Dimensions
240 x 279 x 20mm
This wonderful new volume takes us on a vicarious journey into awe-inspiring mountain scenery through the work of some of the most celebrated landscape artists of the midnineteenth century. It presents, for the first time, the story of how artists Alexandre Calame (1810-64) and Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), and their compatriots from North America and Europe, strove to depict the mountains of the Rockies and the Alps. It features 60 key pictures by Calame - largely unfamiliar to audiences outside of his native Switzerland - along with those by J.M. W. Turner, John Ruskin, Samuel F. B. Morse, Bierstadt and his contemporaries of the Hudson River School - including Thomas Cole, Worthington Whittredge and Arthur Frederick Kensett - and works by photographers Charles Bierstadt, Carleton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge. The decades from 1830 to the 1870s saw artists, scientists and tourists awake to the wonders of sublime natural scenery. The Rockies and the Alps reveals how artists grappled with just how to transform this vast and alien landscape into canvases powerful in national and religious symbolism. The authors also consider the wider context of key socio-cultural developments in the midnineteenth century, particularly the burgeoning interest in natural history and the rise in tourism, and the appreciation of the natural world. AUTHORS: Katherine Manthorne is professor of art history at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Tricia Laughlin Bloom is curator of American art at the Newark Museum. 100 colour images
