In 1836, Thomas Cole published his manifesto on how to “read” nature, titled “Essay on American Scenery.” In that famous text, he argues that

This passage, and the manifesto more generally, relies on some key concepts and distinctions that continued to drive American Romanticism in the late 1830s, especially as it took shape in the art of Thomas Cole and then the Transcendentalist philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

American Romanticism and the emerging Environmental Imagination

The passage above, from Cole’s 1836 essay, suggests the binary: nature vs. civilization. It’s only in “rural nature,” Cole argues, that individuals can fully satiate their intellects. In the late 1830s, this nature-civilization binary would broaden to include the distinction between nature and human civilization more generally.

One of the key assumptions behind this distinction is that “nature”—especially things like grass, flowers, and trees—has an intimate connection with the divine. Puritans such as Anne Bradstreet contemplated the divine while in nature, but Bradstreet’s proto-nature poem, “Contemplations,” views the natural as something to be transcended, a mere symbol of something higher rather than intimately linked with the divine.

Cole, Emerson, and other American Romantics began to see a tighter link between oak trees, grass, and the invisible world. Something about civilization began to seem more distant from the divine than the natural world. This feeling became increasingly emphasized just as the Industrial Revolution was reshaping the United States and Jacksonian democracy was stretching the extent of the young nation into something more akin to an empire. The new railroads being built across the Eastern states and the Eerie Canal became two key touchstones for artists and intellectuals wary of how quickly the nation was growing.

In 1836-37, Cole completed one of his most famous paintings, View on the Catskill, Early Autumn (Fig. 1), begun in the same year as his “Essay on American Scenery.”

This painting displays a lush, pastoral scene. The trees and shrubs cover the landscape so densely that much of the image is shaded. In the foreground we find two female figures in a leisurely repose. Behind them, on the other side of the river, someone appears to be herding horses. A canoe drifts on the water.

When Cole painted this scene the horizon already looked closer to what we find in his 1843 painting, River in the Catskills (Fig. 2).

The 1843 painting is much lighter, with the foliage vastly depleted. Homes dot the landscape, and the railroad crosses over the creek, now covered by a bridge. Instead of wild horses, we find a dog. But foremost in the painting we find a male figure with an axe. To his left, instead of the foregrounded tree that overhung the leisurely women, we find a stump.

In Nature and Culture: American Landscape Painting, 1825-1875, Barbara Novak suggests that these two paintings show the fall “from mythic time to human time”.^[1] Novak provides a helpful quote from Cole written in a letter from the same year: “they are cutting down all the trees in the beautiful valley on which I have looked so often with a loving eye”^[2]. The axe became for Cole an emblem of empire and industrialization, while the stump became “a symbol of the march of civilization”.^[3]

We can find in this proto-environmental imagination not only a bourgeoning “ecological consciousness,” but also a kind of proto-authenticity language. To be human is to be closer to nature. This is recognizably Romantic, of course, but the flavor of authenticity we find in American Romantics such as Cole is extremely precise. The railroad and axe are tools that make citizens forget about their relationship to nature—which, Cole suggests in his 1836 manifesto, is integral to establishing a right relation with the divine.

The context of Industrialization, with projects like the railroad and Eerie Canal, provide an interpretive framework for making sense of the search for wilderness purity we often find in American Romanticism. Critics such as William Cronon point out that a growing ecological consciousness emerged in response to Industrialization. In fact it’s possible to view picturesque paintings such as Cole’s View on the Catskill, Early Autumn, as an elegy to the disappearing frontier and lament about 19th-century capitalism. Cole was not literally painting what he saw, but rather what he wished he was still able to see. Cronon argues:

In this view, the idea of a pastoral or sublime “wilderness” untouched by civilization is itself a historical invention. We can trace that idea to this period of Western history, taking shape in the British Romantics, but perfected by Americans around the 1830s. According to Cronon, we find this same binary fueling the “wilderness era” projects of John Muir in the late 19th-century, when it would become integral to the “preservationist ethic.”

The following video, by Smart History, offers a great visual supplement to the information above:

Thomas Cole’s “series” paintings

Some of Cole’s most ambitious works were presented as tightly-orchestrated “series,” with multiple panels designed to be displayed alongside one another. The first series is his most famous, Course of Empire. (Our own chapter on Thomas Cole includes each installment and I suggest taking a quick look there before continuing.)

Begun in 1836, the series culminates in the painting Desolation (Fig. 3).

The image feels gothic, with ancient ruins dotting the landscape. Shrubs, trees, and vines are slowly covering the ruins, suggesting that, in time, they will be completely submerged by nature.

Desolation was the fourth and final installment, preceded by The Savage State (1834), The Arcadian or Pastoral State (1834), and The Consummation of Empire (1836). Most scholars agree that Cole’s ideal society is represented by the The Arcadian or Pastoral State, an idealized version of ancient classical living, with shepherds, a port, a temple, and people dancing. There’s enough business to suggest industry, but the landscape still mostly dominates human activity. Civilization remains within nature. With The Consummation of Empire, human activity has completely overtaken nature. Nearly all natural elements have been obliterated by construction projects. Taken as a whole, the series walks the viewer through the progress of civilization. The final two paintings (The Consummation of Empire and Desolation) are apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic. The series is of decline, with a climactic ending and denouement.

One thing that’s interesting about the series is that the ending, with Desolation, very obviously points to the beginning of the series, The Savage State. The course of empire, it seems, is cyclical. A cyclical understanding of human history was proposed by Giambattista Vico in Scienza nuova (1725). But Novak points out that the belief that “time was organic” permeated British, German, and American Romanticism. Just as a flower has various cycles of growth and decay, so do individuals and societies.^[4]. Perhaps even empire is like a flower.

