The End of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century America

In 1873, when Jervis McEntee complained that “my pictures accumulate on my hands and there seems no one to buy them,” he was grumbling, as usual, about his own economic anxieties, as he compared sales of his landscapes to those of some of his contemporaries, such as Frederic Edwin Church. He was also putting into words what must have been nagging at the minds of all American landscape painters in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, namely the precariousness of their genre in a rapidly changing world.1 Maggie Cao addresses this “end of landscape” in her exceptional book of the same title. In this volume, which combines agile prose, wide-ranging historical research, and surprising and thought-provoking images, Cao provides an account of the long and fraught dissolution of landscape painting in the face of modernity.