Peindre la terre américaine pour construire la nation : l'École du Sublime

Abstract

This chapter intends to show how nineteenth century landscape painters participated in the nation building efforts common to politicians and writers. By displaying the previously unheard of beauties of the continent, the artists of the Sublime School of painting erased the inferiority complex of Americans vis à vis European landscapes and culture in general. These painters started with the views of the Hudson Valley in the East, then following the campaigns of exploration into the West, they shuddered in front of the magnificence of the Rockies Mountains, the Sierra Nevada, the fabulous canyons that God had shaped and preserved in their pristine wilderness for His Chosen People. Now the American Nation was coming of age. She could brag to the world, and mostly to Europe, that its cathedrals of stone, shaped by the very hand of God, were far superior to those of the old continent, laboriously built by the hand of man. Their gigantic size and their virginal purity drowned also the puny mountains of the old continent now doomed to decadence.