note

+ NOTE +

from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836):
In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,--no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,--my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,--I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental. To be brothers, to be acquaintances,--master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature. (Norton 1: 1075) To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again. The heavens change every moment, and reflect their glory or gloom on the plains beneath. (Norton 1: 1078)

from Emerson, Nature (1836):
The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, which I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right. (Norton 1: 1075)

Washington Irving
Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" (1819) opens with a description of the "Kaatskill" (today commonly "Catskill") mountains above the Hudson River, a landscape memorialized by Cole and other painters identified with the Hudson River School. "Every change of season, every change of weather, indeed, every hour of the day, produces some change in the magical hues and shapes of these mountains," Irving writes. On a journey into the mountains to escape the "terrors" of his wife, Rip contemplates a scene that reflects the contrast between the sublime and the beautiful that structured the Romantic landscape tradition:

: From an opening between the trees, he could overlook all the lower country for many a mile of rich woodland. He saw at a distance the lordly Hudson, far, far below him, moving on its silent but majestic course, the reflection of a purple cloud, or the sail of a lagging bark, here and there sleeping on its glassy bosom, and at last losing itself in the blue highlands. (940)
Here Burke's idea of beauty is predominant: the landscape is agreeable, sociable ("lagging bark" registers a human presence), pastel-colored ("purple cloud"), soft and feminized ("sleeping on its glassy bosom"). However, the opposite prospect sends a different message:: On the other side he looked down into a deep mountain glen, wild, lonely and shagged, the bottom filled with fragments from the impending cliffs, and scarcely lighted by the reflected rays of the setting sun. For some time Rip lay musing on this scene, evening was gradually advancing, the mountains began to throw their long blue shadows over the valleys, he saw that it would be dark long before he could reach the village, and he heaved a heavy sigh when he thought of encountering the terrors of Dame Van Winkle. (Norton 1: 941)
"[D]eep," "wild," "lonely," "shagged," and "scarcely lighted," followed quickly by the "terrors of Dame Van Winkle," are code words for the Burkean sublime, which connotes harsh, antisocial, threatening, and obscure feelings. In fact, the scene forms a sublime picture for Rip as well as the reader, insofar as it follows Burke's rule that only representation, not reality, can be sublime. At a comfortable remove, Rip can enjoy "musing on this scene," without facing directly the domestic terrors that appear to be its underlying association.

Landscape.
A painting in which an expanse of natural scenery-possibly including some man-made structures-is the main subject. Paintings of landscape (from the Dutch landschap) originated in sixteenth and seventeenth century Italy, the Netherlands, and England. In late eighteenth-century England, landscape painting was part of a whole landscape culture that included books by writers like William Gilpin and Uvedale Price promoting sightseeing tours through the Lake District and other areas defined as "picturesque." In addition to the picturesque, two other important concepts in the English landscape tradition are the sublime and the beautiful. In eighteenth-century America, landscape painting was considered inferior to portrait and history painting. However, in the nineteenth century, American landscape painting gained in popularity and respect, as Americans began to identify themselves with the natural beauty of their vast, diverse, and expanding territory. Between the 1820s and the Civil War landscape was the central subject of American visual art. The major landscape painters of the period-Thomas Cole, Thomas Doughty, Asher B. Durand, and Frederic Edwin Church-were loosely identified as the Hudson River School, because many of their paintings depicted the Hudson River Valley in upstate New York.

Beautiful.
The term used in contrast to the sublime by Edmund Burke in his profoundly influential book Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757-59). Burke said that the beautiful gives people harmonious and sociable feelings. It was associated with things that are small, weak, soft, pastel-colored, or sensually curved-and was generally associated with feminine qualities. For English and American artists the beautiful came to be associated with the Italian landscapes of the French painter Claude Lorraine.

Sublime.
An aesthetic term that arose in the eighteenth century, best defined by Edmund Burke in his profoundly influential book Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757-59). Burke said that the sublime gives people harsh and antisocial feelings of "agreeable horror." It was associated with things or experiences that are powerful, threatening, vast or unclear, and was generally associated with masculine qualities. However, one could feel the sublime only from representations of such threatening things or situations (for example, in a painting or novel), not from direct experience (which would be too frightening to appreciate aesthetically). Burke defined the sublime in contrast to the beautiful. For English and American artists the beautiful came to be associated with the landscapes of the painter Salvator Rosa.

