A harbor scene…the sun breaks through the hazy mist…the radiant atmospheric light has a crystalline transparency, which leaves behind an intuition and mood of nature, `eternalizing it in silence and light.' Here is an artist—the purest example of painter of atmospheric light—who seems to have felt at certain places a pristine tranquility that seemed to embody nature's transcendent beauty. Here, the poetry of things—the power to forget self—seems to have acquired yet another form.

With its forests, lakes, waterfalls and the grandeur of its natural world, America was no wonder seen by writers and artists as a primeval paradise. In fact, wilderness has been one of the determining forces in American culture. For over three centuries, from the time of William Bradford to William Faulkner, American writers could not help but see `the primitive, primal earth', `the wilderness raging around'. Their intense, appreciative encounter with nature/wilderness was also an attempt to achieve a synthesis of scientific, aesthetic and religious experience. The truth of the world was experienced as an unbroken circuit of energy and life—a fusion of the self with the wilderness forces. America's early preoccupation with religion also comes through in writers like Jonathan Edwards who saw "the images or shadows of divine things" in nature. The emphasis on seeing the spirit in matter was further carried on in the rhetoric of the 19^th-century American Transcendentalists, notably in the works of Emerson and Thoreau.

The Analyst Magazine, Crystalline Transparency, American Culture, American Transcendentalists, Atmospheric Light, Landscape Expressions, Crystalline Drawing, Central Movements, Radiant Atmospheric Light, Conceptual Realism, Luminist Landscape, Incandescent Twilight Vistas.