Word: grandeur
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...pupil, Frederick Edwin Church (1826-1900). Descended from six generations of Yankee ministers and merchants, patriotic and deeply religious, Church inherited Cole's belief in a style of landscape suffused with "a language strong, moral and imaginative." His paintings--mostly of the Hudson Valley and vistas of South American grandeur--were greeted as both religious icons and triumphs of observation, fusing piety and science in one matrix. Church hit a peculiarly American vein of feeling: Romanticism without its European component of alienation and dread, a view of the universe in which God was in heaven and all was basically right...
...aspects we have chosen as our themes are the impulse to create meanings for the (at first) unfamiliar panoply of American nature; the "American grain" of direct, pragmatic vision and craftsmanship; the urge to visionary expression of spiritual experience; the wish to implant grandeur in society; the move into cities and the obsession with their heroic technology; the desire to commemorate events and remember exemplary people; and the fondness for breaking (and defending) cultural molds...
...grandeur of its pictorial rhetoric, Church's work didn't fully express the hot idea of westward expansion within North America--the belief in Manifest Destiny. To convey the image of the Western landscape as glorious and triumphal, the Cinerama devices first used by Church were taken up by other painters, notably Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) and Thomas Moran...
...illusory desire of Colonial gentry to seem like important extensions of European culture. It would be a recurrent fantasy. Fifty years later, in Boston, one sees John Singleton Copley doing much the same in some of his portraits. But in another hundred years, with the growth of American wealth, grandeur began to get real...
...unable to recall the identities of sundry section leaders and teaching fellows. And, I daresay, most of the instructors I've encountered will soon forget me. Many have done so already. Alas! How fleeting are our days here at Harvard. Sure, I'will wax romantic about the grandeur of the Yard and the vastness of Widener Library. But who will populate these wistful memories? Certainly not the administration. May be a sympathetic professor, but probably not. My classmates? A handful of close friends at most. No, the souls whom I'll remember most don't have initials after their names...