The Spirit and the Vision: The Influence of Christian Romanticism on the Development of 19th-Century American Art

Christian Romanticism was a response to social changes within nineteenth-century American culture, including women's literacy, spiritual domesticity, and the idealization of childhood. This book examines the work of three artists of the first American landscape tradition -- Washington Alston, Thomas Cole, and Frederic Edwin Church -- and two clergymen -- Horace Bushnell and Henry Ward Beecher. It assesses their understanding of the artist as a social and moral teacher, the didactic role of art in society more generally, and a God who acts in history. The author finds that the art of Allston, Cole, and Church expressed and served the dominant middle-class religious ideology of the time -- Christian Romanticism. This distinguishes their work from more elitist and regional work.