Description
Book SynopsisThe End of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century America examines the dissolution of landscape painting in the late nineteenth-century United States. Maggie M. Cao explores the pictorial practices that challenged, mourned, or revised the conventions of landscape painting, a major cultural project for nineteenth-century Americans. Through rich analysis of artworks at the genre's unsettling limitslandscapes that self-destruct, masquerade as currency, or even take flightCao shows that experiments in landscape played a crucial role in the American encounter with modernity. Landscape is the genre through which American art most urgently sought to come to terms with the modern world.
Trade Review"The case Cao makes is too complicated to reproduce here; one detail will have to suffice: the decorative butterfly unexpectedly echoes the apparition of the steamboat Ancon as it lists off the shores of Alaska, reminding the artist of his own artistic dead end. Imaginative leaps such as this abound in this brilliant book; Cao makes them with breathtaking historical sophistication." * Journal of American History *
"It must be said that [Cao's] arguments are frequently highly creative and imaginative." * Winterthur Portfolio *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments • ix
Prologue: What End? • 1
Introduction: Inventions and Failures • 9
PART I
1. Closure: Albert Bierstadt’s Last Pictures • 31
2. Sabotage: Martin Johnson Heade and Frederic Church • 68
PART II
3. Insolvency: Ralph Blakelock’s Economic Accretion • 113
4. Camouflage: Abbott Handerson Thayer and John Singer Sargent • 153
Afterword: Un-landing Landscape • 199
Notes • 207
List of Illustrations • 247
