1. For recent examples of this tendency, see Schneider, Richard J., “Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Painting,” ESQ 31, no. 2 (Second Quarter 1985): 67–88Google Scholar; Smith, Gayle L., “Emerson and the Luminist Painters: A Study of Their Styles,” American Quarterly 37, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 193–215CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Chmaj, Betty E., “The Journey and the Mirror: Emerson and the American Arts,” Prospects 10 (1985): 385–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar In honor of her pioneering, magisterial, and inspiring work on American Painting, I wish to dedicate this essay to Barbara Novak.

2. See, respectively, Baur, John I. H., “American Luminism: A Neglected Aspect of the Realist Movement in Nineteenth-Century American Painting,” Perspectives USA no. 9 (08 1954): 90–98Google Scholar; Novak, Barbara, American Painting of he Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience (New York: Praeger, 1969)Google Scholar; and Wilmerding, John et al. , American Light: The Luminist Movement, 1850–1875 (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1980).Google Scholar

3. For a cogent, provocative and critical survey of the foundation and rise of the whole discipline, see Corn, Wanda, “Coming of Age: Historical Scholarship in American Art,” The Art Bulletin 70, no. 2 (06 1988): 188–207.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Of Luminism, Corn writes that “confusion reigns, and will not go away until scholars are willing to debate the subject openly and come to some new requirements as to how nineteenth-century landscape painting ought to be ordered and described. For all the scholarly attention lavished upon nineteenth-century landscape painting, it is remarkable how muddled the issues continue to be” (p. 196). The scholar who has gone furthest in imposing an objective ordering on the term, besides Novak, is Theodore Stebbins, who has maintained that “in the future, it may be preferable to define luminism stylistically rather than philosophically, and in particular, to limit the term so that it refers specifically to the meticulous tightly polished style in the landscape painting practiced in America chiefly from 1860 to 1880.” See Stebbins, Theodore E. Jr., The Life and Works of Martin Johnson Heade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), p. 105.Google Scholar See also his corrective, largely neglected essay comparing American and European painters of light called “Luminism in Context: A New View,” in American Light, pp. 211–34.Google Scholar

4. Conrad, Barnaby III, “American Light,” Horizon 23, no. 2 (02 1980): 51.Google Scholar

5. For an important conspicuously ignored negative reaction to the whole concept of Luminism, see Wilton, Andrew's review of the American Light exhibit in The Burlington Magazine 122, no. 931 (10 1980): 715–16.Google Scholar

6. First included as only a passing reference by Baur, (“American Luminism,” p. 91)Google Scholar, this quotation was used by Novak to preface her chapter on Fitz-Hugh Lane, subtitled “A Paradigm of Luminism” (p. 110)Google Scholar, and practically became the leitmotif of the essays in the American Light catalog. I am indebted to Cannon Labrie for pointing out this fact and drawing my attention to the importance of the American Light exhibit as an “act of critical invention.” As he writes in an unpublished essay on “Emerson and the Limits of Luminism” (1986)Google Scholar, “What was most important … to the organizers was that nineteenth-century art and by extension, literature, were finally free from the suffocating cultural tentacles of Europe, free from the comparison to the European in which the American always suffered because it was thin, pale, and imitative” (p. 10). The exhibition thus did have Emerson for its father, but not so much the Transcendental Emerson of “Nature,” as Emerson the Cultural Revolutionist, who declared in “The American Scholar” that “our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learnings of other lands, draws to a close.”

7. In a much later article on “Francis A. Silva: Beyond Luminism,” Baur observes of the Luminists that “it is one of the paradoxes of their art that the mirror-like surfaces of their paintings, which seem to reflect nature so faithfully and to suppress any evidence, through brush stroke or handling, of individual interpretation, were actually distorting mirrors insofar as they exaggerated and intensified natural effects of light and air for poetic purposes” (Antiques 118 [11 1980]: 1018).Google Scholar

8. McGann, Jerome J., The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 5.Google Scholar

9. Novak, , “On Defining Luminism,” American Light, p. 25.Google Scholar

10. See Wolfflin, Heinrich, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, trans. Hottinger, M. D. (1915; rept. New York: Dover, 1963).Google Scholar

