In Europe Germany and Britain changed the customary appeal of art by taking on a more intensified approach to expressing such creativity. This first manifested itself in the way landscape painting was done, and the overall response it evoked was profound. By focusing on magnitude through blending darkness, privation, obscurity, vastness, imposition and magnificence evoked feelings of pleasurable fright.
In Europe, painters concentrated on only features in the landscape and embellished them to give them a bold yet, in a way, single character. This automatically appealed to everyone, motivating deep nationalistic feelings and attitudes. As the style progressed to France, it diversified to take a more romantic style in other areas, such as historical dramas. This was primarily because of the Napoleonic era, which became a center of interest for artists in France. In broader Europe, however, masterpiece landscape paintings continued to bring national pride to the citizenry. It was also developed to cover real-time events such as shipwrecks that killed large numbers of people, amplifying the unfortunate incident and hence permanently imprinting it in history.
Further West, Caleb Bingham, and Mark Twain devoted their lives to recording life along the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. In his landscape, Bingham portrayed a rugged individual who would later be described as a typical American. Fur trapping was a tradition exercised by the French ancestry, who lived in the forests and survived by setting and checking traps, trading with Native Americans, and selling pelts to traders. The traders, in turn, sold to middlemen such as Jacob Astor. The paintings marketed by these parties confirmed the ethnic identity of the subjects, including French traders, and how their intermarriages led to the birth of a new race. From the precedent, landscape painting experienced a rapid revolution from topics driven by academic tradition as opposed to those dictated by personal preferences.
Works Cited
Novak, Barbara. Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875, With a New Preface. Oxford University Press on Demand, 2007.