Yet flowers don’t experience apocalypse. Only civilizations do. And Cole was particularly fond of both seasonal and apocalyptic-redemptive tropes. His The Voyage of Life series (1842) maps to the different “seasons” of life, but it’s also framed by a cycle of innocence (childhood), flourishing (youth), trials (adulthood), and redemption at end of life (old age). He also began a series in the mid to late 1840s, The Cross and the World, that juxtaposes the journey of a “worldly” vs. a “spiritual” pilgrim. Both sketches end climactically: the spiritual pilgrim faces a bright, redemptive sky while the worldly pilgrim confronts a dark, foreboding angel of death.

With Cole and other Romantics during this period of American history, we can see a certain overlay of the seasonal and eschatological (relating to judgment, arc of history, etc.). Decay becomes apocalyptic. Rejuvenation after decay becomes redemptive and has echoes of the Kingdom of God. Life is seasonal but also has direction. This somewhat paradoxical relationship between the seasonality of life and the promise of redemption was explored earlier in American literature, by Anne Bradstreet’s “Contemplations,” but her Puritan imagination was much less hopeful that the world’s natural rhythms mapped so easily onto Christian theology. Cole and other Romantics, by contrast, revel in nature-divine hybridity.

That level of comfort suggests what “Christianity” came to mean, in the mid 19th-century, was undergoing a revolution. Ralph Waldo Emerson would make that revolution more obvious.

Thomas Cole and the 19th-Century Sublime

Perhaps the simplest way to appreciate the difference between Bradstreet’s Puritan use of emblems in “Contemplations” and the visual imagination of Cole and other Romantics is by focusing on the emerging importance of the “sublime.” Chapter 3 of Novak’s Nature and Culture provides an excellent overview of how discussions about the sublime evolved throughout the 18th through 19th centuries.

Stage 1. Edmund Burke, Kant, and the sublime as a matter of taste: Burke’s 1757 treatise, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Beautiful and Sublime is massively influential, even today. Here, Burke associates the sublime with “fear, gloom, and majesty.” At this stage, it’s primarily a psychological phenomenon, a matter of taste or “esthetics.” But it also intimated an “overwhelming divinity” that looms over the observer. By contrast, humanity feels small and “insignificant.” It creates a feeling of awe.^[5]

Landscape painters, artists, and travel writers would evoke this sublimity when referring to “cataracts, earthquakes, fires, storms, thunder, volcanoes.” Immanuel Kant, in Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), famously connects this sense of the sublime with pure reason. Whereas the “beautiful” corresponds to our everyday understanding of right relations, order, and what’s fitting for natural objects, the “sublime” corresponds to our capacity for freedom. It also suggests an invisible divinity beyond nature.

An Orientalized vision of nature as “wild and savage” became associated with Burke and Kant’s sublime. The “unknown” more generally could feel sublime, as it often evokes terror and awe, but also fascination and curiosity. These elements also make the sublime a natural fit for the 18th-century gothic, which specialized in hidden spaces and things.

Stage 2. The 19th-Century “Christianization” of the sublime: According to Novak, the Second Great Awakening influenced the sublime by adding a certain level of “pious morality.” Climactic happenings in nature became associated with the “noisy conversions of the evangelical revival especially prevalent in the upstate New York area that spawned so many Hudson River painters … .” The natural sublime becomes apocalyptic during this period, an opportunity to experience revival and participate in that “shouting, biting, groaning, etc.”^[6] The sublime became more explicitly religious in the Hudson River School and in the writings of other Romantic thinkers.

Stage 3. 19th-Centuiry Romantics generalize the sublime: The final shift in the understanding of the sublime was also undertaken by Romantic figures like Thomas Cole. Novak specifically refers to Cole’s 1836 essay “Essay on American Scenery,” which refers to a Nature that’s “both sublime and sanctified,” and the artist is tasked with revealing “the hidden glory” of God. This sounds similar to the apocalyptic sense of the sublime, but Novak notes a key shift in Cole’s essay: here he also introduces the idea that these pious revelations may not always be apocalyptic. Confronting two lakes, he becomes

Cole is suggesting here that sublimity might have a tranquil side to it. This extension of the sublime to encompass even tranquil scenes transforms its connotation into a highly suggestive idea—that divine revelations can be found everywhere, if the observer maintains the right mindset and posture. Novak claims this idea might owe in part to the revival of Meister Eckhart, a Christian mystic beloved by Emerson and other Romantics.

This new sense of the divine radically transforms the requirements of what counts. Whereas Burke and Kant’s definitions helped quickly identify certain paroxysms of nature as “sublime,” this emerging mystical sense extends the term to encompass nearly any natural encounter. The key requirement, in this new sense of the sublime, is that it occasions something revelatory—anything can become an oracle at any moment. Emerson would become the greatest spokesman for this new mystical understanding of the sublime.

What Novak doesn’t mention, but what’s highly relevant for students of American literature, is that, with this new Romantic “mystical” sublime, “emblems” (concrete symbols) take on a whole new meaning. Bradstreet’s “Contemplations” famously searches for which natural symbol might adequately capture, as an emblem, the nature of divinity. She suggests a “stately oak” might be fitting, but then directs the reader’s gaze upwards. Later she suggests a “river” might help connote eternity. But in the end nothing concrete does justice to her intended object—the transcendental signifier that is her God. But Cole, Emerson, and other mystically-inspired artists would discover in these same natural objects a plethora of revelations. Anything could become oracular, Emerson would discover.