Antiques.(Hudson River school)

 
Of course an over-self-conscious straining after a nationalistic form of 
expression may defeat itself.... Yet the fact remains that the greatest 
work must bear the stamp of originality. In exactly the same way the 
greatest work must bear the stamp of nationalism. American work must 
smack of our own soil, mental and moral, no less than physical, or it 
will have little of permanent value. 
Theodore Roosevelt, "Nationalism in Literature and Art," address at the 
joint meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the 
National Institute of Arts and Letters, New York City, November 16, 1916 

The first thing the colonists saw in the New World was nature. The landscape, promising or threatening, was one of the chief shared signs of an American identity, and it became the great protagonist of our art. The emerging American myth saw life and history as just beginning in this country, and the hero of the new adventure was Adam, bereft of ancestry, undefiled by the usual inheritance of family and race. It was not surprising in a time of much Bible reading that the new hero should be Adam before the Fall living in Arcadia. This vision of a new beginning in a pure and untrammeled land served to spiritualize the past where there were no antique monuments to do so.

In 1825 magnificent views of the Hudson River valley were revealed with the opening of the Erie Canal, which linked the Great Lakes to Albany and then to New York City. About this ...