Winslow Homer
BY THE SEA
Oil on panel
6 1/4 x 12 1/4 in
15.9 x 31.1 cm
Available at Surovek Gallery
Researchers at Harvard, Penn State and other universities have been studying American landscape paintings to measure the geological, topographal and ecological changes in the American landscape.
Landscape painting in America became a prominent art form in the late 19th century. Thomas Cole (1801-1848), who immigrated to the United States in 1818, painted the natural settings of the Catskills and is credited with the founding of the Hudson River School of artists.
Cole witnessed many changes to the forest scenery, to which he felt a strong emotional connection. “Our doom is near…” he wrote in 1941. “These slumbering mountains, resting in our arms, Shall naked glare beneath the scorching sun, And all their wimpling rivulets be dry. No more the deer shall haunt these bosky glens, Nor the pert squirrel chatter near his store. A few short years! —our ancient race shall be, Like Israel’s, scattered ‘mong the tribes of men.”
What Cole witnessed were forests in the northeastern US being transformed into agricultural fields. According to Edward K. Faison, a researcher at Harvard, populations increased and woodlands decreased. “By mid-century every New England state except for Maine was less than 50% forested." he wrote, "Southern New England and Vermont, at their nadir, wereonly 30 to 35% forested and by the 1880s New York state was reported to be less than 25% forested.”
The good news is that much has been done, since Cole's lament, to improve the ecosystem. “If he were alive today,” Faison writes, “Thomas Cole would be amazed to see more forest cover in New England than he saw in 1836. But he would once again recognize and lament the signs of deforestation. History has inadvertently given us a second chance to live in a forested New England, but there will be nothing inadvertent about the efforts needed to keep these forests standing.”
American landscape artists, like Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait (1819-1905) who painted the Adirondacks, Winslow Homer (1836-1910) who painted the sea and sky in Maine, Wilson Henry Irvine (1869 – 1936) who painted in Old Lyme, Connecticut, Milton Avery who lived in Manhattan and painted his summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts and Maitland, Florida, Anthony Thieme (1888-1954) who painted in Rockport, Massachusetts, Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) who painted in Manhattan and Missouri, Adolf Dehn (1895-1968) who painted in Minnesota, John Whorf (1903-1959) who painted in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, Wolf Kahn (1927-2020) who painted the beauty of his Brattleboro, Vermont summer home in his Manhattan studio, Hugh O’Neill (b. 1959) who paints in both his Belfast, Ireland and Palm Beach Gardens homes and Scott Kelley who lives in Maine and visits the Everglades to capture the beauty of the flora and fauna, each contribute to our appreciation and respect for the land that surrounds us.
References:
Thomas Cole. Lament of the forest. Knickerbocker Magazine . 1841.
Steve Lundeberg. Art, science merge in Oregon State study of 19th-century landscape paintings’ ecological integrity. Oregon State University. September 13, 2023.
John Bonehill. Stephen Daniels. Projecting London: Turner and Greenwich. Oxford Art Journal. June 2012.\Eva Amsen. Art Historians Join Ecologists to Study Landscapes of the Past. Forbes. September 18, 2023.
Edward K. Faison. Seeing the Landscape in Landscape Art. Harvard Forest/Arnoldia. December 11, 2015.
D. Camuffo. Canaletto's paintings open a new window on the relative sea-level rise in Venice. Journal of Cultural Heritage. 2001.
Mark A. Cheetham. Landscape into Eco Art: Articulations of Nature Since the ’60s.
Penn State University Press. 2018
