Sites of negotiation: American landscape painting and contexts of display, 1837–1919

Through case studies on works by George Catlin, Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, and Dwight Tryon, this dissertation rethinks key examples of American landscape painting through the lens of collecting and display. Numerous scholars have demonstrated the unique force of the American landscape as a cultural, political, and aesthetic idea dating back to the sixteenth century. While we now take for granted the vast symbolic potential of the American landscape, art historical investigations of American painting have tended to view the creation of the art object as the endpoint of strategic, creative, and ideological activity. In fact, artists, collectors, and other actors within the nineteenth-century art world actually exercised an enormous degree of agency in shaping popular and connoisseurial understandings of these works. Before the mass reproduction and circulation of artwork images, engaging in strategic techniques for displaying the objects themselves was among the most potent means of exerting this control. Such techniques included the use of frames, lighting, furniture, props, performers, and printed materials. “Sites of Negotiation” calls new attention to the ways in which collecting and display practices have directly shaped dominant art historical interpretations, as well as cases in which these practices suggest fresh interpretations.