11. In “On Defining Luminism,” Novak states that “Luminist planarism is sometimes directly related to the primitive bias of the artist” (p. 23)Google Scholar, epitomizing comparisons made among Kensett, Lane, Heade, and the American folk-art tradition in APNC (pp. 99–105)Google Scholar, while in “Nature's Art,” her introductory essay to The Thyssen — Bornemisza Collection: Nineteenth-Century American Painting (New York: Vendome Press, 1986)Google Scholar, she writes that “a host of nineteenth century American paintings begin with primitive conceptualism and retain their ideographic base even as they achieve a more ‘advanced’ posture of sophistication” (p. 15). Discussing the provincial portraits of John Singleton Copley, she further observes that “his initial primitivism becomes a distinguishing characteristic for much American art that follows him. Bound to the plane and the linear integrity of idea, it substitutes the pragmatic encounter with the object for the formula of the non-existent academy” (p. 16). This deliberate provinciality also characterizes Dickinson's choice of a folk form, the singsong meters of Watts, Isaac's Hymns (1707)Google Scholar, Psalms (1719)Google Scholar, and Divine and Moral Songs (1720).Google Scholar Dickinson was as aware of European and cosmopolitan cultural developments as were the Luminists, so her adherence to American folk elements was not so much due to what Novak calls “distance from the mainstream” as to a stubborn Emersonian selfreliance. See my Emily Dickinson and Her Culture: The Soul's Society (New Yorkand Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)Google Scholar, esp. ch. 5, “American Grotesque: Dickinson, God, and Folk Forms,” pp. 153–180.Google Scholar A neglected source for Luminist planarity, abstraction, and tonality can be found in the many Chinese export paintings that would have been familiar to anyone frequenting East Coast ports like Salem or Providence in the 19th Century. See, for example, M. V. and Brewington, Dorothy, The Marine Paintings and Drawings in the Peabody Museum (Salem, Mass.: Peabody Museum of Salem, 1968)Google Scholar; Mudge, Jean McClure, Chinese Export Porcelain for the American Trade (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1982)Google Scholar; and Jourdain, Margaret and Jenyns, R. Soame, Chinese Export Art (Norwich: Spring Books, 1950).Google Scholar

12. Johnson, Thomas H., ed., The Poems of Emily Dickinson, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), vol. 1, p. 200Google Scholar, poem 280. Hereafter, all quotations from Dickinson's poems will refer to this, the variorum edition, by citation of poem number in parentheses in the text, that is, (J 280).

13. See Sewall, Richard B., The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), vol. 2, pp. 522–23.Google Scholar

14. Dickinson is cosmic rather than panoramic; one of her few “wide-angle” poems is the wonderful description of sundown in “How the old Mountains drip with Sunset” (J 291). This poem could be again too easily compared, in its pyrotechnical use of scarlet tints, to Frederic Edwin Church's nearly contemporary Twilight in the Wilderness (1860)Google Scholar, save that the poet's images of “old Steeples” in stanza two and “the Village” and “Houses” in stanza four decisively domesticate the landscape, vitiating any menacing wild or frontier elements. The comparison of the sun's departing “Fire” to the royal progress of “Duchess” in stanza three further feminizes the whole event in typical Dickinsonian fashion, one that contrasts markedly with the dominant patriarchal iconography of the Hudson River School, which begins with such renovations of Old Testament images as Cole, Thomas's Sunny Morning on the Hudson River (1827)Google Scholar, where the altars of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Noah in Genesis are re-erected in the American wilderness.

15. In Johnson's edition, 143 of Dickinson's poems begin with the pronoun “I,” while 17 more begin with the contractions “I'd,” “I'll,” or “I've.”

16. See Stebbins, Theodore E., The Life and Works of Martin Johnson Heade, p. 234 and passim.Google Scholar

17. I chose this title deliberately, because it also points to the experiential subject of Heade's painting, which is the major theme of much Luminist painting in general: the contrast in psychic perspective between the mere casual observer of the ocean from the shore, and the seasoned, “professional” apprehension of the same scene by one who lives on or through or with the ocean, and so must adjust to its constant metamorphosis. The true analogue to Heade's archetypal Luminist painting is therefore not to be found in Dickinson, but in Oliver Wendell Holmes's “Sun and Shadow,” first published in The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1857).Google Scholar This poem effectively contrasts, as Heade does, a pictorial, “picturesque” view of the shore and its dangers with a pragmatic, “pilot's” view, much as Mark Twain will later accomplish in his famous passage on the passenger's view of the Mississippi and the pilot, 's view in Life on the Mississippi (1883).Google Scholar I quote the poem in full, because it is such a perfect gloss on Heade's representative and implicit moral meaning in this seminal work:

As I look from the isle, o'er its billows of green, To the billows of foam-crested blue, Yon bark, that afar in the distance is seen, Half dreaming, my eyes will pursue: Now dark in the shadow, she scatters the spray As the chaff in the stroke of the flail; Now white as the sea-gull, she flies on her way, The sun gleaming bright on her sail.

