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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
Recent scholarship in the history of American art has uncovered the deep social, political, and economic context within which specific inividuals invented highly charged (and frequently contested) visions of the American landscape. Drawing attention away from the naturalizing tendency of criticism that emphasizes landscape painting as a reflection of national and transcendental ideals, this kind of analysis has brought new richness to the study of landscapes, weaving political and social history into the criticism of American art. Charting paintings as they function within the constellations of patronage, intellectual history, and reception, these new histories help us understand the cultural work of landscape in the 19th-century United States.
I thank Chris Labarthe, David C. Miller, David Steinberg, Robin Veder, Alan Wallach, and Jochen Weirich for reading and criticizing this essay.
1. The work of Alan Wallach, Kenneth Myers, Roger Stein, and many others likewise emphasizes the circumstances and conditions of the production of landscape aesthetics.
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