States of Grace: Barbara Novak on "American Sublime". (the Vault Preview)

Beginning of article

IN 1829 THOMAS COLE COMPLAINED THAT HIS paintings were skied in the hanging at the Royal Academy and British Gallery in London. "On the varnishing day," he wrote, "I found them in the most exalted situations." Soon his most extraordinary work, the five-canvas series known as "The Course of Empire," 1833-36, will arrive in London as the crown jewel of an ambitious show at Tate Britain, "American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820-1880." Sending "Course of Empire" to London, like sending the Mona Lisa to New York, is an iconic transaction. The series has rarely been allowed out of the building that houses it (the New-York Historical Society). If the paintings survive the transatlantic journey intact, Cole's spirit will rejoice in the fact that his work is now exalted but not skied. Born an Englishman, arriving in America at eighteen to become the so-called father of the Hudson River School, he will now represent the best of American art to his country of origin.

This is no small achievement. Even in this country, American art of the pre-modern period has been consistently left out of surveys of Western art. It is rarely taught as a separate subject in college curricula. Though the nineteenth century is generally recognized as the great era of Western landscape painting, American paintings of this period are rarely if ever included in major landscape exhibitions. Cole, Frederic Church, and Fitz Hugh Lane are not invited to share the stage with Caspar David Friedrich, John Constable, and J.M.W. Turner.

In Europe there is only one major collection of American nineteenth-century painting: that assembled by Hans Heinrich and Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza. Few European collections contain any nineteenth-century American art at all. In 2000, the …