangers that contribute to offering a secret, at once hidden and evident.

Rousseau’s reading of man and his relationship with the natural environment was developed by the philosopher Emmanuel Kant, who affirmed that nature moves us through the symbolism of its forms and colours and, as if it were an artist, does not show in its language the truth and secret it holds. For Kant, the experience of the landscape is awakened by the seduction that nature exercises on the imagination, sensuality, memory and culture of the viewer. In the aesthetic experience of nature all human complexity is placed in activity, from the most sensual to the most intellectual of our motivations.

Kant broadened the concept of beauty embracing other categories not compatible with the harmony and serenity of classical beauty. This new aesthetic trend offered a new sensibility to the landscape. From the peaceful fields and harmonious nature, attention shifted to wild and rugged places; the sea and its storms, the unapproachable rocky places, seemed to defy the presence of man by the unleashing of uncontrollable energies. The mountain inspired feelings of insecurity and anguish faced with the magnitude of the rocks suspended over the void that opened up at your feet.

32. Moran, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, 1872
The feeling of the sublime which, according to Kant, is manifested through the momentary suspension of the life faculties, is provoked by the aesthetic appreciation of the magnitudes. Nature is sublime in those phenomena whose intuition itself bears the idea of infinitude.

33. Moran, Mojave Wall

“Rocks audaciously suspended and threatening, storm clouds that gather in the sky and advance with thunder and lightening, volcanoes at the height of their devastating power, hurricanes that leave desolation in their wake, the limitless ocean roaring with anger, a profound waterfall in a powerful river, etc… reduce our faculty of resistance to an insignificant smallness, compared with its force.

34. Moran, Niagara Falls

However, the more fearful its appearance the more attractive it is, so that it can be observed from a safe place; and we call these objects sublime because they elevate the faculties of the soul above their ordinary middle term and makes us discover in ourselves a faculty of resistance of a totally distinct nature, which gives us the courage to measure ourselves against almighty nature.”

35. William Keith

This is why we return to the natural places as places of pilgrimage. Kant affirms that we then rediscover what civilization had made us forget: the identity of the self and of the world, of the subject and the object, of the spirit and of nature. Rediscovering the lost unity, from which we had been separated is, above all, resorting to aesthetic intuition and, through art, seeing the soul of the world gradually revealed in nature and man. The philosophy of nature is inseparable from the philosophy of art, given that art is the prolongation of the work of nature on man, and in man the divine manifestation of nature is prolonged.
Together with the metaphysical aspect of German idealism, brought up to date by the philosophers and painters Emerson, Cole, Durand, Bierstadt, Longfellow; George Perkins Marsh (1801-1882) in his work Man and Nature; or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action, published in 1864, decisively collaborated in the American Conservation Movement: faced with the predominant idea among geographers of the time that the physical appearance of the Earth was almost completely the result of natural phenomena, Marsh [1965(1864)] emphasised human beings as important agents of change; man changed the natural complex and the changes in nature had a decisive influence on man.
In particular, Marsh called attention to the dangers of the indiscriminate felling of forests, as the erosion and alteration of the system of natural drainage broke down the productivity of the land. He insisted that nature did not always cure itself; he did not reject all exploitative activity, but advocated a “scientific” management of resources. Human action was capable of restoring natural harmonies, and this action had to come, more than from state intervention, from the very educated interest in the vision of nature as something that worked together with man to his benefit.
As well as Marsh, the writer, philosopher and naturalist Henry David Thoreau expressed with great acuteness the delight in the experience of virgin nature —as a symbol of the sublime—. The most influential work by Thoreau, Walden or Life in the Woods (1854), was written after he spent two years in a cabin beside a small lake called Walden, near Concord (Massachusetts), dedicated to covering his basic needs and to freeing himself from the rush and anguish of the cities. The freedom and charm of nature —according to Thoreau— could be found equally in the landscapes transformed by the hand of man close to the cities and in the uninhabited forests of Maine, but in any case “only in the wildness is the preservation of the world.” For Thoreau man could better be defined as a part of nature than as a member of society, and he only truly found himself in the depths of the virgin forest, achieving the unification of his mind with the spiritual dimension of nature.
This is for Thoreau, Emerson, Cole and Cooper the only way of constructing an identity. An identity that was initially forged in the search for utopia where all desires could be realized. A utopia forged with a religious, dogmatic and agonizing foundation that opened a path through the obstacles that nature interposed and which after submitting it to its needs revered it as its own transcendental past.