I have come into possession of some extra copies of my book Painters of Faith: The Spiritual Landscape in 19th Century America, and I thought I’d make them available to you, the members of the global Cranach community. The book was published by Regnery in a limited edition, so it’s gotten quite rare and in demand, selling at Amazon currently for $275. I’ll let you have it for list price plus postage, a total of $50. (Then you can turn around and sell it on Amazon, making $225 profit.)
The Newington-Cropsey Foundation, which is dedicated to America’s first artistic movement, the Hudson River School, commissioned me to do a study of these artists’ religious beliefs. I had always assumed they were just romantics or transcendentalists, such were their stunning depictions of awe-inspiring natural vistas, but to my surprise I found that Thomas Cole, Jasper Cropsey, and Frederic Church were, in fact, dedicated Christians who had thought long and hard about how their faith related to their seemingly secular art. My book puts them in the context of the tradition of Protestant art (most Protestants today not even realizing they have a tradition of art), explores the influence of John Ruskin’s distinctly Christian aesthetic theories, and offers close readings of some amazing paintings. The publishers designed it as a coffee-table book, with huge, gorgeous reproductions of the paintings that I discuss. If you don’t care about what I have to say about them, the pictures alone will give you great pleasure. I’ll also sign your book.
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