A Dissenting Realism

Abstract

A spirit of dissent animated the American Pre-Raphaelites, a movement comprising abolitionist artists and like-minded architects, critics, and scientists. In contrast to their more prominent colleagues, the artists now known as the Hudson River School, the American Pre-Raphaelites established themselves as eloquent critics of slavery and antebellum American society. The group united their political and aesthetic commitments by engaging selected pictorial strategies of the British Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and embracing a radical empiricism. In landscapes, nature studies, and still lifes of modest dimensions, the American Pre-Raphaelites refused compositional conventions that endorsed rank, class, power, and possession by elevating the humble while eschewing the monumental. Through an examination of Thomas Charles Farrer’s View of Northampton from the Dome of the Hospital (1865, Smith College Museum of Art), this article argues that the American Pre-Raphaelites advanced what they viewed as an ethical style of landscape painting—one that assertively announced their abolitionism.