Transcendental landscapes.(Current and coming)

Landscape painters working in the United States around the mid-nineteenth century faced a serious dilemma: how to express their personal impressions of nature without deviating too much from what they saw before them. The general feeling at the time was that God created nature and thus was linked so closely to the landscape that any artist who inserted too much imagination into a landscape painting was tampering with God's creation in a way that bordered on heresy. Within this context, how could the "ideal" vision of the artist be reconciled with the "real" appearance of nature?

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The importance of the imagination in the art-making process was at the center of a lecture presented by Christopher Pearse Cranch to a group of artists in New York City in 1845 entitled "On the Ideal of Art." For Cranch, an artist and a transcendentalist who was a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School and had spent several years as a Unitarian minister before becoming a professional painter and writer in the early 1840s, ideas and imagination were vital in art, and so he proposed a compromise to the real-ideal dilemma:

 
All Art is most perfect in so far as it keeps the just medium between 
literal imagination of outward Nature and that ideal conception which 
haunts the Imagination. Art is neither wholly material nor wholly 
spiritual, [but rather] ... the beautiful child of the wedlock between 
Nature and the Soul; and she is the more beautiful, the more she bears a 
resemblance to both parents. 

It was this recognition of the power of an individual's unconscious--in art and in life--that had drawn Cranch away from the ministry and toward transcendentalism.

Based on the writings of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, transcendentalism first emerged in New England in the early nineteenth century as a kind of religious movement; its core belief was in an ideal spiritual state that transcended the physical and empirical and was realized only through an individual's intuition, not through church doctrines. By meditation and communing with nature, through work and art, man could transcend his senses and attain an understanding of goodness and truth. This belief in an artistic life that was inextricably bound up with the life of the spirit manifested itself in all aspects of American literature, ...