Julia A. Sienkewicz

Although modern disciplines separate art, architecture, and landscape, this project explores a period in the United States without such boundaries. It considers the diverse creative practices and theoretical convictions of Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827), Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1764-1820), Thomas Cole (1801-1848), and Horatio Greenough (1805-1852). By studying painting, sculpture, architecture, and landscape design in the context of artists who worked across these fields, this study locates meaning in the particular modes of viewing and reception they invoked. It identifies a multisensory viewing experience theorized by these artists and present in their works, which was rooted in a conviction that art could alter a viewer’s character if it utilized both bodily and perceptual experience.