Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • (delightful music)

  • - [Guide] We're in the Amon Carter Museum of American Art

  • looking at a large landscape painting by Thomas Cole

  • called, The Hunter's Return,

  • and we can see the hunter returning from his hunt,

  • walking toward this lovely sunlit cottage.

  • - [Art Guide] This cottage is the home

  • to a very settled family.

  • You can see that from the vegetable garden,

  • the dogs that are trying to sneak a little bit of food.

  • - I love the child playing

  • with the dog in the foreground too.

  • There's a real sense of domestic happiness here.

  • - Right, unless you've settled the land,

  • it's unusual to see multiple generations,

  • including an infant,

  • so this represents a family that has put down roots.

  • - But we are surrounded by the wilderness,

  • the wilderness that Cole so loved

  • about the American landscape.

  • - I like to talk about Cole

  • as the first real environmentalist artist.

  • In the 19th century, it was common to go abroad to Europe,

  • and Cole's best friend was the poet William Cullen Bryant,

  • and he said, when you go to Europe

  • you're going to see everywhere, the trace of man.

  • Everywhere human civilization,

  • in the form of buildings and ruins,

  • and what he said was unique about American culture was

  • untouched nature, so he encouraged Cole,

  • when he went abroad, to keep that earlier,

  • wilder image bright, of the American wilderness.

  • - Now, of course, Native Americans were here,

  • and this wasn't this untouched landscape.

  • - Absolutely, but how do you make a distinctive

  • mark as an American artist, for an American audience,

  • you do it by recording the places

  • that they may not have the

  • luxury of experiencing from their city homes.

  • - He's got everything here that

  • you would want in the landscape.

  • He's got this fabulous sky,

  • these lovely touches of clouds,

  • this mountain range that is turning purplish,

  • as the sun sets behind it.

  • A lake in the middle ground,

  • what looks like a little waterfall.

  • These lovely autumn trees framing this cottage

  • that's drenched in sunlight.

  • One's eye travels through this in

  • real enjoyment, and pleasure.

  • - Though he's showing this wilderness,

  • we know by the 1840's when he's painting this,

  • this is a nostalgic view,

  • because, in fact, the railroad is developing.

  • Tanneries have populated the East Coast,

  • and the lumber merchants are deforesting the landscape.

  • - This was something that Cole returned to again and again.

  • This idea that, by necessity, the United States had to

  • transform nature and make it useful,

  • and build things like the Erie Canal,

  • that enabled the trade between the

  • Northeast and the Midwest.

  • So this inevitable economic development,

  • that he feared and worried about,

  • and longed for America, I think,

  • to stay very much the way he pictures it in this landscape,

  • but even here, we have the sense of what's to come.

  • - It's a conflicted painting,

  • because in the foreground you see the results,

  • in exaggerated form, of these giant trees that have

  • been felled for the march of civilization.

  • In fact, it was the very year

  • that this was painted, 1845,

  • that the term Manifest Destiny is coined.

  • - Many of the landscape painters were

  • seeking new frontiers to continue

  • that idea of uncultivated lands,

  • and that was becoming more and more

  • difficult on the East Coast,

  • because there were very few lands that were uncultivated.

  • So there was this desire, and encouragement,

  • for people to move westward,

  • and that's the idea of Manifest Destiny.

  • - So we might, at first,

  • think that this is a painting of a specific scene.

  • - A lot of the landscapes are an amalgam of many,

  • many different trips into the out of doors,

  • and the memories those artists

  • had of those specific locations.

  • Cole himself lived in the

  • Hudson River Valley, in the Catskills,

  • so you might look at the autumn foliage as looking like

  • something that Cole would see from his house,

  • but it's really a patchwork quilt

  • of his experiences and other artworks.

  • Including those of European artists, like Claude Lorrain,

  • and works that he would have seen in engravings.

  • People often ask me, how do you know

  • that Cole was an environmentalist?

  • Is that just something that you are

  • basing on evidence that's in the picture's itself?

  • In fact, in 1836, he wrote an essay

  • for the American monthly magazine,

  • called, 'Essay on American Scenery',

  • about America as an Eden,

  • and his concerns that the wilderness would be disappearing.

  • - He wrote, I cannot but express

  • my sorrow that the beauty of such

  • landscapes are quickly passing away.

  • The ravages of the axe are daily increasing.

  • The most noble scenes are made desolate,

  • and oftentimes with a wantonness and barbarism

  • scarcely credible in a civilized nation.

  • This is a regret rather than a complaint;

  • such is the road society has to travel.

  • - Then he says, there are those who

  • regret that with the improvements of cultivation

  • the sublimity of the wilderness should pass away.

  • We use the word sublime,

  • in a holy, positive way now.

  • We block the association that it had, that there was both

  • beauty and danger involved in the landscape.

  • - There is this idea in the early years of the 19th century,

  • of God's presence in nature.

  • - The religious sentiment associated with the landscape

  • was very much part of Cole's vocabulary.

  • - So you can imagine too,

  • with this idea of seeing God's handy work in nature,

  • that this transformation of the United States

  • into an industrial culture would arouse anxiety.

  • - It's very much in evidence the 'Essay on American Scenery'

  • as this experience of God through natural works,

  • and the dangers of disrupting that.

  • (pleasant music)

(delightful music)

Subtitles and vocabulary

Click the word to look it up Click the word to find further inforamtion about it