Wilderness as Art: Painting- Reading Reflection

 I am glad I chose this reading because I had to study this subject for my major. In my Introduction to Environmental Studies class, we focused on how the Hudson River Valley School slowly redefined what was considered beautiful through paintings of large and sublime wilderness. Learning about the European history of art and wilderness was interesting because we never covered that topic in class. By reading the Italian and English sections, it is shown that the American form of capturing nature was incredibly behind these other countries. Granted, America was an incredibly new country at the time, and for many years during this phenomenon, they were not a country. Nevertheless, I expected colonials, who came from all over, to pick up some of these ideas and transfer them to the United States. In some ways, they did, like bringing with them perfectly manicured lawns desire to tame nature that came from England, but I guess I expected more.

The Hudson River Valley School and their work towards creating landscapes that were consumed by nature, not just as a backdrop, aided the environmental movement greatly as people began to see untouched nature as beautiful. Since the creation of the United States, the wilderness has been seen as ugly. Colonials thought the untamed forests to be evil and of the devil, and their goal was to tame it and build upon them to turn them beautiful and something of God. These feelings arose in several different forms over the decades in the name of progress. Without the landscape movement in Europe and again in the 1800s-1900s in the US, our conservation efforts might not be as strong as they are today.