SOURCE: Stula, Nancy. “Christopher Pearse Cranch: Painter of Transcendentalism.” In Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts, edited by Charles Capper and Conrad Edick Wright, pp. 548-73. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1999.

In the following essay, Stula examines Cranch's career as an artist who successfully translated Emersonian philosophy and Transcendentalism into a visual medium.

In September 1841—just six years after completing his studies at Harvard Divinity School—the young Unitarian minister Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813-1892) confessed to Ralph Waldo Emerson: “I become more and more inclined to sink the minister in the man, and abandon my present calling in toto as a profession.”¹ Cranch's inspiration to abandon the ministry stemmed from his having “very vigorously” taken up landscape painting. Today, however, Cranch is best known as a poet linked with the New England Transcendentalists; that his involvement with the new philosophy led him from a fledgling career...