Kindred Spirits

There is no such “right of property” possible in a republic. . . . To fence out a genial eye from any corner of the earth which Nature has lovingly touched with that pencil which never repeats itself—to shut up a glen or a waterfall for one man’s exclusive knowing and enjoying—to lock up trees and glades, shady paths and haunts...

~The tremendous and ongoing popularity of representations of non-Indigenous hunters in both the United States and Australia first arose in the early and late decades of the nineteenth century, respectively. These images ranged from small narrative vignettes in the margins of wilderness landscapes to sporting scenes proper featuring...

~~OVERVIEW
Centuries of extraction—of fur, timber, fish, precious metals and minerals, rubber, guano and an array of staple agricultural crops such as tobacco, sugar, coffee, cotton and cacao—had by 1800 left their mark on the physical landscape of the Americas...

The decade of the 1850s was, for many, a period of a satisfying coming of age. The Industrial Revolution, which had developed in the United States a bit later than in England, had matured, and the nation was on its way to being a global economic presence (despite a financial depression in 1857). The Gadsden Purchase in 1853 transferred Mexican land (this time without going to war) to the US...

Frederic Church left the United States for a six-month sketching tour of Jamaica in April 1865. Although the artist created a voluminous portfolio of studies, he produced only one major canvas from...

~~Before we, too, abandon Ariadne on her desert isle, let us pause to consider her as the foundation of nineteenth-century American landscape painting. The future wife of Bacchus, nature god of wine and revelry, Ariadne, in all her sumptuous availability, is the trope of bountiful America ready for the taking. Such availability, in...