(gentle piano music)
- [Steven] We're in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
looking at a large painting by Jasper Francis Cropsey.
This is Mount Jefferson, and it was painted
just a few years before the Civil War erupts.
- [Tyler] Cropsey makes this painting
as the Bleeding Kansas Crisis is receding.
- [Steven] Bleeding Kansas was an eruption of violence
that took place when the slave-holding South
and abolitionists in the North both moved to Kansas
to claim that territory as their own.
- [Tyler] So, Cropsey is painting Mount Jefferson.
Well, he believes he's painting Mount Jefferson.
This is actually a representation of Mount Adams.
But it's important to Cropsey that this is Mount Jefferson
because Jefferson is the father
of America's Agrarian Republican ideal.
And that's what this painting is about.
- [Steven] It's so interesting because generally
you would assume you were simply looking
at a beautiful autumnal landscape
of the northeast of the United States.
This is the white mountains in New Hampshire.
It's autumn. The leaves are changing.
You have this wonderful craggy set of ridges beyond
and a lovely vignette of a man walking with his dog
and axe over his shoulder having just passed
between two large mounds of recently cut timber
and a sawmill.
It's a glorious vista to look out at.
The hill to the right is bathed in sunlight.
But the crags that lift up
from what we now know is Mount Adams
is in shadow emphasizing its drama.
In fact, if you look closely
you can just make out water pouring down that cliff side.
- [Tyler] One of the things that gets me
about this painting every time I'm in front of it
is that Mount Jefferson is still green.
It is still summer on Mount Jefferson, if you will.
And it's the foreground
where the dramatic autumn colors are happening.
In the 19th century, Americans were deeply bothered
that they didn't have mountains as high as Europe's.
That so far as they knew in 1857 Eastern America
that America lacked the topographical drama
of the old country.
So, what to do about that?
One way is this embrace of autumnal America.
Flowering of intense oranges and reds
that will be a mainstay of American painting
and a particular signature of Cropsey's.
But the other way Americans engaged with how they lacked
what Europe had was by building America's nature,
America's land into a metaphorical celebration
of America itself.
This was an idea that was introduced to America
by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1836 book, "Nature".
We should think of nature as a kind of guidebook
to how artists and poets, and clergymen and politicians,
and novelists and others should use, Emerson argues,
American nature as a way to make America's land
as great as wonderful as Europe's
because after all America has something Europe doesn't
and that's Republicanism.
- [Steven] And so, while it first glance this may look
simply like a beautiful autumnal landscape,
it is actually an opportunity for the artist
to reference a series of metaphors
that would've been familiar to many viewers
in the 19th century.
- [Tyler] This takes us back to the unusual autumn
on the lower slopes even as summer is holding on
on the higher slopes.
The way I read that is that in painting Mount Jefferson
as retaining its greenery, Cropsey is pointing
to how Agrarian Republicanism is holding on.
The lower slopes, autumn is happening,
and indeed inevitably autumn will advance
on Mount Jefferson's slopes and on Jefferson's ideal
because after all this is late 1850s America.
All America knows, a conflagration is coming.
Here is a dead tree in the lower left as warning.
But there are other ways in which Cropsey
points to his faith in American Republicanism,
and that it has a chance of holding on,
that it will weather the storm to come.
In the lower right hand corner, there is a mill.
Mills cut timber into board.
They ground grain into flower and made it possible
for an agrarian economy to happen and extend across
a region or down rivers to say New York City or Boston.
Mills such as this are enormously common
in American painting.
So, let's think for a moment about how mills
would've existed in the actual landscape.
They were built and owned by a single individual
but they operated for the benefit of an entire community.
- [Steven] And that is the metaphor for the Republic,
for the founding principles of the United States.
But it's also a way of looking towards the future.
This lumber that we see cut in the foreground
will be used to build houses.
Houses that will begin to occupy this virgin landscape
that inspires awe as we look through it.
But one that is also full of promise
for the advance of civilization.
- [Tyler] Cropsey with this mill, which is clearly battered
but has recently been operative,
we see stacks of timber here,
is arguing that Republicanism is holding on.
It's threatened. There are challenges.
But Cropsey is expressing faith
in the broader American Republican project.
- [Steven] And that the landscape will feed
that Republicanism, will nurture the nation
and that's made explicit
by a subtle art historical reference.
The blasted tree that you mentioned
that is the dead tree with the black bird surrounding it
is almost a direct quote by an early 19th century artist
who's painting of "Elijah in the Desert"
is one where God tells Elijah
that the birds will provide for him.
Here, nature will provide for the New Republic.
- [Tyler] We see a landscape full of natural resources
that God has provided for man to take advantage of
including through the mill in the foreground,
through the river down which logs can be floated.
At a time when America's primary natural resource
was timber, this is one timber-filled landscape.
(lively piano music)