tact with nature, their observation, and their skill of eye and hand, are values that have endured. In the wideranging works of Bierstadt, for example, especially in his less pretentious or highly finished canvases, one continually meets with fresh, unconventional recording of light, color and weather-the work of an acute visual observer. And Church, in a painting like Twilight in the Wilderness, achieved colour as daring as any optical painter today. If these men had been less committed to literal naturalism, if they had trusted their visual sensations more, their contribution would have been a less baffling combination of art and non-art.their best landscapes the character of the American land, its spaciousness and solitude , the clearness of its air, the brilliance of its light, its high remote skies, were pictured truly and with a romantic emotion that is still alive. Their works had a leisurely completeness, a feeling for nature in her myriad aspects, tragic as well as smiling, and a sense of her solid substance and moving forces, rather than her mere appearances - qualities that were lost in the more intimate, fragmentary landscapes of their successors.to the Hudson River School with their grandiose and stagy landscape arrangements, and their theatricality was a sizable group of artists who were moving toward an increasinglyintimate and unpretentious realism, which stressed the poetic effect of varying kinds of light on stretches of water , woodland, Or inhabited countryside. Their pictures were not so successful commercially as the paintings by Church or Bierstadt. Their paintings are distinguished by a poetic sensitivity, which found expression in the depiction of familiar scenes transmuted by the varying moods of the weather. The most sensitive of the group were Fitz Hugh Lane (1804-1865) and Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904). Other landscapists not members of the Hudson River School produced works of highly personal vision. Fitz Hugh Lane s modest views of quiet harbours and inlets along the Massachusetts and Maine coast, painted with exquisite preciseness, were pervaded by a calm serenity. Somewhat similar were Martin J. Heade s coastal scenes, in which the sense of loneliness of all-embracing light, of crystalline clarity, attained a penetrating intensity. But Heade s temperament had other sides; the rich romantic profusion of his tropical landscapes such as View of Tree Fern Walk, Jamaica; the exotic beauty of his series of South American orchids and hummingbirds; the brooding sensuousness of his flower still lifes; the threatening drama of Storm over Narragansett. His sensibility, different from the objectivity of the Hudson River painters, foretold the future development of American landscape [11, p. 313].
2. THE MAIN GENRES OF PAINTING AND THEIR REPRESENTATIVES
.1 Portraiture
Portraiture was the most popular type of painting in America from colonial times well into the nineteenth century. Most early portraitists had no formal training, but were self-taught sign-or housepainters. Typically, they traveled from town to town, supplementing their income with the commissions of local landowners and merchants. Now identified as «limners <javascript:OpenBrWindow(«images/p1.htm»,«p1»,«resizable=yes,width=205,height=315»)>,»...
