![]() This came along with a stylistic revolution as well, as the palette and surreal contours of the desert especially inspired a new generation of artists with the uniqueness of its light, palette and geology - which had no analog in the Indo-European tradition, and required a new language of line and color. The proto-cinematic allure of the Wild West as both a place and an idea was fully championed starting in the mid-late 19th century, and soon enough populated with a cast of archetypal characters (cowboys, outlaws, industrial pioneers, farmers and Native Americans) that would soon codify into the enduring iconography we still know today. Nature's Ways Inspired These Complex WorksĪll of this was tied up in the volatile situations and cultural agendas with regard to the First Nation peoples and the follow-on effects of the Civil War. By then, along with the arrival of more settlers and railroads, the propaganda that compelled these newcomers increased and towns sprang up alongside the Westward migration that ensued. That would come in the late 19th century when westward expansion increased. ![]() Classic American Western landscape painting as it came to be recognized had not yet matured into the full-blown genre of wildness, majesty and romance. The works most people encountered from this time tended to resemble European academic standards of likeness and realism and depicted monumental landmarks like waterfalls, river bends, mountain ranges and sweeping plains in a way that was geared toward description and reportage. But for the most part, these were essentially documentary in nature, rather than expressive or literary and lyrical. Of course, along with extensive written descriptions, there were renderings of the landscape, the wildlife and the residents of the land the newcomers encountered. Here the river pitches over a shelving rock, with an edge as regular and as straight as if formed by art, but without a niche or break in it the water descends in one even and uninterrupted sheet to the bottom where dashing against the rocky bottom rises into foaming billows of great height and rapidly glides away, hissing flashing and sparkling as it departs the spray rises from one extremity to the other to 50 feet." “Hearing a tremendous roaring above me I continued my route across the point of a hill a few hundred yards further and was again presented by one of the most beautiful objects in nature, a cascade of about fifty feet perpendicular stretching at right angles across the river from side to side to the distance of at least a quarter of a mile.
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