Connected through Time

Editor’s Letter

I recently returned from a trip to Italy and am still trying wrap my head around the sublime nature of time. I’m still processing all of the art, architecture and ancient history that had saturated me to the bone. In Rome, it’s everywhere, and it all tells a story reaching back to antiquity. How do you fathom a still (partially) standing structure that was first constructed in 146 B.C., like the Portico of Octavia, located in the city’s thriving Jewish Quarter, a neighbood whose history is just as long? It exceeds the bounds of the imagination and the capacity of the human brain. That, precisely, is the definition of the sublime: “a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation.”

It’s a thrilling sensation, and I imagine it was a similar feeling that inspired the earliest American landscape painters to try to express the incomprehensible in their pictures of the natural world. Of course, I’m referring to the Hudson River School artists, whose paintings of Upstate New York and the grandeur of the West established the foundation for the future of landscape painting in America.

These artists, and those that came before and after them, were influenced by their European counterparts—even if the Hudson River School painters endeavored to create a distinctly American style—and time spent abroad, and today, contemporary artists carry on the tradition. This issue contains our special section dedicated to historic American landscape paintings, where you will be able to experience a snippet of time through the evolving lens of those who painted the world around them. Spanning Sanford Robinson Gifford’s 1859 painting Mount Mansfield, Vermont, to a work that Peter Blume touched up in 1968, and with many pieces created in between, it’s a more manageable time frame to digest, but equally as telling.

The sublime can also be terrifying, a sentiment that some of those Hudson River School artists projected onto Mother Nature, because we can fear what we don’t understand. I take comfort in the fact that no art, or life, exists in a vacuum. It is steeped in time, connected to a past with no beginning, and a future with no end.

Enjoy the July/August issue!

Sarah Gianelli
Managing Editor
sgianelli@americanartcollector.com