Luminism

About

Luminism names a mode of American landscape painting of roughly the 1850s to the 1870s that grew out of the Hudson River School but turned calmer and more intimate. Art historians coined the term in the 20th century; the painters never used it.

Luminist pictures are usually horizontal and uncluttered. Water lies glassy and flat, boats sit motionless, and the sky, often at dawn or dusk, fills much of the canvas. Brushstrokes are smoothed away. Fitz Henry Lane painted the harbour of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and the coast of Maine with crystalline precision. Martin Johnson Heade painted salt marshes dotted with haystacks under gathering storms, John Frederick Kensett made spare views of the Rhode Island shore, and Sanford Robinson Gifford bathed mountains and lakes in golden haze. Francis Augustus Silva painted similarly still coastal scenes. The mood is contemplative, often linked to the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson.