The awakening of spring ...

... Luminists: John Frederick Kensett and Mark Strand.

These American artists arrested an ideal and tranquil, yet momentary, glance at an aspect of this nation’s nature, perhaps as a measure of meditative pleasure, in much the same way Ralph Waldo Emerson recommended in his well-known essay, “Nature,” written in the late 1830s: “In the pleasure of nature a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says—he is my creature, and maugre all impertinent grief’s, he shall be glad with me. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields in tribute to delight, for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midnight.”