The idea of geology in American landscape painting, 1825-1875

This essay will examine the idea of geology in American landscape painting as a broader phenomenon during the nineteenth century and will define and clarify its origins, its efflorescence, and its decline. Seven chapters will investigate the aesthetic context for the incorporation of geology into landscape paintings; the emergence of geology as scientific discipline between 1780 and 1820; the surge in the popularity of geology in America from the 1830s to the 1870s, a trend strongly influenced by the industrialization of America and the exploration of the American West; the introduction of the geology to landscape artists through the avocation of fossil collecting; the definition of a geologic aesthetic as one derived from landscape illustrations in geologic reports; and the convergence of geology and art in landscape paintings at mid-century.; A review of geologic landscape paintings reveals that they were manifestations of the romantic imagination, even though scientifically rendered, for it was the theoretical and conceptual geologic landscape instead of the economic or documentary one that artists addressed in their paintings. The salient geologic theories and concepts that artists addressed include the glacial theory and the Ice Age, geological time, the formation of mountains, and the relationship of electromagnetism to geology. These geologic landscapes symbolized an exuberant fascination with geology, a belief in the providence of God, and an optimism in America's future as a nation. It mattered little in the final analysis of their works whether artists captured only the idea of geology in their pictures or whether they portrayed scientific concepts with textbook accuracy, for the suggestion of scientific geology in paintings was as important as the most informed representation. Both types of landscapes were apt expressions of an empirical and exploratory age when America's faith in geology as a science was perceived as a providential sign of the future progress of the nation.