Born, Wolfgang: American landscape painting: an interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948)

This bit of mild picturesqueness seems
inspired by Earl's English predecessor
Richard Wilson. We can take it for
granted that the proud maker of the
chiaroscuro sketch knew Burke’s then
famous Inquiry into the Origin of Our
Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful *
which, since its appearance in 1756, had
conditioned the Anglo-Saxon world for
the wave of romanticism which later on
was to sweep the earth.

The American colonies, apart from ser-
mons, political speeches, folk ballads,
and other unpretentious productions,
had no literature of their own. Landscape
painting was in a similarly humble state
of development. There were wall paint-
ings and overmantles * which occasion-
ally showed landscapes, but they are
mainly decorative and thus outside the
scope of this discussion. The roots of the
American landscape proper were the top-
ographical drawing, water color, and
print.” Views of harbors count among
the earliest American landscapes,“ as is
shown by a somewhat clumsy picture in
the New York Historical Society (Fig.
16). This painting stems from the middle
of the eighteenth century and recalls
Dutch engravings which, without any
doubt, were well known in New York.
The Dutch models, however, were not
the only influences which inspired the
topographical landscape in America. The
demand for authentic representations of
points of interest was general and stimu-
lated the development of the topographi-
cal engraving in the second half of the
eighteenth and the beginning of the nine-
teenth century to a degree of perfection
which matched that of the average Euro-
pean production and did not differ from
it much in character. The harbor view re-


in keeping with the fact that at that time

the East Coast was almost synonymous
with American civilization. Not far to the
west began the wilderness. What the
buyer of an engraving wanted was fidel-
ity, and the topographical engraving
gave it to him. The style of this type of
engraving was sober and clear, and this
is true also of the style of the painters of
views, whose works like those of Thomas
Birch © were derived from these topo-
graphical engravings. Birch was born in
England in 1779, the son of an engraver
of views, and came with his father to
America in 1794. He began his career as
a painter of city views more or less in the
manner of his father; an example is his
view of Philadelphia in the Historical
Society of Pennsylvania (Fig. 17). It is
dated 1800. The tradition lasted into the
second quarter of the nineteenth century
but gradually its austerity softened. This
austerity, it should be remembered, was
part of the aesthetic tenets of classicism,
the period style that controlled the art of
the western world at the turn of the cen-
tury. In his later life—he lived until 1851
—Birch painted seascapes of a decidedly
dramatic character, such as the Ship-
wreck of 1829 (Fig. 18). He then used a
much richer inventory of tones and
blended them subtly rather than clinging
to the flat, silhouetted, and static mode of
expression prevalent in his youth. Birch’s
evolution echoed the evolution from the
glassy seascape of the eighteenth-
century French painter, Joseph Vernet,
whom he admired, to the atmospheric
seascape of Turner—a product of roman-
ticism,® the first European literary and
artistic movement to find a creative echo
in America after its independence.

The romantic poet as well as the ro-
mantic painter was in search of the


in history and nature. America offered