31 History of Geology in the Northeast: A Symposium to Mark the 125th Anniversary of The Geological Society of America
Tuesday, 19 March 2013
8:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Monroe Room
ART AND GEOLOGY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY NEW ENGLAND
Paper number: 31-4
Program: Symposia Sessions
Time: 8:40 AM – 8:55 AM
Authors
Abstract
In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Louis Agassiz’s revelations about New England’s glacial history drew the attention of numerous landscape painters, including Frederic Church, William Stanley Haseltine, Thomas Hill and Thomas Hinckley. Undermining earlier, biblically-based interpretations of the land’s history, Agassiz’s ideas fired the imaginations of these artists, informing and transforming their vision. It turned their attention to new sites and impelled them to develop new pictorial strategies to express their transformed understanding of the landscape. Such interactions between artists and geologists in this era highlight the dialectical relationship between visual perception and visual representation.