Political Economy, Race, and the Image of Nature in the United States, 1825–1878
Evan Robert Neely
Routledge, 2024
The Metropolitan Museum of Art dryly describes Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow (1836) as “a masterpiece of American landscape painting” in which the artist “juxtaposes untamed wilderness and pastoral settlement to emphasize the possibilities of the national landscape, pointing to the future prospect of the American nation.” While the Hudson River School—a group of largely male Anglo-American painters, including Cole—has broadly become known for landscapes in service of Manifest Destiny and prevailing attitudes towards the wild and nature, their paintings are now being assessed for their embodiment of the settler imaginary of the American West, and their depictions of land that signify interleaving relationships of capitalist expansion, racial identity, and nationalism.
The Oxbow is one of several paintings discussed at lengths in Evan Robert Neely’s meticulous Political Economy, Race, and the Image of Nature in the United States, 1825–1878. Neely asserts how cartography influenced not only the visual structure of landscape painting and its orientation of space, but also that the practice of sketching en plein air expressed “the ideology of propertarianism is inextricable from colonial conquest.” Throughout, he shrewdly focuses on the ways in which nature during this crucial period in America was culturally constructed and mutually determined by land ownership, economic development, settler colonialism, and the rise in literary forms—such as poetry—and their mass dissemination in a growing publishing industry and literacy in the northeast. Indispensable for both the landscape art historian and painter, this book makes timely reappraisals of widely canonized painters such as Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, and Frederic Church. The groundbreaking insights, however, come in the later chapters as Neely deftly evaluates the racial geography in African American painter Robert S. Duncanson’s landscapes of Black labor and locates in Duncanson’s paintings and Henry David Thoreau’s writings critiques of the picturesque’s propertarian economy and imperialist views of nature.
In a preamble, Neely offers “Three Stories,” each from successive decades of the 1960s through the 1980s that evoke a greater historical context outside of the nineteenth-century American landscape tradition. They also serve as a prelude to his adoption of twentieth and twenty-first–century theoretical models such as Michel Foucault’s dispositif as interpreted through Giorgio Agamben’s apparatus. The stories also historically provide a bridge between our present and the Jacksonian, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras discussed.
First, the Storm King Mountain case in 1962 highlights legal and environmental resistance to development based on ecological, rather than aesthetic, concerns. Secondly, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson’s 1971 film Swamp critiques conventional landscape beauty by exploring degraded environments, rejecting romanticized notions of nature. Thirdly, Gordon Parks’s 1984 adaptation of Twelve Years a Slave shifts focus from the natural landscape to the emotional trauma of slavery, rejecting any redemptive connection between nature and human suffering. These examples provide counterpoints to prevailing attitudes on American landscape painting and argue for a critical reevaluation of traditional landscape aesthetics, describing how environmental degradation and human suffering challenge the Hudson River School’s romanticized views of nature.
While the general problem with Foucault remains a reductive notion of power and Agamben an unintelligibility in his acritical relations of the apparatus, it is a reassurance that Neely ultimately employs pragmatism as his overarching theoretical lens. In addition, he devotes a coda to Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotics, which he connects to Emerson’s transcendentalism, emphasizing that nature constantly inscribes itself in physical marks. Anticipating the autographic mark of American Abstract Expressionism, Neely applies Peirce’s thinking to the modern American landscape painting of George Inness and Alexander Wyant, where brushstrokes became indexical marks of personal expression.
Since Landscape with Rainbow (1859) was on display at the US Capitol for Biden’s inauguration in 2021, Robert Duncanson has experienced a surge of interest and reinvestigation. For Neely, Duncanson’s painting, View of Cincinnati, Ohio, from Covington, Kentucky (ca. 1851) embeds a political charge into a pastoral scene, serving as a complex reflection on race, labor, and geography. A departure from later Romantic landscapes, Duncanson paints a realistic depiction of Cincinnati from the viewshed of Kentucky, a slave state. Duncanson works with the mainstream visual culture of a popular engraving, while subtly critiquing its colonialist underpinnings. Providing a counter-narrative to the white settler, he deliberately alters the race of a figure in the foreground, thus emphasizing Black labor and the legacy of slavery. The geographical orientation of the scene—northward from a slave state—signals a metaphorical escape from slavery, aligning with abolitionist narratives of the Underground Railroad and flight to freedom.
Neely’s Political Economy, Race, and the Image of Nature in the United States, 1825–1878 is a significant and compelling reassessment of nineteenth-century American landscape painting that reads like the first of a series. Considering his interest both in Land art and mid-century modernist painting as well as his distinctive theoretical lens, a trilogy of texts could coalesce around these art historical periods that interweave landscape and painting. Neely’s engagement with semiotics, particularly through Peirce, provides a theoretical grounding that connects nineteenth-century landscape painting to both twentieth-century abstraction and contemporary issues of environmentalism and racial geography. His thoughtful inclusion of later twentieth-century critiques—such as those by Holt, Smithson, and Parks—underscores the ongoing relevance of these discussions, linking historical artistic practices to modern-day concerns about environmental degradation and the politics of representation.