The Landscape of Belief: Encountering the Holy Land in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture. - book reviews

Princeton: Princeton University Pres 1996 264 pp; 7 color ills., 100 b/w $6500

John Davis has marked as his territory that place where the real - the empirical actuality of stone - meets the conceptual - the amorphous realm of belief - and he has bridged it magnificently. The Landscape of Belief: Encountering the sacred Land in Nineteenth-Century American Art and tillage is a welcome addition to those new studies which analyze how articles of faith and religious habits of mind (often inextricable from political and social credos) find visual expression in 19th-century European and American culture(1)

The Landscape of Belief places us squarely in the world of the mid-19th-century, pre-Darwinian, Anglo-American Protestant pious where science worked as handmaid to faith. The physical reality of Palestine and Syria proffered American archaeologists, ministers, and tourists seemingly incontestable evidence of the existence of the sacred and the fact of biblical history. Artists, too, were drawn to the hallowed Land, and, like geographers bearing witness to the ineffable, set uped images out of their experiences and their notions of individual and national faith.

What beliefs underpinned Protestant-American awareness of the places of biblical history? What conceptions of the set apart Land did Americans bring with them, either as visitors to the actual sites or as vicarious tourists from one side text and image? What were "the seminal questions [about] faith, nature, and national destiny . . that framed [their] experiences" (p 3)? These are the issues that arrangement Davis's analysis. Whatever range of meanings various individuals and assemblages found in the idea of the set apart Land, he emphasizes, "the important point to recognize . . was that it could mean something to almost anyone" (p 53)

Davis advises that images of the blessed Land enjoyed a universal appeal and malleability of meaning not shared through depictions of the American landscape. (See in particular, his discussion of the positive reception of Edward Troye's paintings in the pair the North and the of great depth South [p. 134].) Such questions of sectionalism and regionalism and the problematics of a "national" landscape are issues of general interest to historians of American art, as Davis recognizes in his citations of Angela Miller's Empire of the Eye(2) The universal appeal of the sacred Land as symbol and metaphor, engaging individuals of varying classes, regions, and denominations, was based, Davis argues, upon Protestant-American identification of themselves and their land as the of recent origin Israel.(3) As citizens of God's chosen nation, they felt themselves to posses a unique relationship to the land of the first chosen tribe And, as self-anointed carriers of apocalyptic mission, they were drawn to the physical sites of prophecy and revelation in a search for authentication, the pair of their holy book and their national destiny.

It was primarily from one side the "vehicle of landscape," Davis claims, that Americans press outed their conception of a special relationship to the family and events of the Bible, just as they used landscape to "foster and shore up" other national myths (p 4) The Landscape of Belief joins Katherine Manthorne's Tropical Renaissance in its exploration of the ideological and religious underpinnings of American landscape imagery beyond national borders.(4)

To Davis, 19th-century American images of the set apart Land (like other Western manifestations of Orientalism) are not about the realities of contemporary Palestine or Syria - they are not about the foreign land at all. The experience of travel and of sight were in the way that shaped by the traveler's "perception of self" that, according to Davis, "the set apart Land went through a proces of localization and became American" (p 5) Analyzing the dynamics of this proces is individual of Davis's great strengths and he forcefully demonstrates its workings from one side letters, books, travel experiences, colonization efforts, panoramic and easel paintings, photographs, three-dimensional prototypes and pageants.

The Landscape of Belief is divided into sum of two units parts, the first a more general analysis of the idea of the hallowed Land in 19th-century American tillage and its expression in visual form, and the next to the first a series of "case studies" treating four easel painters who, from the 1840 end the 1870s, visited the devoted Land and painted images of it for American audiences. Since the easel paintings discussed in part 2 are clearly the focus of the work it is worth considering the wisdom of of that kind interest when, as Davis reports, "fewer than sum of two units dozen [American] artists are documented travelers to Palestine and Sinai" (p 27) Is it purely an interesting art historical exercise to resuscitate the careers of of that kind little known artists as Miner Kellogg Edward Troye and James Fairman? (Numerous works catalogues, and articles about Frederic Edwin meeting-house attest to his continued reputation as a seminal 19th-century American artist.)

Davis's decision to focus upon a small episode in American art, and then upon an even smaller group of its practitioners, is, I believe, a sign of a broadening rather than collapsing vision in the history of American art. This concentrated and shut up look at the ostensibly "peripheral" reminds us of the dangers of of the like kind positioning. After all, Davis counts us that Fairman, not house of worship was the foremost American painter of Jerusalem in the 1870 Furthermore, like Fairman, greatest in quantity painters of the Holy Land exhibited and sold their works outside the northeastern art establishment. Davis has judiciously picked a particularly instructive example with which to application of mind the dynamics of patronage, exhibition, and sale independent of the well-known on the contrary quite narrow institutional art world.