The Spirit and the Vision The Influence of Christian Romanticism on the Development of 19th-Century American Art |
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| Author:
| Apostolos-Cappadona, Diane |
| Series title: | AAR Academy Ser. |
| ISBN: | 978-1-55540-975-3 |
| Publication Date: | Jan 1995 |
| Publisher: | Oxford University Press, Incorporated
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| Book Format: | Paperback |
| List Price: | USD $37.99 |
Book Description:
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Christian Romanticism was a response to social changes within nineteenth-century American culture, including women's literacy, spiritual domesticity, and the idealization of childhood. This book examines the work of three artists of the first American landscape tradition -- Washington Alston, Thomas Cole, and Frederic Edwin Church -- and two clergymen -- Horace Bushnell and Henry Ward Beecher. It assesses their understanding of the artist as a social and moral teacher, the didactic...
More DescriptionChristian Romanticism was a response to social changes within nineteenth-century American culture, including women's literacy, spiritual domesticity, and the idealization of childhood. This book examines the work of three artists of the first American landscape tradition -- Washington Alston, Thomas Cole, and Frederic Edwin Church -- and two clergymen -- Horace Bushnell and Henry Ward Beecher. It assesses their understanding of the artist as a social and moral teacher, the didactic role of art in society more generally, and a God who acts in history. The author finds that the art of Allston, Cole, and Church expressed and served the dominant middle-class religious ideology of the time -- Christian Romanticism. This distinguishes their work from more elitist and regional work.