Picturesque.
A term influential in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and applied to both painted and real landscapes. It was associated with the pleasantly rough and irregular shapes of nature. It was also applied to certain objects in a landscape that would make it picturesque: for example, old barns, run-down architecture, poor farmers, and other rough features associated with the past and rural life.

Realism.
Refers to a literary movement influential in Europe, England, and America, originating about 1830 and increasingly powerful in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Major realists include Stendhal, Balzac and Flaubert in France; Turgenev and Tolstoy in Russia; George Eliot and Trollope in England; Howells and James in America. Howells was the primary advocate of realism in America. He called realism "nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material." For Howells as for other realists, realism was opposed to the forced plot conventions and idealized characterizations of romance. Realism can be characterized as a documentary art. Some common features of American realism include: ordinary characters who, while individuals, are representative of a certain class or type; identifiable contemporary setting; dialogue that represents how people of various classes and places really talk; minimizing of authorial intrusion and comment; an ethical imperative to show life the way it is. Wharton and especially James bring to realism deeper concern with the inner psychology of characters (see Norton 2: 6-12).

Naturalism.
Refers to a literary movement influential in Europe, England, and America, originating in the later nineteenth century. Novelists associated with the movement include Zola (France), Hardy (England), and Norris, Crane, Dreiser, and London (America). Naturalism has been understood as both an extension of realism and a break from it. It reflects a philosophy, highly influenced by the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) and Descent of Man (1870), which has been characterized in its purest form as follows: "a human being exists entirely in the order of nature and does not have a soul nor any mode of participating in a religious or spiritual world beyond nature; and therefore, that such a being is merely a high-order animal whose character and behavior are entirely determined by two kinds of forces, heredity and environment. A person inherits compulsive instincts-especially hunger, the accumulative drive, and sexuality-and is then subject to the social and economic forces in the family, the class, and the milieu into which that person is born" [M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 6th ed. (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace, 1993), 175]. Zola expresses the principles of naturalism in his essay "The Experimental Novel" (1880), arguing that the novelist must work like the chemist, physicist, or physiologist and replace imagination with "observation and experiment." In "A Plea for Romantic Fiction" (1901), Norris criticizes Howellsian realism as "meticulous" and "commonplace"-"the drama of the broken teacup"-and calls for a true Romance that explores "the unsearched penetralia of the soul of man." The American Naturalists cannot be pigeon-holed into a single definition, and the extent to which they allow for the existence of free will and the soul is an open question (see Norton 2: 6-12).

Regionalism.
A branch of American realism concerned with representing the distinctive characters, dialects, lifestyles, and landscapes of the widely dispersed non-urban sections of the United States. The movement put special emphasis in the short story, responded to the rapidly expanding magazine market, and gave particular opportunity to women writers. Regionalism attempted to preserve the distinctive local cultures of the United States at a time when the nation was becoming more homogeneous, industrialized and interconnected; it reflects the tension between the local and national, tradition and change, insiders and outsiders. Regionalism is also referred to as local color fiction, by comparison to the painting of genre scenes. Major American regionalists include Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Austin, Kate Chopin, Bret Harte, and Hamlin Garland (see Norton 2: 6-12).

Mark Twain
The following passage from the beginning of Chapter 19 of Huckleberry Finn conveys the lazy calm of raft life evident in Bingham's painting as well:

