ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to explore some of the ways the unique 'physical peculiarities' of America were used by artists to transform the traditions that they had inherited, if not from their 'mother country', then at any rate from the European cultures on which, inevitably, their art was founded. The European tradition of plein air painting was well established by the mid century, and the Americans contributed significantly to it, working on the intimate scale of the Romantic naturalists and the watercolourists. The English critics were anxious to admire American landscape paintings. They were tiring of the work that the now ageing British landscapists were offering year after year. The pioneer of nineteenth-century American landscape painting, Thomas Cole, had conceived his own art as a continuous celebration of nationhood in terms of the indigenous scenery of the country, 'a subject that to every American ought to be of surpassing interest'.
