Episodes at the End of Landscape

This dissertation examines the dissolution of landscape painting as a major cultural project in the late nineteenth-century United States. As a genre aligned with the goals of nation building, landscape maintained a privileged artistic status for much of the nineteenth century. Yet as frontier development, land speculation, environmental change, and other factors slowly rendered its conventions meaningless, landscape became the site through which American artists most urgently sought to come to terms with the modern world. This argument is anchored by unorthodox artworks, from landscapes resembling banknotes to paintings made out of bird feathers—limit cases that allude to the failure of landscape in sustaining American cultural goals. Chapter One concerns Albert Bierstadt's aesthetic struggles in post-frontier America. During the 1890s, Bierstadt's anxieties about landscape surfaced in the particularities of objects that fold and unfold, from butterflies painted by chance to expanding railway cars—objects that might be considered the subconscious of a genre built upon expansionist ideology. Chapter Two argues that Martin Johnson Heade's tropical and marsh paintings of the 1870s an