Christian Romanticism was a response to social changes within nineteenth-century American culture, including women's literacy, spiritual domesticity, and the idealization of childhood. This book examines the work of three artists of the first American landscape tradition - Washington Alston, Thomas Cole, and Frederic Edwin Church - and two clergymen - Horace Bushnell and Henry Ward Beecher. It assesses their understanding of the artist as a social and moral teacher, the didactic role of art in society more generally, and a God who acts in history. The author finds that the art ofAllston, Cole, and Church expressed and served the dominant middle-class religious ideology of the time - Christian Romanticism. This distinguishes their work from more elitist and regional work. | The Spirit and the Vision by Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, Paperback | Indigo Chapters