Art and the beginning of our national parks

This week PBS is airing a Ken Burns documentary on the history of America's National Parks system. I haven't seen the series yet, but I hope the documentary makes this point: Artists were a key motivating force behind the creation of what Burns calls America's "best idea." If you need an example of how and why the arts matter to a society and to the United States in particular, the founding moment of our national park system is a good place to start. [Image: Grizzly Giant, Carleton Watkins, New York Public Library.]

Throughout the middle of the 19thC artists were on the vanguard of making Americans aware of the grandeur of the land. (Writers, including John Muir and John Wesley Powell, were influential too.) None were more important than Carleton Watkins, America's first great artist. Watkins' photos of the American West, and his 1861 pictures of Yosemite in particular, were a revelation to Easterners who had little context for the scale and majesty of the West.

In 1863 Goupil's Art Gallery, an important New York space, showed Watkins' pictures of California to great acclaim. Among the visitors was Albert Bierstadt, who promptly made plans to go west to paint. Magazines such as North Pacific Review and Atlantic Monthly reviewed the work favorably. Influential opinion leaders such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes saw Watkins' work and were moved to advocate for not just the westward movement of Easterners, but for the land itself. Frederick Law Olmsted, who had apparently seen Watkins' pictures even before the Goupil's show, urged Congress not to privatize great natural places, but to instead hold them in public trust.

But that's not all: Watkins' interest in Yosemite lands also provides an unusually direct example of how art can impact public policy. In February, 1864, a representative of a steamship company proposed to California Sen. John Conness that the federal government set aside Yosemite valley and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove as protected areas. The representative included in his correspondence with Sen. Conness a portfolio of Watkins' photos of Yosemite.

Conness was likely already familiar with Watkins' work -- Olmsted and scientist Josiah Whitney had shared Watkins' stereoscopic photographs with Conness, who showed the portfolio and the stereoscopes to his fellow senators as he lobbied for passage of his bill. Watkins' work was a hit, the bill passed and President Abraham Lincoln promptly signed it into law. The 1864 legislation addressing the preservation of the Yosemite valley and Mariposa Grove was the precursor to the 1872 legislation that created the nation's (and the world's) first true national park.

(Watkins' role didn't end there: Olmsted became an appointed commissioner of Yosemite and promptly enlisted the photographer to consult with him as to the best ways to preserve and use the park.)

Related: I wonder if Georgia O'Keeffe saw Watkins' Grizzly Giant? Key sources and books to read on Watkins, the West and American environmentalism: Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception edited by Douglas R. Nickel, Richard Grusin's Culture, Technology and the Creation of America's National Parks, and Aaron Sachs' The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism.