“Appropriate in a Sylvan State”

Abstract

This article demonstrates that William Rush’s unusual, terracotta Self-Portrait (ca. 1822)—in which the artist’s stern head rises from the knotty trunk of a white pine tree—illuminates an increasingly fraught and mediated corporeal relationship to the American environment during the early national period, as the recognition of scarcity and extinction challenged earlier beliefs in the plentitude of nature. Through subtle allusions to the classical past, Rush’s Self-Portrait projected a patriotic message of empire and victory grounded in the natural world. Even as Self-Portrait upheld Enlightenment and imperial ideals about cultivation and domestication of the American landscape, it celebrated the vibrant materiality of wood and provided a visual memorial to the region’s diminishing sylvan past.