Wilderness as art and the naissance of environmental consciousness: The wild transfigured in the visual landscape of Jasper Francis Cropsey and Frederick Law Olmsted

This enquiry explores a shift in perspective concerning wilderness. Rather than a wasteland and a place that threatened the agriculturally oriented polis, wilderness became symbolic of preserving the world that remained untouched by technology. Visual depictions of wilderness in three paintings of Jasper Francis Cropsey and two landscape projects of Frederick Law Olmsted are examined as visual rhetorical artifacts that helped to produce a shift in social consciousness whereby wilderness began to be experienced as a place of aesthetic value. In order to explore the effect of visual rhetoric in the transformation of social consciousness indicated by the shift in wilderness valuation, fantasy theme analysis, a method for interpreting communication acts developed by Ernest G. Bormann, is used to analyze these artifacts. The process by which new connotations of wilderness arose sheds light on religious interpretations of wilderness, as well as the continued power of visual rhetoric in relation to environmental concerns.