Humboldt in America (Winter 2021 | Volume: 66, Issue: 1)

Humboldt in America

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Authors: Eleanor Jones Harvey

Historic Era: Era 4: Expansion and Reform (1801-1861)

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Winter 2021 | Volume 66, Issue 1

Editor’s Note: Eleanor Jones Harvey is a senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She organized the recent exhibition on Humboldt at the museum and was one of the authors of the book, Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture (Princeton University Press), in which portions of this essay appeared. 

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Humbolt, painted here by Friedrich Georg Weitsch, visited the United States for six weeks in 1804. 

Alexander von Humboldt is best remembered as an extraordinarily driven and omnivorously curious Prussian naturalist, whose radical ideas and prolific writings made him arguably the most important natural philosopher of the 19th century. Today, more than 300 plant species are named for him. Open a terrestrial atlas and you will find features named for Humboldt on every continent; open a celestial atlas and you will find his name attached to two asteroids and to a lunar mare (the Mare Humboldtianum) on Earth’s moon.  

At first glance, Humboldt would not seem to have much relevance for American art and culture. But Humboldt understood the deep connections between his passion for science and the aesthetic gratification he derived from nature. He traveled with more than 40 scientific instruments; among them was a cyanometer, an invention designed to determine which of 52 shades of blue accurately matched the color of the sky as seen at different altitudes. He believed that artists needed to know enough natural history to render their sketches and paintings with great accuracy and that scientists needed to embrace an aesthetic appreciation for the natural world. In the second volume of his magnum opus, Cosmos, he spent a third of the narrative giving advice to landscape painters, drawing on historical examples of the genre while encouraging artists to seek subjects beyond the familiar Mediterranean region. He believed that the awe-inspiring features of the hemispheric American landscape were worthy corollaries to their European counterparts and to the man-made wonders of the Old World.  

Proclaiming himself “half an American,” Humboldt’s influence on the United States was immediate, sustained, and profound.

Alexander von Humboldt’s six-week visit to the United States between late May and early July of 1804 led to downstream consequences for the next 50 years, underscoring American art as a way of understanding the roots of this country’s deep cultural identification with nature. Humboldt’s primary goal during his trip was to meet Thomas Jefferson, then president of the United States, to share ideas with a man he suspected was his intellectual equal. His interest in the United States reflected his fervent desire to see its democratic style of government flourish, to extend his South American explorations into the newly acquired Louisiana Territory, and to harness North American data in his emerging picture of the world’s ecosystems.  

Humboldt’s brief stay in Philadelphia and Washington came at exactly the right moment to articulate the scientific and cultural promise of the United States. “This country that stretches to the west of the