: Two or three days and nights went by; I reckon I might say they swum by, they slid along so quiet and smooth and lovely. Here is the way we put in the time. It was a monstrous big river down there -- sometimes a mile and a half wide; we run nights, and laid up and hid daytimes; soon as night was most gone we stopped navigating and tied up -- nearly always in the dead water under a towhead; and then cut young cottonwoods and willows, and hid the raft with them. Then we set out the lines. Next we slid into the river and had a swim, so as to freshen up and cool off; then we set down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee deep, and watched the daylight come. Not a sound anywheres -- perfectly still -- just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bullfrogs a-cluttering, maybe. The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line -- that was the woods on t'other side; you couldn't make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness spreading around; then the river softened up away off, and warn't black any more, but gray; you could see little dark spots drifting along ever so far away -- trading scows, and such things; and long black streaks -- rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or jumbled up voices, it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by and by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there's a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes that streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off of the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log-cabin in the edge of the woods, away on the bank on t'other side of the river, being a woodyard, likely, and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it anywheres; then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you from over there, so cool and fresh and sweet to smell on account of the woods and the flowers; but sometimes not that way, because they've left dead fish laying around, gars and such, and they do get pretty rank; and next you've got the full day, and everything smiling in the sun, and the song-birds just going it!; A little smoke couldn't be noticed now, so we would take some fish off of the lines and cook up a hot breakfast. And afterwards we would watch the lonesomeness of the river, and kind of lazy along, and by and by lazy off to sleep. Wake up by and by, and look to see what done it, and maybe see a steamboat coughing along up-stream, so far off towards the other side you couldn't tell nothing about her only whether she was a stern-wheel or side-wheel; then for about an hour there wouldn't be nothing to hear nor nothing to see -- just solid lonesomeness. Next you'd see a raft sliding by, away off yonder, and maybe a galoot on it chopping, because they're most always doing it on a raft; you'd see the axe flash and come down -- you don't hear nothing; you see that axe go up again, and by the time it's above the man's head then you hear the k'chunk! -- it had took all that time to come over the water. So we would put in the day, lazying around, listening to the stillness. (Norton 2: 109-10)

Walt Whitman
Bingham originally titled his painting Fur Trader and Half-Breed Son, but the American Art-Union decided Fur Traders Descending the Missouri would better suit a national audience. The subject of interracial marriage on the frontier, which Bingham addresses in his first title, was handled even more directly by Walt Whitman. In "Song of Myself" (1855), Whitman describes the marriage of a trapper and an Indian:

: I saw the marriage of the trapper in the open air in the far-west. . . .the bride was a red girl,; Her father and his friends sat near by crossleggedand dumbly smoking. . . . they had moccasins to their feet and large think blankets hanging from their shoulders;; On a bank lounged the trapper. . . . he was dressed mostly in skins. . . . his luxuriant beard and curls protected his neck,; One hand rested on his rifle. . . . the other hand held firmly the wrist of the red girl,; She had long eyelashes. . . . her head was bare. . . . her coarse straight locks descended upon her voluptuous limbs and reached to her feet. (lines 178-182)

Walt Whitman
In Country Politician, Bingham juxtaposes the spoken word of the politician with the printed advertisements on the wall. Similarly, in the following lines from "Song for Occupations," Walt Whitman expresses the power of direct oral communication, as opposed to the mechanized communication of print.

: Come closer to me,; Push close my lovers and take the best I possess, [. . .]; I was chilled with the cold type and cylinder and wet paper between us.; I pass so poorly with paper and types. . . . I must pass with the contact of bodies and souls. (qtd. in Reynolds 173)
In his introduction to the 1855 Leaves of Grass, Whitman proclaims that the United States express themselves "in the common people":: Their curiosity and welcome of novelty-their self-esteem and wonderful sympathy-their susceptibility to a slight-the air they have of persons who never knew how it felt to stand in the presence of superiors-the fluency of their speech-their delight in music, the sure symptom of manly tenderness and native elegance of soul . . . their good temper and openhandedness-the terrible significance of their elections-the President's taking off his hat to them not they to him-these too are unrhymed poetry. It awaits the gigantic and generous treatment worthy of it.

