Alan Wallach, "Making a Picture of the View from Mount Holyoke," in American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature, ed. David C. Miller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 83-84
In “Making a Picture of the View from Mount Holyoke”, Alan Wallach argues that Thomas Cole created a new perspective of landscape art in his 1836 painting of View from Mount Holyoke (The Oxbow). His perspective merges a panoramic view with precise attention to detail, and with those things The Oxbow has the ability to give the viewer a sense of power. Wallach states that “the tourist experiences a sudden access of power, a sudden dizzying sense of having suddenly come into possession of a terrain stretching as far as the eye could see”. This combination of optical elevation with a sense of power created the “pantropic sublime”.
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He argues that the idea of panoptic sublime is more than just the action of seeing but a more intense and explosive ideology involving a sense of power. He uses Jeremy Bentham’s idea of a prison tower to further explain the relationship of vison and power. He says that the prison tower is used for constant surveillance over inmates giving the person watching a feeling of superiority. We get a sense of superiority when we feel nothing is hidden, as if we know everything, and that makes us feel powerful. He also mentions the phrase “optical hierarchy” when describing the feeling panoptic sublime. Those two words make the reader feel as if they are looking down on Mount Holyoke; giving the reader an insight into the feeling of the panoptic sublime. Wallach achieved his intended goal in explaining and demonstrating the existence of the panoptic sublime in The
Hartwick, Harry. The Foreground of American Fiction. New York: American Book Co, 1934, p. 17-44 Rpt in Crane,
This painting is one of the most well know because the painting show the division of the untouched wilderness to the left, and the cultivated land that is treeless and is covered by field of crops. The diagonal division creates a strong composition which is the first place where the eyes drawn to. The left side of the painting contains the most luscious greenery, which untouched nature should have consist, and the right has more of a yellowish dried and flat landscape where humans contaminated the area. The foreground has a large broken or dead tree that frames the painting so the eyes do not wonder off. The dead trees also represent the untouched land, and rainstorm approaches on left side of the sky dramatizing it. The large river that divided the land has a shape of a loop, which indicated the bow of wooded collar of the yoked ox. Just like that painting from The Clove, Cole small figure in his painting would represent the size of the landscape. The composition gives the figure a feeling of isolation in the wilderness. In The Oxbow, the small figure is John Cole himself, small and very hidden in the bushes, being present in the untamed side of
At the left-bottom corner of the painting, the viewer is presented with a rugged-orangish cliff and on top of it, two parallel dark green trees extending towards the sky. This section of the painting is mostly shadowed in darkness since the cliff is high, and the light is emanating from the background. A waterfall, seen originating from the far distant mountains, makes its way down into a patch of lime-green pasture, then fuses into a white lake, and finally becomes anew, a chaotic waterfall(rocks interfere its smooth passage), separating the latter cliff with a more distant cliff in the center. At the immediate bottom-center of the foreground appears a flat land which runs from the center and slowly ascends into a cliff as it travels to the right. Green bushes, rough orange rocks, and pine trees are scattered throughout this piece of land. Since this section of the painting is at a lower level as opposed to the left cliff, the light is more evidently being exposed around the edges of the land, rocks, and trees. Although the atmosphere of the landscape is a chilly one, highlights of a warm light make this scene seem to take place around the time of spring.
Florian Maier-Aichen is a landscape photographer and drawer.With the computer he is able to alter photographs and make them a piece of artwork that not only pleases his thoughts, but also makes a statement.Since he takes real life images of a landscape and then constructs them in different modes that satisfy him , those images aren’t reality anymore.In Blum & Poe you can observe the strange colors he added to enrich myth-making.He fantasizes landscapes, making them open ended
Stokstad, Marilyn, Michael Watt. Cothren, and Frederick M. Asher. Art History. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall/Pearson, 2011. Print
American History Through Literature 1820-1870. Ed. Janet Gabler-Hover and Robert Sattelmeyer. Vol. 3.
Vose, Marcia L. Forging a National Identity: 19th Century American Paintings. Boston, MA: Voss Galleries, 2012. Print.
Newhall, B. (1982). The history of photography. 1st ed. New York: Museum of Modern Art.
...van, and Hugo Adam. Bedau. "The Boston Photographs." Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing: A Brief Guide to Argument. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2008. 173. Print
Erwin Panofsky, 1939, Studies in Iconology, 1939 rpt. New York: Harper and Row, 1972, pages 3-31.
Ferrier, John-Louis. Art of Our Country: The Chronicle of Western Art 1900 to the Present. Trans Walter D. Glaze. New York: Prentice Hall Press, 1998.
Works Cited “American Literature 1865-1914.” Baym 1271. Baym, Nina et al. Ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature.
Originally derived from the measures to control “abnormal beings” against the spreading of a plague, the Panopticon is an architecture designed to induce power with a permanent sense of visibility. With a tower in the center, surrounded by cells, the prisoners can be monitored and watched at any given time from the central tower. The goal of this architectural plan was to strip away any privacy and therefore create fear induced self-regulation amongst the prisoners, with an unverifiable gaze - The prisoners can never identify when and by whom they are being observed from the tower.
Belasco, Susan, and Linck Johnson, eds. The Bedford Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 1, 2nd Ed., Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2014. 1190-1203. Print.
Holt, Elizabeth G. From the Classicist to the Impressionists: Art and Architecture in the 19th Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966.