Thomas Cole and the Landscape of Evangelical Print

This chapter defines the central concept of evangelical space. It shows how the evangelical print that flooded the nation in the 1820s and 1830s combined with an emerging landscape art culture that produced spectacular visualizations of the evangelical spatial imagination. It also mentions illustrated religious tracts, almanacs, and Bibles alongside one of the most iconic landscape paintings of the period, Thomas Cole's View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm. The chapter reveals that landscape art enacted a symbolic synthesis of two competing impulses in northern evangelical culture: the individual believer's inward pilgrimage toward God and the collective work of global missionary activism. It reconstructs an immersive form of looking closely that is tied to evangelical reading practices and shows how devout viewers used the landscape to orient themselves in sacred history.

Matthew Baigell, The Implacable Urge to Defame: Cartoon Jews in the American Press, 1877–1935. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017. 240 pp. Matthew Baigell, Social Concern and Left Politics in Jewish American Art, 1880–1940. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2015. 280 pp.

Matthew Baigell has accomplished the enviable achievement of juggling two distinguished careers as an art historian. He first came to prominence as a scholar of the arts of the United States, writing both on canonical painters (among them, 19th-century landscapists Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt) and on 20...

From Place to Presence: Landscapes and Transcendence

Ranging from the Transcendental and Romantic writing of the nineteenth century through the experimental verse of Gerard Manley Hopkins and the iconic depictions of westward expansion in the landscape painting of Thomas Cole (and the Hudson River School), to the rural poetics of Robert Frost, this article argues that poets, like painters, must not merely sketch or describe the sublime or transcendental nature of a scene; they must capture its visual and emotional impact, and – through some artistic device – reenact its transcendence to move the reader or observer from place to presence.