Buying a view: American landscape painting and Gilded Age vacation culture, 1870-1910
Embargo Date
2026-09-17
OA Version
Citation
Abstract
This dissertation investigates how late nineteenth-century American landscape painting encouraged development in areas of seasonal affluence. Through the collection and consumption of land and landscape paintings, I argue, Anglo-Americans asserted their control over and status within several new vacation communities in the Eastern United States. Using landscape paintings as material goods that represented idealized versions of their personal properties, collectors elevated themselves socially, culturally, and economically. By reconstructing these visual and material acquisitions (which I term “buying a view”), my dissertation explores how Gilded Age Americans sought to exert control over resort landscapes, to privatize and commodify views available from those spaces, and monetize the natural environment for their personal gain. Examining the activities of William Trost Richards, Laura Woodward, Benjamin Champney, Rose Lamb, Celia Thaxter, Alice Pike Barney, and other artists who worked closely with hoteliers and second home owners, I demonstrate that late nineteenth-century landscape painters played a central role in the development and promotion of late nineteenth-century elite resorts. By considering the work of amateur and professional women artists alongside pictures by oft-studied male contemporaries, my dissertation shows that a wide range of American landscape painters found success by catering to seasonal consumers’ desire to own aesthetically pleasing landscapes.
Through five case studies centered around places in the United States now associated with elite property ownership, I dissect the social and cultural implications for landscape collection in its various forms. I look to the Adirondacks in New York, the White Mountains in New Hampshire, the coast of Maine, St. Augustine and Palm Beach in Florida, and Newport, Rhode Island as the sites for each of my chapters’ examinations. By tracing the activities of specific patrons in each of these communities, this dissertation will shed new light on the ways that landscape patronage underwrote the dominance of the late nineteenth-century leisure class and offer a new account of period collecting that complements existing research focused on urban art buyers. By investigating the cultural work that landscape paintings performed in late nineteenth-century resort communities, my project illuminates an understudied body of American landscape art and extends recent work on the genre’s later history.