The Spirit and the Vision The Influence of Christian Romanticism on the Development of 19th-Century American Art

by Apostolos-Cappadona, Diane

• ISBN13: 9781555409753
• ISBN10: 155540975X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1995-01-02
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Christian Romanticism was a response to social changes within nineteenth-century American culture, including women's literacy, spiritual domesticity, and the idealization of childhood. This book examines the work of three artists of the first American landscape tradition -- Washington Alston, Thomas Cole, and Frederic Edwin Church -- and two clergymen -- Horace Bushnell and Henry Ward Beecher. It assesses their understanding of the artist as a social and moral teacher, the didactic role of art in society more generally, and a God who acts in history. The author finds that the art of Allston, Cole, and Church expressed and served the dominant middle-class religious ideology of the time -- Christian Romanticism. This distinguishes their work from more elitist and regional work.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction	p. 1
The Emergence of Christian Romanticism in Antebellum America	p. 13
The Creation of a Christian Romantic Culture: The Clergy, An American Art, Nature and the Home	p. 39
Entry into the Garden: Washington Allston and the Emergence of a Christian Romantic Aesthetic in America	p. 69
The Garden Regained: Thomas Cole and Landscape Painting as Christian Romantic Rhetoric	p. 105
The Return to the Wilderness: Frederic Edwin Church and the Transformation of the American Landscape	p. 171
Conclusions	p. 203
Bibliography	p. 207
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