BIRCHFIELD AND HOPPER

My fairly passionate perusal of old masters in the past elided Samuel Palmer--and then again I forget a lot. (Albert Pinkham Ryder might be added to the list of similar visionaries: "I can not but feel in some way that in . . . the Religious picture [Christ Appearing to Mary] I have gone a little higher up on the mountain and can see other peaks showing along the horizon.") He looks to be part of a 19th century visionary movement. The artists you mentioned worked at roughly the same period. It was an era of great aspiration, however flawed. Walt Whitman, the Civil War, Truth, Tubman, Emerson, Ruskin, Morris, Thoreau, Booker T. Washington, Fredrick Douglass...and so many of similar ilk. It was, arguably, the high point of the British Empire too.

In Jamaica, two major mileposts are marked c. 1880: 1) The birth of the Institute of Jamaica (1879) and that of Marcus Garvey (1887). it was an exceptionally visionary moment, as the contemporary artists, writers, activists, thinkers listed above would suggest. I speculate that this is the point at which the British-American civilization began its slow decline. It is argued that the decline was partly the result of depleted energy supply and that this was the underlying motive for the two 20th century world wars.

Could Burchfield, then, be considered a throwback to the 19th century aspirational movement, while Hopper looks forward to the malaise and alienation of the 20th?