麻豆约拍

The early Puritans rejected imagery in their struggle to make America a new world, but the country's dramatic and awe-inspiring natural beauty inspired a symbolism of its own. Andrew explores the landscapes of the Hudson River valley and the majestic Catskill Mountains in New York State which inspired a whole school of 19th century American painting. He looks at Frederick Edwin Church's masterpiece Niagara Falls (1857), a painting of spiritual power and intensity. Yet while Church and his peers were revelling in the sublime peace of the landscape, elsewhere on the frontier in the American west, Native Americans were being murdered and the land ravaged for profit. Andrew explains how this is a persistent paradox in American history - an ideology rooted in God and nature, but a reality seeped in blood and the destruction of the natural world.