A wilderness for all: The transmuting and transmitting of wilderness imagery by print media and material culture for antebellum America

American landscape art was largely born of a naive tradition. What made it unique was the melding of a quasi-historical narrative with the uniquely exotic wilderness depicted. The American artist's experiences in the wild were contributive to the discovery of an imagery that elevated the status of landscape above the more aesthetically esteemed historical painting; a genre that had only ever treated the subject of landscape as ancillary. These conditions set American art apart from its colonial antecedents.;Post-colonial and antebellum fine art and literature identified the wilderness as among the defining characteristics of the American experience. Peopled by exotic others and replete with details that qualified it as both picturesque and sublime; it was depicted as explicitly biblical in appearance. And, as prescribed by a concurrent rhetoric, it was, in either virtual or actual form, to serve a didactic role through its moral and intellectual offerings to the era's seemingly corrupted industrial and urbanized society. Literature portrayed a wilderness that affected individuals to the point of transforming them into something defined as quintessentially American and heroic. Legend and myth as well as the defining characteristics of real wilderness locations like the Catskills, the White Mountains, and the Adirondacks further distinguished the home-brewed flavor of an imagery born of Romanticism and depicted in antebellum fine art and literature. Print media and material culture simultaneously transmuted and transmitted this imagery. Wallpaper brought floral and foliage motifs as well as landscape vignettes and the scenic to homes for decoration as well as armchair travel. Inexpensive lithographs brought imitations of it to the public en masse. Print media promoted not only a rhetoric that touted wilderness as public necessity but assisted in the realization of plans for social reform that included, among other things, urban tree planting, botanizing, and agricultural communes. Rural cemeteries realized in three-dimensions yet other imitative versions of wilderness imagery, including rare examples of marble funerary art as well as an engineered topography and floral and foliage arrangement to achieve the picturesque. This nurtured a greater affinity with the wilderness among a citizenry and served in an evolving American cultural identity.