The Decade prior to the darkest years in this nation’s history, the Civil War, the Golden Years, the years of the American Renaissance, were considered by some as the brightest of all years of America.

These were years rich in thought and imagination, where the arts begin to appear through authors such as, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and Longfellow, writing true American classics like, Leaves of Grass, Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, Song of Hiawatha and The House of Seven Gables. Short Stories, Poem, and Essays were capturing the thoughts and imaginations of America in these Golden Years of expression.  Thinkers and orators such as Abraham Lincoln were penetrating hearts with optimism and confidence.  These men set the course for others to follow in American culture and a continued spirit of freedom.   

Now that America had established itself a stable nation, with leisure setting more easily upon the American conscience, books, magazines, and newspapers appeared in more increasing numbers.  Museums, academies, libraries, and lyceums blossomed.  The age of intellect was awake and the road to adventure was in clear view.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1843, “America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination.”  He advised the artists of the day to celebrate the Northern trade, the southern planting and the Western clearing in their poems and their paintings.  Alive to this challenge the American Renaissance was born. American painters chose new subjects and represented them in new ways and put the new American landscape on canvas and in the hearts of its people.

After these landscapists, these portrait makers, and these genre painters of the mid-century would come men of greater sophistication and a riper skill, masters of the Gilded Age, such as, Hunt, Eakins, and Homer, but these early painters laid the foundation, whose tribute to the beauty of their native land, to the character of its representative men, and to the humor and pathos of its daily life, formed one of the finest chapters in the history of American art. 

These men strengthened the hearts of the nation’s people for the darkest years shortly to come, a time when brother would fight against brother and mother’s and father’s would grieve together, because a nation became divided against itself, and would be chastened back to one indivisible nation under God with liberty and justice for all.

References taken from the writings of Historian, Jay Leyda.