Wilderness and the west

Episode number 3 of Series “American visions”.
From majestic, primal America, stretching from the Hudson to the Rockies, there rose the idea of landscape as God’s fingerprint, invested with sacramental power. We see the immense religious and patriotic connotations which cling to American landscape painting and how, out of these, the belief in Manifest Destiny is embodied in art. Among the artists whose work Hughes covers are Thomas Cole, whose views of the Catskills and the Falls were the first to depict the American landscape as holy ground; the Hudson River School; and Frederic Church. Others include George Catlin, portraitist of Indians, and John James Audubon. The Civil War shattered the image of ‘nature’s nation’, but soon out of the ashes, rose the industrial future, driven by the railroad. Artists such as Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, in the pay of the government and the railway bosses, departed for the West. With their massive canvasses of Yosemite and the Grand Yosemite and the Grand Canyon, they enticed tourists to follow. Early photographers accompanied these expeditions, and their pictures renewed America’s faith in its ‘cathedrals of nature’ and its unique identity in the wilderness. However, the arrival of the urban landscape created feelings of nostalgia for a past that never was, and the myth of the West was born. Written and presented by Robert Hughes.