The End of an Era

Following the Civil War, many factors, including artists' discoveries of the West and the development of photography, helped shift the aesthetic focus away from the idealism of the Hudson River School and the White Mountain School. Essentially, the entire American art world underwent an extensive transformation. Prior to the 1860s, there had existed a hierarchy of subjects, some deemed more worthy than others. Most important had been subjects with significant historical references or sublime characteristics such as Niagara Falls, and of course Mount Washington because of its association with the country's first president. With a newly developing aesthetic, this hierarchy of subjects was replaced, and every subject began to take on equal value. All of nature, from the most humble scene to the most lofty, became worthy in itself as a subject. By the end of the 1860s, the public began to find oft-repeated images, such as Mt. Washington, monotonous. Other "new" images, such as the Rocky Mountains, were outweighing interest in the White Mountains. The impact of images of those mountains was usurped both by new artistic ideas and by the social and technological changes that were rapidly occurring in the region and throughout the country. By the end of the nineteenth century, these factors, and the advent of photography, led to the gradual decline of White Mountain landscape painting.