kindred_spirits_too_Whitman_and

Kindred Spirits: The Hudson River School and Transcendentalism

Asher B. Durand, Kindred Spirits,
Oil on canvas, 44 in. x 36 in.
Collection of the New York Public Library.
Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

To the left is Thomas Cole, the founder of the Hudson River School of painting. On the right is William Cullen Bryant, a major nature poet of the nineteenth century and editor of Picturesque America, a set of books showing the natural beauty of the United States. This was painted a year after Bryant's death.
Link to William Cullen Bryant: Forest Hymn pages 273-277

Walden, Henry David Thoreau 1854

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things. . .

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a man's life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty. . .

Albert Bierstadt, The Matterhorn,
undated c. 1850

Transcendentalism is an American literary, political, and philosophical movement of the early nineteenth century, centered around Ralph Waldo Emerson. Other important transcendentalists were Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Amos Bronson Alcott, Frederic Henry Hedge, and Theodore Parker. Stimulated by English and German Romanticism, the Biblical criticism of Herder and Schleiermacher, and the skepticism of Hume, the transcendentalists operated with the sense that a new era was at hand.

They were critics of their contemporary society for its unthinking conformity, and urged that each individual find, in Emerson's words, "an original relation to the universe". Emerson and Thoreau sought this relation in solitude amidst nature, and in their writing. By the 1840s they, along with other transcendentalists, were engaged in the social experiments of Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Walden; and, by the 1850's in an increasingly urgent critique of American slavery.

Albert Bierdstadt The Rocky Mountains Landers Peak 1863

Still Life with Ivory Tankard and Fruit, c.1860, Roger Fenton,
The Royal Photographic Society Collection

Mr. Fenton, a lawyer from a well-to-do family, was already renowned for his technical abilities and his close association with the royal family, which resulted in several historic portraits. A co-founder of the Royal British Photographic Society, he was also an accomplished landscape photographer, a skill he employed often in Crimea.

Still Life with Ivory Tankard and Fruit, c.1860, Roger Fenton,
The Royal Photographic Society Collection

memento mori

Still Life with Crab, c. 1654 oil on canvas, Abraham van Beyeren, Dutch Baroque

Roger Fenton's Crimean War photographs represent one of the earliest systematic attempts to document a war through the medium of photography. Fenton, who spent fewer than four months in the Crimea (March 8 to June 26, 1855), produced 360 photographs under extremely trying conditions. While these photographs present a substantial documentary record of the participants and the landscape of the war, there are no actual combat scenes, nor are there any scenes of the devastating effects of war.

Mr. Fenton covered the war thanks to a commission by the publisher Thomas Agnew and Sons to photograph as many of the officers as possible so that Thomas Barker could use the images as the basis for paintings. Other sources have suggested he was more motivated by the Duke of New Castle, Prince Albert, and other patrons who wanted photographs that could help shape British public opinion about the war. The conflict with Russia was already well-chronicled in words, including Alfred Lord Tennyson’s 1854 poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”

Benjamin West, Death of General Wolfe. 1770 oil on canvas, 5'x7'
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa- British History Painting

The Valley of the Shadow of Death, 1855, Roger Fenton, The Royal Photographic Society Collection

This is Fenton’s most famous photograph, and one of the most well-known images of war. Its title is taken from Psalm 23 of the Bible, which was also evoked in Tennyson’s famous poem The Charge of the Light Brigade; the ‘Valley of Death’ was named by British soldiers who came under constant shelling there. Absent of life, or lives lost, this desolate portrayal of the scene communicates the dismal aftermath, in which the emptiness acts as a symbol of the tragedy of war.

The Charge of the Light Brigade
BY ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
I
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
   Rode the six hundred.
“Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!” he said.
Into the valley of Death
   Rode the six hundred.

II
“Forward, the Light Brigade!”
Was there a man dismayed?
Not though the soldier knew
   Someone had blundered.
   Theirs not to make reply,
   Theirs not to reason why,
   Theirs but to do and die.
   Into the valley of Death
   Rode the six hundred.

III
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
   Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of hell
   Rode the six hundred.

IV
Flashed all their sabres bare,
Flashed as they turned in air
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
   All the world wondered.
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right through the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reeled from the sabre stroke
   Shattered and sundered.
Then they rode back, but not
   Not the six hundred.

V
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
   Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell.
They that had fought so well
Came through the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of hell,
All that was left of them,
   Left of six hundred.

VI
When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
   All the world wondered.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
   Noble six hundred!

