Citation: Gonnen, Noam. 2023. Grounding the Landscape: Epistemic Aspects of Materiality in Late-Nineteenth-Century American Open-Air Painting. Arts 12: 36. https://doi.org/10.3390/ arts12010036 Academic Editors: Ronit Milano and Nissim Gal Received: 20 September 2022 Revised: 25 November 2022 Accepted: 5 December 2022 Published: 14 February 2023 Copyright: © 2023 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). arts Article Grounding the Landscape: Epistemic Aspects of Materiality in Late-Nineteenth-Century American Open-Air Painting Noam Gonnen Department of the Arts, Eilat Campus, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Eilat 8855630, Israel; noamgonnen@gmail.com Abstract: This article examines how notions of “material” and “materiality” were infused, both technically and discursively, into American landscape painting in the late nineteenth century. Fo- cusing particularly on the praxis of open-air painting as consolidating a new mode in landscape painting as well as a new artistic identity, this article argues that painting outdoors was perceived by artists in terms of agency, uniting painter, painting, and landscape; but unlike earlier romantic or Transcendentalist approaches, this idea was not conceived of as a solely spiritual union but, rather, as a mode that is embedded in the mundane, in the existence of objects, of embodied engagement and material means. The overt affinity between the basic idea of the praxis—painting outdoors in ‘real’ nature—and material aspects of art-making, is discussed as the underpinning of a new emerging epis- teme of American landscape painting, while considering the environment wherein this phenomenon was cultivated within a specific moment in American culture. Paintings and texts, generated by American painters and critics between the late 1870s and the 1890s, are read in this article through the lens of recent theoretical phenomenological approaches to landscape, illuminating the unique role that materiality played in these representations. Moreover, tying the findings to the changing conceptions of both landscape and art in the Gilded Age, the article concludes that landscape painters of the ‘new generation’ sought to evade commodifying tendencies of image-making by deliberately engaging with materiality, devising a mode of landscape representation that would not succumb to the flattening steamroller of capitalist consumer culture. Keywords: embodied praxis; epistemology; experience; landscape painting; material; materiality; open-air painting; phenomenology; proximal knowledge Nine-tenths of our backwardness has been due to the overwhelming embarrass- ment of picturesque material that has all along been at our very door—material which, by reason of its grandeur and sublimity, in no sort of fashion would do to make pictures of. Simplicity alone has evaded us all along. —Robert Swain Gifford, as quoted by Laffan and Strahan (1880) Touch produces a form of confirmation of the subject-world at the interface between the materiality of that world and the hand. —Kevin Hetherington (2003), “Spatial Textures: Place, Touch, and Praesentia” 1. Introduction John Haberle’s (1856–1933) painting Torn in Transit (Figure 1), now part of the Smithso- nian American Art Museum’s collection, exemplifies a peculiar kind of sophistication. The first impression is that of a perfectly illusionistic rendition of materiality: torn packaging paper, stickers, and strings, from which a portion of a picturesque scenery emerges. 1 This kind of illusionism is the principal formalistic idea upon which the tradition of trompe-l’oeil painting, which gained considerable recognition and acclaim in late-nineteenth-century American painting, is based. Yet, in comparison with other trompe-l’oeil paintings by the same artist, this work is quite distinct: Whereas in many works, the represented objects Arts 2023, 12, 36. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12010036 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/arts