Knowledge Box

The Power of Man over Nature in Richard Law Hinsdale’s Children in a Landscape, 1855-56

HSB 304

Mid-nineteenth-century American landscape paintings characteristically depict the country’s land both as an uncultivated wilderness and as a civilized living space in the same scene. Consequently, these paintings typically portray Native American land destined for the intrusion of the country’s citizens. Richard Law Hinsdale’s landscape genre painting, Children in a Landscape, 1855-56, presents a group of seven boys at a cracked and creviced cliff side that reaches to the top of the picture plane; the boys whittle, climb, lounge, or watch, as the sun sets over a receding countryside to the right. A distinct sense of authority over the land permeates the scene in the boys’ presence, rather than a sense of innocence. In this paper I will argue that rather than focusing on the land as wild and the moralizing existence of man, in Children in a Landscape, Hinsdale instead directly acknowledges the power man is inflicting over nature. This paper will explore the presentation of these young boys, the environment, and the relationship therein as well as how previous artists and contemporaries of Hinsdale treated the land. The pictorial precedence of the Westward landscape in the nineteenth century show they typically functioned as favorable expressions of America’s expansionist policies; previous scholarship overlooks works of a more dissenting nature, such as Hinsdale’s Children in a Landscape.