Acadia by James Kaiser

Author:James Kaiser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel guide to Acadia National Park and Mount Desert Island, Maine.
Publisher: Destination Press
Published: 2018-07-16T16:00:00+00:00

The painters of the Hudson River School not only introduced Mount Desert Island to the masses in the 1800s, they also helped launch the American conservation movement. Two hundred years earlier, when the Puritans first arrived in New England, wilderness was viewed as a sinister, dangerous place—and back then it often was. The Puritans believed it was their moral duty to tame the wilderness so religious communities could flourish. But even after the landscape had been tamed, their harsh view of nature persisted, and generations of Americans grew up viewing the frontier as an obstacle to be conquered. But as more and more pristine wilderness disappeared, a backlash began to develop.

Leading the charge were landscape painters such as Frederic Church and Thomas Cole, members of the Hudson River School of Art (which was not an actual school but an artistic movement). Cole rallied against the “apathy with which the beauties of external nature are regarded by the great mass, even of our refined community.” Another artist declared, “Yankee enterprise has little sympathy with the picturesque, and it behooves our artists to rescue from its grasp the little that is left before it is for ever too late.”

Artists of the Hudson School painted breathtaking scenes of the American wilderness that ignited the passions of the American public. They also used subtle visual techniques to convey their belief that wilderness was an extension of God, not an obstacle to His progress. One of their favorite tricks was to hide human features in the contours of rocks. This not only turned picture viewing into a kind of game, but also established a direct link between man and nature—and by extension God.

By portraying the American wilderness as a spiritual destination, the Hudson School hoped to dispel the notion that nature was an obstacle to be conquered. They also wanted to prove that American landscapes were just as beautiful as European landscapes, creating a much needed sense of national pride for the young democracy. On both counts, they succeeded. Hudson School exhibitions drew huge crowds and lured thousands of tourists to beautiful American destinations such as Mount Desert Island.

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