Reviewed by: Looking into Walt Whitman: American Art, 1850â1920, and: Within the Landscape: Essays on Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture Wendy J. Katz Looking into Walt Whitman: American Art, 1850â1920. By Ruth L. Bohan. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 2006. Within the Landscape: Essays on Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture. Edited by Phillip Earenfight and Nancy Siegel. Carlisle, Pennsylvania: Trout Gallery, Dickinson College, in association with Pennsylvania State University Press. 2005. These two books, both by art historians, seemingly share interdisciplinary goals. Phillip Earenfight, director of the gallery whose symposium led to Within the Landscape, says the essays collectively address âa group of artists and writers . . . [who] played leading roles in shaping visions of the American landscapeâ (3). Ruth Bohan sets out to describe âthe shifting dynamics that transformed the relationship between literature and the pictorial arts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuriesâ (6). Within the Landscape focuses on antebellum art while Bohan concentrates on post-war developments, yet the only direct intersection between them comes in Kevin Averyâs essay in Within the Landscape, in a travel writerâs quotation of Walt Whitmanâs poetry. This is because most of the scholars in Within the Landscape cite a variety of contemporary authors in order to help articulate broad cultural attitudes to nature. Bohan instead aims to show the âdynamic reciprocityâ (6) between modes of writing and visual cultureâbut around Whitman alone. Bohanâs book is divided into two parts. âImaging Whitman: The Nineteenth Centuryâ claims both that Whitman wanted to yoke his poetry to the expressive power of the visual arts and that nineteenth-century artists expressed their embrace of his ideas primarily through portraits of the poet. Bohan thus analyzes both the pictorial character of Whitmanâs verse and how his portraits evoke malleable, multiple selves. Where previous studies of Whitman have emphasized his involvement with photography, Bohan observes that Whitman devoted a third of his editorial output to the visual arts, accepted the âsister artsâ ideal and actively supported the Brooklyn Art Unionâs program for free public access to the fine arts. Her book will be particularly helpful for Whitman scholars, as she systematically traces Whitmanâs multitudinous art world connections, from early gatherings at sculptor Henry Kirke Brownâs Brooklyn studio, to patrons of Jean-Francois Millet in Boston, to the later circles around editor Richard Watson Gilder in New York City. Her chapter on Thomas Eakins is particularly nuanced, introducing evidence connecting Eakinsâ Concert Singer to his portrait of Whitman. The second part, â20th-Century Whitman and the Modernists,â centers on three figures exemplifying different brands of modernism. Marsden Hartley developed Whitmanâs linkage of the mystical and the musical, a transcendence activated by the sexualized male body. Gallery owner Robert Coadyâs magazine The Soil (1916â17) turned to Whitmanâs democratic embrace of the marketplace and corresponding attack on artistic hierarchies. Italian immigrant artist Joseph Stella encountered Whitman in Europe, leading to his stress on the flux of modern experience in his Brooklyn Bridge series. As in her analysis of the personal, sexual and social politics of Whitmanâs reception in the nineteenth century, Bohan demonstrates how networks between artists, patrons, and writers mediated encounters with Whitmanâs writing, and thus what artists took from it. Within the Landscapeâs essays offer a sampling of current methods in the field by noted scholars, giving it value for the classroom. David Schuylerâs âThe Mid-Hudson [End Page 156] Valley as Iconic Landscapeâ argues that while the taste for wilderness was associated with democratic assertions of Americaâs contribution to the world, it was landscape tourismâs economic transformation of the Catskills that stimulated a preservationist impulse among men like Washington Irving and Thomas Cole. Nancy Siegel, a co-editor of the volume, reprises key findings from her 2003 book Along the Juniata: Thomas Cole and the Dissemination of American Landscape Imagery, in âDecorative Nature.â She emphasizes that most of the middle class encountered landscape images in a form considerably different than an oil painting in a gallery, as in the transformation of a Cole drawing into a more stylized, less âwild,â design on imported ceramic...