Mountains out of the Mist

[devinc07]

Devin Cline

Transcendentalism is a movement that was begun in the nineteenth century by Ralph Waldo Emerson through a series of essays and perpetuated by the experiences and writings of Henry David Thoreau in his book entitled Walden. The goal of transcendentalism is to forge an original relationship with the universe by learning to experience solitude and live deliberately through your intuition to come to a greater understanding of yourself and the world around you. Its focus was on the role of the individual within society, and the main idea espoused by Emerson and Thoreau was that individuals should not be subject to the will of society. This idea was reactionary to the prevalent idea of democracy, which perpetuates the will of the majority, effectively ignoring the will of the individual. A major continual theme of transcendentalism is the idea that we are all connected by a universal soul, of which we each have a part called an oversoul. To be truly enlightened, one must learn to tap into one's oversoul through solitude and communion with nature. The idea that all things are connected is also present in the belief that God, Man, and Nature present within each other, and cannot be definitively separated. This movement of transcendentalism has had widespread effects on art and society since its conception, and one of the places where it is readily apparent is in the artwork of the Hudson River School artists.

The Hudson River School was a group of artists whose style and outlook shared common themes of nature and romanticism. It was begun by the painter Thomas Cole, who had many pupils, including the German painter Albert Bierstadt, whose painting "Mountain out of the Mist" contains significant transcendental imagery. Like the essays of Emerson and Thoreau, Bierstadt's painting emphasizes the importance and beauty of nature. The foreground of the painting is clear, whereas the mountains in the distance are obscured by mist, which symbolizes the importance of the present rather than the future. Contrary to the views of society that one should always be preparing for their future and that the present is just a means to an end, Emerson and Thoreau wrote that the present should be more appreciated and that one must live by intuition rather than following the guidelines that society sets forth for us.


pictopia.com/perl/get_image?provider_id=207&size=550x550_mb&ptp_photo_id=145075