The Artist's Mount Desert: American Painters on the Maine Coast - Softcover

Wilmerding, John

9780691037509: The Artist's Mount Desert: American Painters on the Maine Coast

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691037507 ISBN 13: 9780691037509

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1995

In a panoramic narrative John Wilmerding has brought together individual studies of the artists who painted Mount Desert Island off the Maine coast in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Wilmerding demonstrates that Mount Desert has had an enduring appeal for artists and visitors, much like other great sites of national geography, such as Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Niagara Falls. This coastal region of the northeast captured the imaginations of several generations of American painters, and each generation attached its own meaning to the island. These changing meanings reveal both the history of American landscape painting as well as cultural concerns of each era. As Wilmerding states, "Part of the island's continuing allure is that a fixed point of geography can inspire such diverse visual responses and stylistic treatments as the romantic realism of the early Hudson River painters, the crystalline luminism of artists in the middle of the nineteenth century, the variants of Impressionism practiced at century’s end, and the new modes of representation in the twentieth, approaching aspects of abstraction."

The figures most central to this chronology are the pioneers, Thomas Doughty, Alvan Fisher, and Thomas Cole, who generalized and romanticized nature in their visits of the 1830s and 1840s, Fitz Hugh Lane in the 1850s, and Frederic Edwin Church in the 1850s and 1860s. Each drew and painted extensively at Mount Desert. In particular, they recorded the northern sunsets in forms that made Americans give serious thought to the significance of their country’s geography and its destiny. Other artists, among them William Stanley Haseltine, Sanford Gifford, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, and, more recently, Richard Estes, continued to come to Mount Desert and to find in its light, air, and rock formations the kind of scenery that inspired a rich diversity of visual expressions.

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About the Author:

John Wilmerding is Christopher Binyon Sarofim '86 Professor in American Art at Princeton University and Visiting Curator in the Department of American Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is the author of many books and catalogs, including American Light and American Views, both published by Princeton University Press.

Review:

". . . a theme-related scholarly volume from a foremost American art historian. . . . [Wilmerding] stresses the inspiring scenery, but his study can also be taken as a fine general synopsis of American landscape painting and the literary sources behind it." (Choice)

"Landscape painters have flocked to Mount Desert Island to paint its spectacular cliffs, coves, rocks, and sea. This accessible study suggests much of interest about changing attitudes toward landscape as manifested in the concerns of artists." (Wilson Library Bulletin)

"Wilmerding . . . contends that [Mount Desert] is unique as one of the most inspiring and passionately sought havens for artists in America. . . . Those with admiration for Mount Desert Island and an interest in landscape painting will find [this] to be an engaging historical document. It is an encyclopedic resource for anyone wishing to cross-reference Mount Desert with nineteenth-century painting."---Temple Parker, The Boston Book Review

"In this handsome publication, noted art historian John Wilmerding conducts an in-depth study of various painters' incorporation of Mount Desert scenery in their works, exploring the intentions behind their style and choice of motif."---Grayson Lane, Art New England

"The rugged and romantic topography of this island has inspired a veritable 'who's who' list of 19th- and 20th-century American landscapists. . . . Readers will be fascinated by the translation of simple pencil sketches into oil paintings exhibiting great breadth of style and emotion." (Library Journal)

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