Henry L.A. Culmer’s Shoshone Falls

the blog/video entry above is some music that will help you really get in the mood for this next reading! Start it and listen while you read!

Shoshone Falls by Henry L.A. Culmer

Utah landscape artist Henry L.A. Culmer combined diverse artistic attributes from many western artistic schools throughout his career to create his own style. Hanging in BYU’s Museum of Art is a painting by Culmer, Shoshone Falls, in which he depicts both the spirit and beauty of America through sublime grandeur as he does in his other works. His painting of Shoshone Falls can be seen as a cultural representation and a combination of three art schools: the Rocky Mountain School, Hudson River School, and French Impressionism.

Shoshone Falls is a waterfall in Idaho Falls, Idaho and was painted around 1905. The artist, Culmer (1854-1914), was born in Darrington, England and "is noted for his expansive panoramic views and paintings of rock formations” (Springville Museum of Art). He joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and in 1868 and soon came to the United States to travel to Utah where others of his faith resided. In Utah, he studied with a few other early landscape artists, but had little formal training himself. He took an interest in and painted the natural arches in Southern Utah and also many other mountain scenes. He eventually travelled all over the West painting landscapes—Alaska, California, Idaho, etc... His painting of Shoshone Falls hung in the church Administration Building, was gifted to BYU, hung in the Wilkinson center, and then was removed to the Museum of Art on campus due to damage; It has now been conserved.

My personal reaction to Shoshone Falls, upon seeing it displayed in the Museum of Art, was that of wonder and awe. Later this view underwent a change of disposition. Happily, the change of sentiment helps me form a flexible opinion useful in deciphering elements enjoyed by some audiences and elements that might be disdained by others. The utter immensity of the painting gives it an unfair advantage in invoking a sense of reverence upon its audience’s unarmed thoughts. I cannot say whether it was a shameful lack of food in my stomach or whether it was the painting itself that made me slightly dizzy. I had to step back to take in the full sight with any level-headedness. After deciphering that this was the painting for me, I left the museum, thought about the painting, and in hind-sight decided that I hardly like the painting at all! What brought about this marked contrast of admiration? I have to attribute it to an “out of sight, out of mind” theory. The only way to really appreciate this painting’s aesthetic value fully, or at all, is to be in front of it in a good setting; the size is its main virtue.

Putting away my confused aesthetic enjoyment of the piece, I was glad to find deeper cultural meaning in this captivating immense painting. Landscape paintings were the chief artistic creations of 19th century European painters. In the following time, Americans and Europeans found landscapes to be bona fide fragments of spiritual scenes. Culmer’s slightly idealistic rendering of Shoshone Falls lends itself brilliantly to this expectation of spiritual significance. These idealized, fashionably exotic landscapes are seen to rise up in such common places as Idaho—a small fulfillment of the American dream and attraction. The vast size of Shoshone Falls is itself a nationalistic statement of grandeur and power. Culmer relayed this message, and others, by infiltrating elements of three schools into his painting.

First is the Rocky Mountain School. Western landscape paintings abound in the 19th and early 20th centuries as painters of that genre strove to capture the grand expanse of the American land. Culmer “came out of the Rocky Mountain School, which was epitomized by stark contrasts of perspective, grandiose vistas, misty recesses, and artistic license with locale” (Poulton and Swanson 42). Like Western landscapes before it, this school still captures the majesty of the Western land, but it utilizes the aforementioned techniques to create a more mystical view—though still possessing very solid elements. First, the most prominent elements are those of Culmer’s emergence as a Rocky Mountain School painter. There are misty recesses both at the bottom of the painting where the water falls to an unseen end and another receding point at the right top of the painting. The long lines of the mountain plateaus and falling streams of water reinforce and lead the eye to these opposing directions making the imagination stretch beyond the canvas to the beginning and end of this body of water. Shoshone Falls also encapsulates other defining elements of Rocky Mountain painting as given by Poulton and Swanson previously: a grandiose vista and artistic license with locale. Culmer fill Shoshone Falls with rock and water, little room is given to the small streak of sky, emphasizing the grandeur of the landscape.

Second, a prominently contributing school is the Hudson River School: panoramic and spiritually enlivened values. Culmer uses that very same panoramic view. The later artists of this school used a technique called luminism to depict dramatic landscapes, especially water, to highlight contrasts of light and dark. Culmer’s painting of Shoshone Falls is filled to the brim with this luminous water. Though Culmer was a Rocky Mountain artist, his meeting with Thomas Moran, a painter of the Hudson River School, greatly influenced him and his style. It is specifically the later Hudson River painters who were prone to paint grand, fear-provoking elements of nature—those that overwhelm the senses in a subliminal, Kant-like way—instead of painting mere ethereal, pleasant, large expanses. Shoshone Falls itself invokes fear. Who would wish to stand where the artist places us in real life at the edge of a plummeting cliff? The techniques of the Hudson River School, that Culmer pulled on so constantly, sought to create spiritual meaning, oneness and communication with nature and God in landscape depictions. Traditional elements of a Hudson River painting include an impressive panoramic view, dramatic serenity, Romantic touches, and they often use haziness and lines to lead the eye into an imaginary, reaching, further expanse.

Thirdly, another contributing school in Shoshone Falls is that of French Impressionism. This is mostly found in the impressionistic colors of green, blue, and purple profusely apparent. Impressionism rejects the rules of solid vision, lines, and color. It is through his impressionistic color that the viewer understands that this is not a true reliance of an Idaho scene, but the artist’s personal impression of what he saw.

In conclusion, Culmer’s painting does not challenge the norms of his time: it is a conglomeration of different traditions, a stewing pot of various techniques that mesh various visions. Isn’t that very American? Yet why can’t I like it? I have decided that it is because it is busy, gives the feeling of motion, and is unnatural in its mix of coloring—also just like America. This is not a normal painting of a serene countryside; it represents a metropolis that is America. His painting of a beautified Idaho scene can be appreciated because of its very mixture of American ideals in the midst of relative provincialism.

Works Cited

Poulton, Donna L., and Vern G. Swanson. Painters of Utahs Canyons and Desters. 1st ed. Salt Lake City, Ut: Gibbs Smith, 2009. 42. Print.

Springville Museum of Art, . "Henry L.A. Culmer." J. Willard Marriott Library . University of Utah, Spring 2010. Web. 26 Oct 2010. < vgnextoid="34e920da69a08110VgnVCM1000001c9e619bRCRD&vgnextfmt=">.