Walt Whitman

: The pure contralto sings in the organ loft,; The carpenter dresses his plank, the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp,; The married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanksgiving dinner,; The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm,; The mate stands braced in the whale-boat, lance and harpoon are ready,; The duck-shooter walks by silent and cautious stretches,; The deacons are ordain'd with cross'd hands at the altar,; The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel,; The farmer stops by the bars as he walks on a First-day loafe and looks at the oats and rye,; The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirm'd case,; (He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother's bed-room;); The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case,; He turns his quid of tobacco while his eyes blurr with the manuscript;; The malform'd limbs are tied to the surgeon's table,; What is removed drops horribly in a pail;; The quadroon girl is sold at the auction-stand, the drunkard nods by the bar-room stove,; The machinist rolls up his sleeves, the policeman travels his beat, the gate-keeper marks who pass,; The young fellow drives the express-wagon, (I love him, though I do not know him;); The half-breed straps on his light boots to compete in the race,; The western turkey-shooting draws old and young, some lean on their rifles, some sit on logs,; Out from the crowd steps the marksman, takes his position, levels his piece;; The groups of newly-come immigrants cover the wharf or levee,; As the woolly-pates hoe in the sugar-field, the overseer views them from his saddle,; The bugle calls in the ball-room, the gentlemen run for their partners, the dancers bow to each other,; The youth lies awake in the cedar-roof'd garret and harks to the musical rain,; The Wolverine sets traps on the creek that helps fill the Huron,; The squaw wrapt in her yellow-hemm'd cloth is offering moccasins and bead-bags for sale,; The connoisseur peers along the exhibition-gallery with half-shut eyes bent sideways,; As the deck-hands make fast the steamboat the plank is thrown for the shore-going passengers,; The young sister holds out the skein while the elder sister winds it off in a ball, and stops now and then for the knots,; The one-year wife is recovering and happy having a week ago borne her first child,; The clean-hair'd Yankee girl works with her sewing-machine or in the factory or mill,; The paving-man leans on his two-handed rammer, the reporter's lead flies swiftly over the note-book, the sign-painter is lettering with blue and gold,; The canal boy trots on the tow-path, the book-keeper counts at his desk, the shoemaker waxes his thread,; The conductor beats time for the band and all the performers follow him,; The child is baptized, the convert is making his first professions,; The regatta is spread on the bay, the race is begun, (how the white sails sparkle!); The drover watching his drove sings out to them that would stray,; The pedler sweats with his pack on his back, (the purchaser higgling about the odd cent;); The bride unrumples her white dress, the minute-hand of the clock moves slowly,; The opium-eater reclines with rigid head and just-open'd lips,; The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck,; The crowd laugh at her blackguard oaths, the men jeer and wink to each other,; (Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you;); The President holding a cabinet council is surrounded by the great Secretaries,; On the piazza walk three matrons stately and friendly with twined arms,; The crew of the fish-smack pack repeated layers of halibut in the hold,; The Missourian crosses the plains toting his wares and his cattle,; As the fare-collector goes through the train he gives notice by the jingling of loose change,; The floor-men are laying the floor, the tinners are tinning the roof, the masons are calling for mortar,; In single file each shouldering his hod pass onward the laborers;; Seasons pursuing each other the indescribable crowd is gather'd, it is the fourth of Seventh-month, (what salutes of cannon and small arms!); Seasons pursuing each other the plougher ploughs, the mower mows, and the winter-grain falls in the ground;; Off on the lakes the pike-fisher watches and waits by the hole in the frozen surface,; The stumps stand thick round the clearing, the squatter strikes deep with his axe,; Flatboatmen make fast towards dusk near the cotton-wood or pecan-trees,; Coon-seekers go through the regions of the Red river or through those drain'd by the Tennessee, or through those of the Arkansas,; Torches shine in the dark that hangs on the Chattahooche or Altamahaw,; Patriarchs sit at supper with sons and grandsons and great-grandsons around them,; In walls of adobie, in canvas tents, rest hunters and trappers after their day's sport,; The city sleeps and the country sleeps,; The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time,; The old husband sleeps by his wife and the young husband sleeps by his wife;; And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,; And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,; And of these one and all I weave the song of myself. (lines 264-329)

Stephen Crane
In the Red Badge of Courage (1895), Stephen Crane describes the capture of four Confederate prisoners by Union troops. Crane does not characterize these soldiers as stereotypes of Southern degeneracy, as does Homer in Prisoners from the Front (1866), but rather as modern men dealing individually, like the Union soldiers themselves, with the overwhelming machinery of war. Homer was much closer to the war historically and he reflected Northern biases; filtering the war through the naturalistic perspective of the 1890s, Crane sees it as the ultimate physical and emotional challenge to the human being:

