Thoreau and the visual arts

In the article Unlikely Kindred Spirits: A New Vision of Landscape in the Works of Henry David Thoreau and Asher B. Durand Daniel Peck compares Asher B. Durand, who painted this picture, and Henry David Thoreau, bringing up some interesting points about Thoreau that I believe relate to our discussion by ways of the importance Thoreau lays on the primacy of perception, man's harmony with nature, and in the sense that some of the points mentioned echo our brother Romantics the British.

*"Walden cannot be read without understanding it in part as an expression of regional rivalry, specifically as a contrast between "humble" rural New England landscapes like Walden Pond and essentially touristic Hudson River Valley scenery, which by midcentury had become an emblem of the national landscape. (Patriotism?)
*"A comparison of these figures is complicated by the difficulty of finding any viable, integral relations between Thoreau and the visual arts. [Thoreau] appears to have been so little interested in art, and the few remarks he makes about painting in his journal do not reveal a particularly sophisticated sensibility in this area. Thoreau’s standard for landscape painting seems largely to have been one of stubborn and narrowly defined realism. In a journal entry of June 1853, he writes, "Men will go further & pay more to see a tawdry picture on Canvass a poor painted scene—than to behold the fairest or grandest scene that nature ever displays in their immediate vicinity—though they may have never seen it in their lives" (Journal Volume 6 174)".
*"It may be Thoreau’s Puritan legacy, as scholars have suggested, that predisposed him against the visual arts, but whatever the reason there is no mistaking or glossing over this predisposition. In his overt expressions of artistic taste (as opposed to his actual practices as a writer), he makes clear that his sense of beauty—so intensely idealized—does not extend to representational forms such as landscape painting. He seems to have conflated any such form of artistic production with "mere ornamentation" (Journal Volume 4 245), and this view limited his thinking about aesthetics. We are thus left with a perplexing but, I think, accurate formulation: Thoreau is a writer whose works reveal a rich pictorial imagination but who disliked art".
*Although Thoreau dispised the visual arts due to materialistic grounds, Thoreau's journals may be seen as a sort of "picture" of nature:"Thoughts," [Thoreau] says, "accidentally thrown together become a frame—in which more may be developed—& exhibited" (277); "[h]aving by chance recorded a few disconnected thoughts and then brought them into juxtaposition—they suggest a whole new field in which it was possible to labor & to think" (277–78). A few days later, Thoreau would turn this idea into a formula and fully justify for himself the superiority of journal writing over formal exposition.
*"Thoreau’s method of associating reverently was overtly aimed at the perception of harmony. Association, in this sense, acknowledged a human limitation—that no individual perceiver could advance directly upon the truth, or apprehend at once the grand design of the universe; rather, an aggregating vision of particulars linked by association could offer glimpses of the whole. As Thoreau puts it, in the same journal passage, "the contemplation of the unfinished picture may suggest its harmonious completion" (Journal Volume 4 277). But methods have a way of asserting themselves and reorienting the search for truth. At some level, Thoreau recognized that through his journal’s method of "juxtaposition," through establishing relations of adjacency rather than hierarchy, his "unfinished picture" offered a new and distinctive vision of reality".
*"Thoreau remained committed to a symbolic understanding of nature’s truths, but that the method of his journal led him implicitly to challenge the philosophical idealism that underlay such symbolism. This method allowed Thoreau the freedom to describe nature’s infinitely various phenomena without allowing the act of composition to fix the phenomena he was viewing, and his prose would reflect the act of being in the moment".
*"Thoreau attempted to balance the empirical and the visionary.Thoreau was suspicious of any approach to nature, including that of science, that atomized experience". (Sounds like Blake)
*Thoreau is a Peripetetic writer: " Thoreau’s landscape description in his journal linked an excursive mode of experience—continuous walking (and later reflection)—to a discursive mode of composition. (Seems to echo Colderidge and William Wordsworth)
^*Daniel Peck says that Thoreau's journal belonged to an epistemological project: it was "a means of exploring, testing, and verifying the very structure of things—a "discipline". In Walden he refers to "the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen".
*"Thoreau and Durand can both be understood as attempting to work out, in their art, a solution to the problem of philosophical idealism that Emerson had alerted them to but himself solved only abstractly through claiming—not enacting—the primacy of perception. What perception actually could do, what it could uncover, was left for them to work out. In Thoreau’s case, the Emersonian legacy and his reaction to it are overwhelming and overt; Walden can be precisely understood in these terms".
*"Thoreau worked fundamentally in the realm of the familiar, and Walden... can be understood as enacting profoundly a process of familiarization—an intimate "worlding" of the world". (Again echoing William Wordsworth).

Peck, Daniel. Unlikely Kindred Spirits: A New Vision of Landscape in the Works of Henry David Thoreau and Asher B. Durand. American Literary History. 2005.
http://alh.oxfordjournals.org.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/cgi/content/full/17/4/687