ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the influences of Anglo-American theories of geography and concomitant practices of cartography on various practices of landscape painting are investigated. The chapter discusses how two paintings, Thomas Cole's View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow and Asher Durand's Progress, modeled a notion of geography, underwritten by cartographic strategies associated with Manifest Destiny, that was meant as a key to understanding new practices in landscape painting, including the exhibition of the finished sketch, the employment of the cardinal directions as a structure of pictorial composition, and the removal of overtly symbolic elements from depictions of the wilderness. At the end, the chapter focuses on how these two artists influenced other figures who articulated features of the trends they initiated: Elias Lyman Magoon, a theorist of Manifest Destiny who initiated the practice of exhibiting sketches, and William Tylee Ranney and George Caleb Bingham, who depicted the colonist Daniel Boone according to the compositional structures underwriting Cole and Durand's paintings.