Yet her pilot is thinking of dangers to shun, – Of breakers that whiten and roar; How little he cares, if in shadow or sun They see him who gaze from the shore! He looks to the beacon that looms from the reef, To the rock that is under his lee, As he drifts on the blast, like a wind-wafted leaf, O'er the gulfs of the desolate sea. Thus drifting afar to the dim-vaulted caves Where life and its ventures are laid, The dreamers who gaze while we battle the waves May see us in sunshine or shade: Yet true to our course, though the shadows grow dark, We'll trim our broad sail as before, And stand by the rudder that governs the bark, Nor ask how we look from the shore!

Holmes, , Poetical Works (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1890), p. 162.Google Scholar

16. See Stebbins, , The Life and Works of Martin Johnson Heade, p. 234 and passim.Google Scholar

18. Heade's accuracy harks back to that of Turner in his storm paintings. Compare, for example, the early orange squiggle of lightning in “Tower by the Sea” from the “Wilson” sketchbook of about 1796, reproduced by Wilkinson, Gerald in Turner's Early Sketchbooks (New York: Watson-Guptil, 1972), p. 56Google Scholar; the white daggers of The Lake ofThun, Switzerland (c. 1806)Google Scholar and The Bass Rock (c. 1824)Google Scholar, reproduced by Wilton, Andrew in J. M. W. Turner: His Art and Life (Secaucus, N.J.: Poplar Books, 1979), pp. 97, 159Google Scholar; the fiery bolts of Stonehenge (c. 1825–1828)Google Scholar, Stamford, Lincolnshire (c. 1825–1828)Google Scholar, and the engraving of Calvern Abbey and Gate, Worcestershire (1832)Google Scholar, reproduced by Shanes, Eric in Turner's Picturesque Views in England and Wales: 1825–1838 (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), pi. 25; pp. 31, 35.Google Scholar It was of the Stonehenge that Ruskin wrote in Modern Painters I that “The white lightning, not as it is drawn by less observant or less capable painters, in zigzag fortifications, but in its own dreadful irregularity of streaming fire, is brought down, not merely over the dark clouds, but through the full light of an illumined opening to the blue, which yet cannot abate the brilliancy of its white line; and the track of the last flash along the ground is fearfully marked by the dog howling over the fallen shepherd, and the ewe pressing her head upon the body of her dead lamb.” See Ruskin, John, Modern Painters (1843; rept. New York: Wiley, 1886), p. 261.Google Scholar In his note on the engraving of this scene in Turner and the Sublime (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980)Google Scholar, Andrew Wilton writes that “Rawlinson relates that the President of the Royal Meteorological Society was impressed by the artist's rendering of the lightning” (p. 163).Google Scholar See also the lightning forks in the mezzotints of Paestum and Catania, Sicily, part of the so-called “Little Liber,” a series of prints of night and twilight effects prepared by Turner himself about 1825 as an experimental afterthought to the great Liber Studiorum of 1819.Google Scholar These were never published in Turner's lifetime, but are reproduced in Turner and the Sublime on pp. 158 and 161.Google Scholar

19. I am indebted to Denise Holland for pointing out the “colder spirituality” (Hawthorne's phrase) that characterizes Heade's larger exhibition works like Approaching Storm and Moonlit Landscape, which, in an unpublished paper on “Moonlit Scenes of Hawthorne and Heade” (1986)Google Scholar, she relates to the Coleridgean distinction between the fancy and the imagination.

