Chiaroscuro as an Artistic Device in Cooper's Fiction

Abstract

Although the pictorial element has long been recognized as an important factor in James Fenimore Cooper's descriptive style, detailed analyses of specific techniques that Cooper shared with contemporary landscape painters can still add much to our understanding of his fundamental artistry. A number of such studies have already appeared. Howard Mumford Jones has shown how Cooper's moral view of the world found a means of expression—the expansive depiction of a panoramic scene—that is strikingly similar to the typical landscape of the Hudson River School of painting, and James Franklin Beard has written of the basic artistic technique that Cooper shared with the painter Thomas Cole—the harmonization of precise details to present an ideal truth. Other studies, moreover, have pointed out a number of specific devices that Cooper and his artistic friends employed to express their related themes. One important painterly technique used by the novelist, however, has yet to be treated in detail: the chiaroscuro, or arrangement of light and shadow, that he, like the painters, included in his delineation of the natural scene. Many readers of Cooper, no doubt, have perceived the effectiveness of Cooper's carefully lighted descriptions, and comment upon them has, indeed, appeared in print. The technique, however, is so important in Cooper's art that it merits a much more extended treatment than it has yet received.