ART AND GEOLOGY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY NEW ENGLAND

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Louis Agassiz’s revelations about New England’s glacial history drew the attention of numerous landscape painters, including Frederic Church, William Stanley Haseltine, Thomas Hill and Thomas Hinckley. Undermining earlier, biblically-based interpretations of the land’s history, Agassiz’s ideas fired the imaginations of these artists, informing and transforming their vision. It turned their attention to new sites and impelled them to develop new pictorial strategies to express their transformed understanding of the landscape. Such interactions between artists and geologists in this era highlight the dialectical relationship between visual perception and visual representation.