Mathew Brady, also called Mathew B. Brady, (born c. 1823, near Lake George, New York, U.S.—died January 15, 1896, New York, New York), well-known 19th-century American photographer who was celebrated for his portraits of politicians and his photographs of the American Civil War.

After training with the artist William Page and the artist and inventor Samuel F.B. Morse, Brady began to make daguerreotype cases and frames and then opened his first daguerreotype studio in New York City in 1844, a second in Washington, D.C., four years later, and a third, larger gallery, also in New York, in 1852.

His first New York portrait studio was highly publicized, and in 1845 Brady began to carry out his plan to photograph as many famous people of his time as he could—including Daniel Webster, Edgar Allan Poe, and James Fenimore Cooper. Brady compiled many of his portraits in A Gallery of Illustrious Americans (1850), an album of lithographs based on his daguerreotypes that gained him and his studios fame at home and abroad. Brady had an extensive personal collection of presidential portraits: except for William Henry Harrison, who died only a month after his inauguration, Brady created, copied, or collected the photographs of every U.S. president from John Quincy Adams to William McKinley.

Matthew Brady's "The Dead of Antietam." 1862

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Brady sought to create a comprehensive photo-documentation of the war. At his own expense, he organized a group of photographers and staff to follow the troops as the first field-photographers. Brady supervised the activities of the photographers, including Timothy H. Sullivan, Alexander Gardner, and James F. Gibson, preserved plate-glass negatives, and bought from private photographers in order to make the collection as complete as possible. Brady and his staff photographed many images of the Civil War including the Fist Battle of Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg.

In 1862 Brady shocked the nation when he displayed the first photographs of the carnage of the war in his New York Studio in an exhibit entitled "The Dead of Antietam." These images, photographed by Alexander Gardner and James F. Gibson, were the first to picture a battlefield before the dead had been removed and the first to be distributed to a mass public. These images received more media attention at the time of the war than any other series of images during the rest of the war A New York Times article in October, 1862, illustrates the impression these images left upon American culture stating, "Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our door-yards and along the streets, he has done something very like it…"

Theodore Gericault 1791-1824
Raft of the Medusa 1819
Paris,Louvre French, Romanticism

I Sit and Look Out
Walt Whitman

I SIT and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame;
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done;
I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate;
I see the wife misused by her husband—I see the treacherous seducer of young women;
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be hid—I see these sights on the earth;
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny—I see martyrs and prisoners;
I observe a famine at sea—I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be kill’d, to preserve the lives of the rest;
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;
All these—All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look out upon,
See, hear, and am silent.

Josiah Hawes and Albert Southworth
Early Operation under Ether 1862

Thomas Eakins,
The Gross Clinic 1875
Oil on canvas 96 x 78 in.
Jefferson Medical College
of Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia

Rembrandt, The Anatomy Lecture of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp 1632
Oil on canvas, 169,5 x 216,5 cm
Mauritshuis, The Hague

Thomas Eakins,
The Gross Clinic 1875
Oil on canvas 96 x 78 in.
Jefferson Medical College
of Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia

Thomas Eakins, Studies of Movement

Thomas Eakins, The Swimming Hole 1884-85
Oil on canvas 27 3/8 x 36 3/8 in. (69.5 x 92.4 cm)
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth

Eadweard Muybridge "Handspring" and "A Pigeon Interferring" c1880

Eakins, Thomas The Swimming Hole 1884-85
Oil on canvas 27 3/8 x 36 3/8 in.
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth

Manet, Dejeuner sur l'herbe 1863.
Oil on canvas 84" x 106"

Winslow Homer, The Gulf Stream 1899
Oil on canvas 28 1/8 x 49 1/8 in. (American Realist)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Winslow Homer, The Gulf Stream 1899
Oil on canvas 28 1/8 x 49 1/8 in. (American Realist)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

JMW Turner The Slave Ship 1840 35"x48"

Winslow Homer, The Gulf Stream 1899
Oil on canvas 28 1/8 x 49 1/8 in. (American Realist)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

GERICAULT,Theodore 1791-1824
Raft of the Medusa 1819
Paris,Louvre French, Romanticism

Winslow Homer,
The Life Line 1884
Oil on canvas 29 x 45
in Philadelphia Museum of Art

Winslow Homer,1836-1910 Snap the Whip, 1872
Oil on canvas, 22 x 36" (55.88 x 91.44 cm.)

Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Banjo Lesson 1893
Oil on canvas 49 x 35 1/2 in. Hampton University Museum, Virginia

Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Thankful Poor 1894