Paintings and Parks, for our Benefit and Enjoyment
In recent weeks, many PBS stations aired Ken Burns’s latest film, a six-part series called The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. The documentary chronicles the rise of the park concept and the often dramatic struggles to preserve—for the benefit and enjoyment of the people—some of the country’s most spectacular scenery. The National Parks devotes significant attention to the ways in which both naturalists and ordinary people have responded to nature and the parks over time, which inspired me to think about the sizable group of paintings in American Stories that feature figures in landscape settings. In fact, I was struck by how much the paintings resonate with the same ideas about the American wilderness that are brought out in the documentary. Read more »