20. In Dickinson: Strategies of Limitation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985)Google Scholar, Jane Donahue Eberwein notes that the poet similarly domestic cated “a sublime presentation of American landscape” to the “reductive literary form of a recipe” in J 1755, “To make a prairie …” (p. 134).Google Scholar In “The Modernism of Emily Dickinson,” Charles Anderson suggests that Dickinson's use of opal “gives a theatrical irridescence, like Noah's Rainbow, to the vision of a restored world” (Emily Dickinson: Letter to the World [Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1986], p. 41).Google Scholar That nature would wear the “Sign of Promise” itself as an apron further sentimentalizes and feminizes a fundamentally patriarchal Old Testament typology. See Landow, George, “Rainbows: Images of Problematic Nature,” in Images of Crisis: Literary Iconography, 1750 to the Present (Boston and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), pp. 156–79.Google Scholar

21. Johnson, Thomas H. and Ward, Theodora, eds., The Letters of Emily Dickinson, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), vol. 2, pp. 519–20.Google Scholar Hereafter quotations from this edition appear in parentheses in the text, that is, (L 2: 519). Johnson and Ward speculate that the poem sent in 1873 was “The Wind Begun to knead the Grass” (J 824), the very opening lines of which indicate a typical domestication and feminization of Dickinson's subject matter (that is, storm = making bread). In describing the electrical discharge, however, Dickinson alters the anthropomorphic lines of the first version:

The lightning showed a Yellow Head –

And then a livid Toe –

to stress the storm's human fierceness in the second version:

The Lightning showed a Yellow Beak

And then a livid claw.

See Poems 3: 624–25.Google Scholar

22. See Edelstein, Tilden G., Strange Enthusiasm: A Life of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (New York: Athenaeum, 1970), pp. 296–335.Google Scholar

23. See the paintings reproduced in Workman, Robert G., The Eden of America: Rhode Island Landscapes, 1820–1920 (Providence: Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 1986).Google Scholar

24. I have myself characterized Dickinson's method in “The Mountains stood in Haze” (J 1278) as “approach[ing] that of the native American school called luminism” (Emily Dickinson and Her Culture, p. 242).Google Scholar As I further point out, Dickinson's brother Austin and sister-in-law Susan owned an outstanding collection of 19th-century paintings, among them Hudson River landscapes by Sanford Gifford and John Kensett that could legitimately be labelled “Luminist” (pp. 251–52, 260).Google Scholar But my survey of Dickinson's sunset poems reveals the essentially painterly and Turneresque tropes of her pictorialism (pp. 262–95).

25. Higginson, T. W., Oldport Days (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1873).Google Scholar Hereafter referred to as OD in the text.

26. Higginson, T. W., Malbone: An Oldport Romance (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1869).Google Scholar Hereafter referred to as M in the text.

27. See Higginson, T. W., “Review of Cape Cod,” Atlantic Monthly 15 (03 1865): 381.Google Scholar

28. See my essay “Luminism in the Work of Henry David Thoreau: The Dark and the Light,” The Canadian Review of American Studies 11, no. 1 (Spring 1980): 13–30.Google Scholar

29. See Novak, Barbara's chapter “The Geological Timetable: Rocks,” in Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825–1875 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 47–77.Google Scholar

30. See also the catalog description of Bricher, A. T.'s On the Shore, Newport (c. 1885)Google Scholar in Eden for a striking example of the difficulty of establishing locales through the inclusion of ever-changing architectural details (p. 57). Once again, the only real constants are waves, rocks, and erosion.

31. Compare Marsden Hartley's Cubist treatments of the same scene during the 1930s. As James F. O'Gorman writes of his 1931 oil, Rock Doxology, “Hartley's title suggests the reverential attitude with which he viewed this abstract pattern of gray rocks and red brown autumnal vegetation. In the painter-poet's vision, Dogtown assumed an anagogical role. Like the desert retreats of ancient hermits, the lonely landscape evoked for Hartley the presence of a divine spirit.” See Portrait of a Place: Some American Landscape Painters in Gloucester (Gloucester, Mass.: Cape Ann Historical Association, 1973), p. 90Google Scholar

32. Werner, Alfred, Inness Landscapes (New York: Watson-Guptil, 1973), pp. 46–47.Google Scholar

33. For James's use of Newport's architectural riches, see Dahl, Curtis, “Lord Lambeth's America: Architecture in James's ‘An International Episode,’” The Henry James Review 5, no. 2 (Winter 1984): 80–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34. Jarves, James Jackson, The Art-Idea, ed. Rowland, Benjamin Jr (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), pp. 189–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35. See Novak, 's ch. 2, “Grand Opera and the Still Small Voice,” Nature and Culture, pp. 18–33.Google Scholar