: At one part of the line four men had been swooped upon, and they now sat as prisoner. Some blue men were about them in an eager and curious circle. The soldiers had trapped strange birds, and there was an examination. A flurry of fast questions was in the air.; One of the prisoners was nursing a superficial wound in the foot. He cuddled it, baby-wise, but he looked up from it often to curse with an astonishing utter abandon straight at the noses of his captors. He consigned them to red regions; he called upon the pestilential wrath of strange gods. And with it all he was singularly free from recognition of the finer points of the conduct of prisoners of war. It was as if a clumsy clod had trod upon his toe and he conceived it to be his privilege, his duty, to use deep, resentful oaths.; Another, who was a boy in years, took his plight with great calmness and apparent good nature. He conversed with the men in blue, studying their faces with his bright and keen eyes. They spoke of battles and conditions. There was an acute interest in all their faces during this exchange of view points. It seemed a great satisfaction to hear voices from where all had been darkness and speculation.; The third captive sat with a morose countenance. He preserved a stoical and cold attitude. To all advances he made one reply without variation, "Ah, go t' hell!"; The last of the four was always silent and, for the most part, kept his face turned in unmolested directions. From the views the youth received he seemed to be in a state of absolute dejection. Shame was upon him, and with it profound regret that he was, perhaps, no more to be counted in the ranks of his fellows. The youth could detect no expression that would allow him to believe that the other was giving a thought to his narrowed future, the pictured dungeons, perhaps, and starvations and brutalities, liable to the imagination. All to be seen was shame for captivity and regret for the right to antagonize. (Crane 94-95)

Passage from Stephen Crane, "The Open Boat" (1897)
Ahead or astern, on one side or the other, at intervals long or short, fled the long sparkling streak, and there was to be heard the whiroo of the dark fin. The speed and power of the thing was greatly to be admired. It cut the water like a gigantic and keen projectile. The presence of this biding thing did not affect the man with the same horror that it would if he had been a picnicker. He simply looked at the sea dully and swore in an undertone. [Nature] did not seem cruel to him then; nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent. It is, perhaps, plausible that a man in this situation, impressed with the unconcern of the universe, would see the innumerable flaws of his life and have them taste wickedly in his mind and wish for another chance. A distinction between right and wrong seems absurdly clear to him, then, in this new ignorance of the grave-edge, and he understands that if he were given another opportunity he would mend his conduct and his words, and be better and brighter during an introduction, or at a tea. (Norton 2: 1715, 1717-18)

Henry James

Henry James had this to say about the Impressionists after seeing their exhibition in 1876:: The young contributors to the exhibition of which I speak are partisans of unadorned reality and absolute foes to arrangement, embellishment, selection, to the artist's allowing himself, as he has hitherto, since art began, found his best account in doing, to be preoccupied with the idea of the beautiful. [. . .] [They] declare that the subject which has been crudely chosen shall be loosely treated. They send detail to the dogs and concentrate themselves on the general expression. (The Painter's Eye 114-15)
Over the years, James modified his initial criticism of Impressionism, especially after his friend Sargent became associated with the movement. James wrote the following in his 1893 essay on Sargent:: From the time of his first successes at the Salon [Sargent] was hailed, I believe, as a recruit of high value to the camp of the Impressionists, and to-day he is for many people pigeon-holed under that head. It is not necessary to protest against the classification if this addition always be made to it, that Mr. Sargent's impressions happen to be worthy of record. This is by no means inveterately the case with those of the ingenuous artists who most rejoice in the title in question. To render the impression of an object may be a very fruitful effort, but it is not necessarily so; that will depend upon what, I won't say the object, but the impression, may have been. The talents engaged in this school lie, not unjustly, as it seems to me, under the suspicion of seeking the solution of their problem exclusively in simplification. If a painter works for other eyes as well as his own he courts a certain danger in this direction-that of being arrested by the cry of the spectator: 'Ah! But excuse me; I myself take more impressions than that!' We feel a synthesis not to be an injustice only when it is rich. Mr. Sargent simplifies, I think, but he simplifies with style, and his impression is the finest form of his energy. (The Painter's Eye 217-18)
James himself has been called a literary impressionist. In a famous passage in his essay "The Art of Fiction" (1884, contemporaneous with Sargent's A Dinner Table at Night) James characterizes experience as being made up of impressions. For James, an impression is an expanding awareness of what the eye sees:: Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spiderweb of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every airborne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative-much more when it happens to be that of a man of genius-it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations. [. . .] The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it-this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education. If experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe. Therefore, if I should certainly say to a novice, "Write from experience and experience only," I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, "Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!" (Norton 2: 376)

