American Landscape

According to David Morse, America's untouched, natural beauty served as a catalyst for the growth of Romantic thought in our nation. The seemingly endless landscape inspired a feeling of the "unlimited potential of the American character."

The pioneering painter Thomas Cole believed that the American artist had an advantage over one of Europe because he did not have to paint what so many men had already captured but instead had a "pure, immediate and spontaneous encounter with nature" which gave him a greater sense of his own power. With this inspiration, Cole painted natural Americ "in the grand Romantic manner." Before leaving America in 1829 to study painting in Europe, Cole made a trip to Niagra Falls in order to be "infused with the genius loci" and the "independence and originality" which it inspired even in the face of the masters of tradition in Europe.

Immanuel Kant, the author of Critique of Pure Reason and a predecessor of Romantic thought, believed that staring at the grandeur of the natural world would not make a man feel overpowered and insignificant but would instead be a "revelatory moment of his inner potentiality for greatness."

As Americans we have been incredibly blessed and influenced by our land. In protecting the wildness of our nation, we protect what makes us American.
In wildness is the preservation of our world. -Thoreau