Specification review and requirements analysis

¶ … Oxbow" by Thomas Cole and Elgar's "Nimrod"

Landscape painting, on the surface, may seem like a pacific and soothing genre of pictorial works, because the turmoil of the human condition is not directly represented within the frame of the work. However, the inner turmoil, joy, or despair (and the national and political perspective of the artist) is still manifest within the frame of a landscape on canvas. The Hudson River School of painting took the Romantic, European use of the landscape to express the feelings of the artist as kind of a template of the inner consciousness of the observer and transposed it onto the wider and more optimistic American horizon.

Specifically, the Hudson River School uses the American landscape to show hope and possibility, in a way that European artists if a similar Romantic sensibility did not, given the more cramped confines of European territory at the time. Furthermore, one element in European landscape art of the period that is lacking in American works is nostalgia -- for the past and a lost pastoral. For the American artist, the wilderness and the pastoral was still present physically present within his or her frame of vision, and the emphasis of the artist is optimistic and hopeful, that nature will still be a present in the future.

Like the life-giving swell and building, rolling music of Elgar's "Nimrod" that grows progressively louder, the Hudson River School saw the American wilderness as infinite and sprawling. However, unlike the complex, occasionally hesitating and challenging sprawling forward of Elgar's notes, the school saw industrial progress and the colonization of the power of nature in the future as benign in an uncomplicated manner. In Thomas Cole's "The Oxbow" although there are storm clouds above the wilderness that "speak of the uncontrolled power of nature, [they also speak]...of the sublimity of this power. Cole shows no remorse for the recession of the wilderness from the scene. The soft greens and yellows and the gentle rolling landscape of the farms suggest that the pastoral civilization that replaces the wilderness is as beautiful in its order as nature is in its sublimity" ("The Oxbow," the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2007).