Chinese Translation

湯瑪斯．柯爾詩如山一景 (1836)
這幅風景畫描繪了許多讓人聯想到美國十九世紀中期的荒野的特色。山巒在暴風雨的洗滌後又露出臉來，但這同時那暴風雨卻在背景的右方發威，刻劃出大自然的善變與活力。中景部份在山巒上方的淺藍天空與陽光照耀下的秋葉，則顯現大自然優美的一面。然而柯爾同時也利用畫中籠罩右方的烏雲與傾盆而下的豪雨這種莊嚴美來與優美加以對照。另一個具有莊嚴美的細節，則是左下角那棵顯然曾受雷擊的枯樹。另外，同樣出現在前景，但卻不那麼顯眼的，則是在中央右方，兩個帶著羽毛頭飾的印第安人的頭。他們微小半隱在樹叢中的身影，是特意的安排。柯爾畫中所反應出的，是他那時期的一個普遍現象：他們視印第安人為自然的一部份，而非駕馭其上。只是諷刺的是，當柯爾描繪此景時，印第安人已因為死亡與遷徙之故，不在紐約州的荒野活動了。

風景畫：這種畫作的主題是在描繪廣闊的自然景觀，但畫中或許也有些人為的建築。風景畫(這名稱源自荷蘭文的landschap)始於十六與十七世紀的義大利、荷蘭及英國。
英國在十六世紀晚期時，風景畫只是整個地景文化的一部份。地景文化也包括威廉．季平與維德．普萊斯等作家的作品。這二人大力提倡到大湖區與其他被視為「風景如畫」的地區遊賞。在英國風景藝術的傳統裡，除了景色如畫外，另外兩個重要的概念是莊嚴美與優美。
美國在十八世紀時，風景畫的地位遠不如肖像畫與歷史畫。但到了十九世紀時，美國人開始認同他們遼闊、多元、不斷擴展的領土裡的自然美，美國的風景畫同時也獲得肯定與重視。在1820年代與南北戰爭時期，風景成了美國視覺藝術的重要主題。這時期的主要風景畫家(像是湯瑪斯．柯爾，湯瑪斯．多提，艾雪．德藍以及弗德列克．艾文．邱吉等人)因為有許多畫作描繪的是北紐約州的哈德遜河谷，而被概括的稱之為哈德遜河流派。

優美：這個辭彙在艾德蒙．柏克影響深遠的《人類對莊嚴美與優美認知起源的哲學探究》一書中，是用來與莊嚴美作對照的。柏克認為優美帶給人祥和易處的感覺。它常令人聯想起小巧的、柔弱的、粉色系的或觸感有曲線弧度的事物，且常令人聯想到女性陰柔的特質。對英、美的畫家而言，優美一詞後來與法國畫家克勞德．羅瑞的義大利風景畫作成為等號。

莊嚴美：在十八世紀興起的美學辭彙，最適切的定義見於艾德蒙．柏克影響深遠的《人類對莊嚴美與優美認知起源的哲學探究》一書 (1757-59)。柏克認為莊嚴美予人一種「可接受的恐懼」的嚴厲、不易相處的感覺。它令人聯想起強烈的、威嚇的、巨大的、不明的事情或經驗，且常令人聯想到男性陽剛的特質。不過，人只有由具有威脅性的事物或情況(像是在繪畫或小說中)，才能感受到莊嚴美，而不能來自親身經驗(因為那會太過嚇人，而無法讓人有美學的體驗)。在柏克的定義中，莊嚴美與優美是對立的。對英、美藝術家來說，莊嚴美後來與畫家薩瓦多．羅沙的風景畫成為等號。

景色如畫：在十八世紀末、十九世紀初期，極具影響力的辭彙，且這辭彙同時適用於畫中與真實生活中的風景。它指的是自然界中悅人的崎嶇、不規則的形狀。它也適用於風景中可以讓景色如畫的一些特定景物，像是老舊的穀倉、殘破的建築、襤褸的農夫，以及一些其他與舊時農村生活有關的一些村野的景色。