Calvinist Roots of the American Landscape Aesthetic

From its beginnings in the landscapes of Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School to culmination in the Modern Art of Georgia O’Keeffe, Ansel Adams, and their colleagues, the dominant American landscape in art has been dramatic, glorious, and unpeopled. American landscape artists grew up in Reformed Protestantism, which embued in them the aesthetic principles of the American landscape.

Early Reformers developed aesthetic principles that emphasized practical and moral goals, and that art must be truthful. With these goals in mind, Huguenot artists first developed a Reformed art, followed by the Dutch, the English, the Scots, and finally the Americans.

In the company of Huguenot exiles, the Presbyterian Hogarth essentially founded English painting and adapted the Dutch genre painting to a highly influential form. His protégé Gainsborough, of a devout Dissenter family, founded the dual English artistic emphasis on portraits and landscape, the two subjects where according to Calvin the glory of God shone most clearly, and developed by English artists Constable (once destined for the ministry), Reynolds (scion of a family of clergy), and Turner. Presbyterian Scotland produced many influential aestheticians, especially Alison (an Anglican priest) and the Presbyterian Ruskin.

English Dissenter Thomas Cole founded the Hudson River School of landscape art upon the aesthetic principles of Reynolds and Alison. The Hudson River Schools’ artists, all of Puritan, Presbyterian, and Huguenot extraction, imbibed the principles of art’s practical and moral purposes. By the time of the school’s second generation, beginning with Frederic Church, Ruskin’s profound influence made itself felt in the passionate adherence to the “truth” of nature. In photography and Modern art, O’Keeffe and Adams and their peers continued the tradition of “truthfulness” to nature as well as moral purpose.