'LOOKING ALWAYS AT WHAT IS TO BE SEEN': HENRY THOREAU AND MID-NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN LANDSCAPE PAINTING (LUMINISM, HUDSON RIVER)

This study demonstrates that Thoreau's writings contain landscape descriptions that parallel and anticipate the methods and moods of most mid-nineteenth-century American landscape paintings, including those that view nature devoid of spirit. Such parallels provide striking evidence of Thoreau's complex response to nature.;Chapter three considers Thoreau's relation to the Hudson River School. Like Thoreau, the Hudson River artists reinforced the notion of nature as the sensuous image and revelation of God by concentrating on the harmony, contrasts, colors, and details of nature. Though such descriptions do not occur very often in Thoreau's published prose, they do occur regularly in the Journal and play a significant role in his early essay, "A Walk to Wachusett," demonstrating that he could find beauty and meaning in the harmony and details of certain rather "conventional" vistas, as did the Hudson River artists.;Chapters four and five examine the luministlike landscapes in Thoreau's writings. Like the luminist artists, Thoreau well knew the contemplative sublimity of those moments in nature when stillness, space, reflections, and light combine to suggest the infinite and eternal. The important role that such moments play in A Week and Walden demonstrates that the luminist landscape was for him the best landscape in which to realize the ideal in the real.;Chapter six concentrates on those landscapes in "Ktaadn" and Cape Cod that present nature as an amoral, indifferent force and thus anticipate the paintings of the monumental sublime by Frederic Church and Martin Heade. This darker view of nature reveals that side of Thoreau that was willing to face the possibility that man holds only a tenuous place in the universe.;As an introduction of Thoreau's interest in aesthetics, chapter two examines his mixed feelings toward the writings of William Gilpin. Though Thoreau could admire the descriptive skills of Gilpin, he ultimately grew weary of the artist's coldly rational method of regarding nature in terms of foregrounds and backgrounds.;To examine Thoreau's verbal landscapes in the context of mid-nineteenth-century American landscape painting is to discover the meaning and significance of traditional, Transcendental, and naturalistic descriptive passages in Thoreau's writings.