Hélène Valance

About twenty years after James McNeill Whistler reinvented moonlight painting with his Nocturnes, night paintings became a veritable vogue in the United States. A majority of artists, critics, and even art historians agreed to interpret nocturnes as paintings of poetry and mystery, detached from their more down-to-earth context. Yet nocturnes appear, in many ways, as anti-modernist reactions to the transformations of their times. I argue that the metaphor of night, repeatedly employed to approach topics as diverse as science, urban life, and the unconscious, enabled artists of the time to deal, albeit negatively, with unprecedented and disturbing realities.

With research in bacteriology, experiments with magnetism, and the discovery of X rays, boundaries between the visible and the invisible seemed increasingly blurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The attraction artists felt for barren and murky landscapes indicated their refusal to represent nature accurately, as science kept proving that visual perception was illusory and inadequate. As psychology and psychoanalysis began exploring the dark recesses of the mind, the monochrome and quasi-empty canvases of nocturnes were read as spaces of repose for the soul, the outside landscape acting as a mirror of the viewer’s interiority. At a time when the urban way of life became predominant, many painters manifested an escapist preference for idealized, quiet rural moonlights. Frederic Remington’s late nocturnes similarly evoked a vanished frontier, recasting the Old West into nostalgic, yet highly marketable, imagery. Winslow Homer’s Searchlight, Santiago de Cuba (1901) ambiguously reemployed rhetoric of light and darkness used to justify the United States’ new imperialism. From Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) to Ashcan school paintings of night-time street life, darkness served to highlight contrasts as well as to cover differences made visible by the arrival of ethnically diverse immigrants swelling into expanding cities.

If explored beyond the limits of surface description or artistic lineage and connected to its broader visual context, the nocturne can be revealed as a sort of negative image of the United States between 1890 and 1917. My intention is to show how, at the turn of the century, the visual metaphor of night acted as a buffer zone that both repressed and accommodated modernity.

I intend to work on nineteenth-century American landscape painting, focusing on the imaginary re-envisioning of native landscape: landscape seen as a wilderness to be tamed, cultivated, and ornamented in imitation of, or in contrast with, European landscapes, and considered in all its imaginative reconfigurations.

I will rely first on a series of texts dealing with scenery or landscape and its painted representations. These texts will be seen as reveries or re-imaginings of the American landscape and will be compared with analogous dramatizations or reconfigurations in the pictorial tradition, more particularly in the paintings of the Hudson River School.

It is almost a commonplace for nineteenth-century authors writing about American landscape to lament its “plainness,” its lack of “picturesqueness,” and its paucity of historical significance. Obsessed with representations of European landscapes that abound with signs of the past—ruins, monuments and buildings, all visible markers of human cultural history—American writers and painters of the nineteenth century dreamt of the picturesque “enrichment” of their own landscape. This preoccupation led some to re-envision their native wilderness in often hallucinatory ways, imagining future transformations that would incarnate the higher ideals of a new nation but at the same time point towards the figural rape of pastoral serenity. This tension between the dream of “cultivation” and the fear of violating the landscape’s native integrity demands an investigation into the definitions of this “cultivation” and its relationship to European depictions of landscapes. What forms do dreamed landscapes take in the work of painters? To what extent do the latter borrow European models, and in what ways are these anachronistic signs formally and technically integrated into the American imagery?

I will concentrate on the expression, in the works of nineteenth century painters, of paradoxes expressed by writers who, seeking a picturesque future that would endow them with a visible past, dream of a national representation nurtured by European pictures and confront the realities of their own country with delirious aspirations of its quasi-magical embellishment.