Luminist Paintings

In the history of nineteenth-century landscape painting in the United States, the Luminists are distinguished by their focus on atmosphere and light. The accepted view of Luminist paintings is that they are basically spiritual and imply a tranquil mysticism that contrasts with earlier American artists’ concept of nature as dynamic and energetic. the onlooker toward a lucid transcendentalism, an idealized vision of the world.

What this view fails to do is to identify the true significance of this transcendental atmosphere in Luminist paintings. The prosaic factors that are revealed by a closer examination of these works suggest that the glowing appearance of nature in Luminism is actually a sign of nature’s domestication, its adaptation to human a muting of those emotions, like awe and fear, which untamed nature elicits.

One critic, in describing the spiritual quality of harbor scenes by Fitz Hugh Lane, an important Luminist, carefully notes that “at the peak of Luminist development in the 1850s and 1860s, spiritualism in America was extremely widespread.” It is also true, however, that the 1850s and 1860s were a time of trade In all of these places he painted the harbors with their ships—the instruments of expanding trade.

Lane usually depicts places like New York Harbor, with ships at anchor, but even when he depicts more remote, less commercially active harbors, nature appears pastoral and domesticated rather than primitive or unexplored. The ships, rather than the surrounding landscapes—including the sea—are generally the active element in his pictures. For Lane the justification of the atmosphere necessary for business, if also an exaggerated, idealistic rendering of that atmosphere.