William Cullen Bryant / W. J. Linton:

28) Thanatopsis. (Various editions)

The publishing of these illustrated gift-book editions marked a peak in the careers of both Cullen Bryant as a poet and Linton as an illustrator and engraver. Linton’s illustration work is a quintessential achievement, comprising the best moments of the previous illustrated series of New England poetry and of his expressive Lake District graphics. There is much Turner in it and also two pictorial Blake references: Death Door - the famous image is once more used as a frontispiece – and a rather free adaptation of a motif taken from Blake’s poem Jerusalem. In his preface, Linton acknowledges his indebtedness to the painter–poet, and to David Scott and Isaac Taylor, the author of The Natural History of Enthusiasm and The Physical Theory of Another Life, who had been an accomplished engraver, “almost unknown as an artist.”

The sequence of Linton’s illustrations develops an extraordinary film-like dynamic. Together with the almost abstract qualities of the stirred-up nature sceneries he depicts, this intrinsic motor-function creates an impression of intoxicating vertigo. Although Linton’s images follow Bryant´’ poems in their succession step by step, they function also independently as an autonomous work of art. There was rarely a more convincing pictorial manifestation of American transcendentalism in the 19th century than these two connected cycles of illustrations, Thanatopsis and The Flood of Years. And there is hardly a work of art that demonstrates in a better way the continuity between the 19th-century American cult of delimitation and its modernist artistic extensions. “Abstract Expressionism,” says Donald Kuspit in his Critical History of 20th-Century Art, “seems to be a throwback to 19th-century American Transcendentalism (...) a nostalgic holdover from an older America, an esthetic reminiscence of the spiritual vitality that once was, American idealism kept alive in the amber of abstract form.”