"Invaluable in pointing the way toward a complete, integrated vision of the inner world of thought a nd feeling and the outer world of external nature"--Inside jacket.

George Inness (1825-94), long considered one of America's greatest landscape painters, has yet to receive his full due from scholars and critics. A complicated artist and thinker, Inness painted stunningly beautiful, evocative views of the American countryside. Less interested in representing the details of a particular place than in rendering the "subjective mystery of nature," Inness believed that capturing the spirit or essence of a natural scene could point to a reality beyond the physical or, as Inness put it, "the reality of the unseen." Throughout his career, Inness struggled to make visible what was invisible to the human eye by combining a deep interest in nineteenth-century scientific inquiry—including optics, psychology, physiology, and mathematics—with an idiosyncratic brand of mysticism. Rachael Ziady DeLue's George Inness and the Science of Landscape—the first in-depth examination of Inness's career to appear in several decades—demonstrates how the artistic, spiritual, and scientific aspects of Inness's art found expression in his masterful landscapes. In fact, Inness's practice was not merely shaped by his preoccupation with the nature and limits of human perception; he conceived of his labor as a science in its own right. This lavishly illustrated work reveals Inness as profoundly invested in the science and philosophy of his time and illuminates the complex manner in which the fields of art and science intersected in nineteenth-century America. Long-awaited, this reevaluation of one of the major figures of nineteenth-century American art will prove to be a seminal text in the fields of art history and American studies.

Charlotte Klonk's deeply researched accounts of the complex and often ambiguous interactions that took place between artists and scientists challenge simplistic accounts of developments in art as mere by-products of scientific progress as well as reductive socio-economic interpretations. For Klonk, the common thread running through the changes in both art and science is the emergence of a new phenomenalist conception of experience around the turn of the century. Phenomenalism involved a commitment to the scrupulous observation of particular phenomena, without making prior assumptions about meaning or underlying causes, and this ideal was common to both artists and scientists. In this way, Klonk argues, the period represents a brief moment of balance before the concerns of science and art split apart into objectivity and subjectivity, respectively.

West Rock and East Rock are bold and beautiful features around New Haven, Connecticut. They resemble monumental gateways (or time-tried sentinels) and represent a moment in geologic time when the North American and African continents began to separate and volcanism affected much of Connecticut. The rocks attracted the attention of poets, painters, and naturalists when beliefs rose about the spiritual dimensions of nature in the early 19th century. More than two dozen artists, including Frederick Church, George Durrie, and John Weir, captured their magic and produced an assortment of classic American landscapes. In the same period, the science of geology evolved rapidly, triggered by the controversy between proponents and opponents of biblical explanations for the origin of rocks. Lavishly illustrated, featuring over sixty paintings and prints, this book is a perfect introduction to understanding the relationship of geology and art. It will delight those who appreciate landscape painting, and anyone who has seen the grandeur of East and West Rock.

This volume contains thirty-five papers from a 2010 conference on landscape archaeology focusing on the definition of landscape as used by processual archaeologists, earth scientists, and most historical geographers, in contrast to the definition favored by postprocessual archaeologists, cultural geographers, and anthropologists. This tension provides a rich foundation for discussion, and the papers in this collection cover a variety of topics including: how do landscapes change; how to improve temporal, chronological, and transformational frameworks; how to link lowlands with mountainous area.

This book is the first study to trace the relationship between the artistic changes in landscape art and the revolution taking place in the natural sciences. As various theories about the earth's history were presented, artists began to render nature in new ways. This topic is more iconography than connoisseurship as the paintings are presented as reflecting in both image and style the radical upheavals which mark intellectual history during those decades.