Nature at Estes Park imitates landscape art so precisely it provokes irritation

Evidence

The park is most irregularly shaped, and contains hardly any level grass. It is an aggregate of lawns, slopes, and glades, about eighteen miles in length, but never more than two miles in width. The Big Thompson, a bright, rapid trout stream, snow born on Long’s Peak a few miles higher, takes all sorts of magical twists, vanishing and reappearing unexpectedly, glancing among lawns, rushing through romantic ravines, everywhere making music through the still, long nights. Here and there the lawns are so smooth, the trees so artistically grouped, a lake makes such an artistic foreground, or a waterfall comes tumbling down with such an apparent feeling for the picturesque, that I am almost angry with Nature for her close imitation of art. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 126

Categorization

• DEFINE: The picturesque as a landscape ideal — nature measured against art — is implicitly defined here through her anger at the imitation.
• SHARE: For a friend into landscape aesthetics or 19th-century picturesque tourism: her inversion — annoyed at nature for imitating art too well — is a gem.
• XREF: connects to: Landscape art imitating nature grew as cities swallowed the countryside — Schafer, Murray R, The Soundscape- Our Sonic Environment…, 370; Art’s violation of nature is liberation from an oppressive apparatus — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 836; Landscape painting retroactively reveals nature and society as ideological representations — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 394

Broader Connections

• Landscape painting retroactively reveals nature and society as ideological representations #expands (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 394
• Landscape art imitating nature grew as cities swallowed the countryside #complicates (0.82) — Schafer, Murray R, The Soundscape- Our Sonic Environment…, 370
• Art’s violation of nature is liberation from an oppressive apparatus #complicates (0.75) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 836