Full Description
The 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 limits—landscapes that self-destruct, masquerade as currency, or even take flight—Cao 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.
Contents
Acknowledgments • 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
