“Through stunning visual evidence and discussions of the written words of artists and naturalists, Christiana Payne’s In the Shade of the Pine uncovers young America’s concern for a sylvan world under tremendous threat. As readers encounter the words and paintings of thinkers who mourned the early nation’s destruction of forests and trees, they enter an era in which art and literature helped to birth the science of ecology. This compelling volume helps restore the pervasive environmental concern that informed nineteenth-century America, reminding us that art and literature have worked through the ages to protest nature’s degradation.”
—Rochelle L. Johnson, past president, the Thoreau Society

“In the Shade of the Pine is an important book. In concise essays on the practices of close observation shared by five nineteenth-century landscape painters and two naturalist writers, the author interrogates ideas and cultural attitudes that persist today in our era of acute climate awareness. Newly settled and absent of the Old World’s monuments, the vast forests still to be found in America were embraced as a claim to national identity, venerated as spiritual retreats, and recognized as complex ecological environments. Well-written and well-documented, Payne’s book presents iconic works freshly perceived with ecocritical insights.”
—Linda S. Ferber, vice president and museum director emerita, the New-York Historical Society