36. See the essays in Scythe, Staddle and Stack: Haying on the Salt Marsh (Newburyport, Mass.: Newburyport Maritime Society, 1983).Google Scholar In “Gathering the Salt Hay: A Measure of Man and Marsh,” Betsy H. Woodman observes that the salt-marsh haystacks themselves “had recognizable shapes, and a person with a trained eye and one who knew the stackers could recognize the hand of the individual builder” (p. 36).Google Scholar In “Collected Scatterings: Reminiscences of Salt Hay Farming,” Woodman and Douglas MacLeod note that “it is claimed, especially by the marsh farmers, that a man's stack was his signature. When looking at a marsh painting of uneven stacks, an old farmer is known to have quipped ‘those weren't my stacks. They must have been somebody else's down the road’” (p. 42).Google Scholar Haying was thus both a craft and an art, with highly specialized tools like “loafer rakes,” “ditching saws,” and “bread loaf knives” that developed as part of the elaborate and almost ritualized process of cultivating, cutting, and stacking the hay. A special nomenclature went along with the intricate and time-honored process of haying; the teethlike rows of poles that look like miniature stone circles in some of Heade's marsh scenes were in fact platforms called “staddles.” As Woodman explains in her article on gathering the hay,

The staddles consisted of a grouping of wooden poles that were stuck into the marsh, and these provided an open surface that would allow air to circulate under the stack and would keep the stack dry and elevated above the marsh and the high tides, (p. 36)

The hay was transported from the marsh by “gundalows,” flat-bottomed boats especially designed for the purpose, their name probably deriving from the Venetian “gondola,” though typically the demands of Yankee utilitarianism overcame any stray exotic or picturesque connotations. In winter, when the marshes were frozen, heavy-duty sleds were employed. Most interesting, however, are the antiquity and complex ecological aspects of the whole haying operation, which depended entirely on an exact calculation of natural rhythms and cycles. As Pike Messenger writes in his “Haying, Other Salt Marsh Things, and Time,”

It was only when older that I began to think about relationship between marsh events and time. The haymakers consulted the almanac, before almanacs the moon, and scheduled their trips to the “medders” on a series of lower tides (neap tides) in the latter part of July and August. These times are between full and new moons when the water just rises to the top of the creek banks but no higher. They had just about a week to ten days of relatively dry marsh, (p. 41)

Messenger notes that, as early as 1663, the Newburyport selectmen forbade haying in the marshes before the tenth of July. All of these facts emphasize the antiquity, specialization, intricacy, and ephemerality of salt-marsh haying as a seasonal folk tradition, a true Local Color phenomenon that necessitated the nice adjustment of man to the elements, based in turn on the knowledgeable cultivation of a seemingly barren waste that was really a rich and fertile resource. All of this could hardly be lost on an artist so in love with the “out of doors” as Heade, and as Erica Hirschler and Julie Aronson comment in their “Martin Johnson Heade and the Newburyport Salt Marshes,” in Heade's marsh paintings “man is dwarfed by Nature, as he is in the paintings of Church, yet he seems to have come to a truce with her, for most of these marsh scenes reflect the benevolence of the earth as it can be cultivated by man” (p. 44). An affinity between folk subject matter, like salt-marsh haying, and the “folk-art” elements of Heade's work, noted by Novak, is also implicit here: significantly, both Heade and Silva began as “self-taught” artists. It is appropriate that Heade's paintings should be one of the last records of this primitive activity in all of its folk purity, for mechanization increasingly took over “marshing” in the 20th Century, with the tractor replacing the highly skilled teams of men and horses and the automatic baler obviating the careful human construction of stacks and staddles. Salt-marsh haying peaked right before the First World War, and after that the salt farms lost their population to the factories, while the last horses disappeared from the marshes during the Depression. This previous resource, once jealously guarded by Colonial proprietors for use as fodder, thatch, and bedding, was left largely to return to its prehistoric state, save for some renewed popularity as winter garden mulch. See Amos Everett Jewett, “The Tidal Marshes of Rowley and Vicinity with an Account of the Old-Time Methods of ‘Marshing’,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 85 (10 1949): 272–91Google Scholar; and Woodman, Betsy H., “Salt Haying, Fishing, and Farming in Salisbury, Massachusetts: The Life of Sherb Eaton (1900–1982),” Essex Institute Historical Collections 119 (07 1983): 165–81.Google Scholar

37. See Eston Naef, 's essay, “‘New Eyes’ – Luminism and Photography,” in American Light, pp. 267–89.Google Scholar