In Sunrise over Diamond Head, 1888, the prominent Waikīkī landmark Lēʻahi, also known as Diamond Head, is painted in a shadowy haze beneath large purple clouds. The ocean’s silvery glow, the stillness of the scene, and the diffused sunbeams hint to the viewer that a storm has recently lifted. Dormant and extinct craters, such as Lēʻahi, were former homes of Pele before she settled at Halemaʻumaʻu, at the summit of Kīlauea, where volcanic eruptions are ongoing.
Like other artists affiliated with the Volcano School, Tavernier’s work exemplifies a fusion of aesthetics: the European sublime and Romantic and American landscape traditions, characterized by scenic depictions of the natural world in turbulence or grandeur. Distinct among landscape styles, painters working with ideas of the sublime often included an element of nature’s potential danger for heightened drama. Many of Tavernier’s late 19th-century Hawaiʻi compositions feature views of smoldering lava pools and shorelines aglow under cloud-laden skies.
Tavernier and other Volcano School painters created work that celebrated the natural wonders of the world. Awe-inspiring natural phenomena rendered with established painterly conventions, such as a shadow-cast moon, gurgling lava, or daylight breaking through storm clouds, implied divinity in nature. These associations, as stunning as they are visually, were linked to notions of manifest destiny and the quest to scientifically document and make claim to perceived uncharted territories. All of this despite the long-standing and continued presence of Indigenous peoples in those places.
Spirituality and the environment are entwined in Hawaiian belief systems. A key difference between the Hawaiian consideration of divinity in nature and manifest destiny is that the relationship between people, gods, and nature in Hawaiian spirituality was not propagated through a racist lens to authorize the decimation of human life and land. In art, expansionist principles have been visualized by painters as daring yet inviting landscape scenes indicating a perilous journey of conquest. These problematic forms of cultural supremacy were established in colonial American landscape art traditions and became painterly formulas by which even Hawaiʻi’s most sacred places were rendered toward the turn of the 20th century.
Text by Healoha Johnston, curator, Asian Pacific American Women’s Cultural History, Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center
Jules Tavernier and the Elem Pomo is on view at the de Young from December 18, 2021 through April 17, 2022.
Sources Cited
- “Art Notes.” Pacific Commercial Advertiser. April 9, 1887.
- Kame'eleihiwa, Lilikalā. Nā Wāhine Kapu: Divine Hawaiian Women. Honolulu: ʻAi Pōhaku Press, 1999: 18–39.
- Louis, Renee Pualani and Moana Kahele. Kanaka Hawai'i Cartography: Hula, Navigation, and Oratory. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2017: 29, 75–84, 161.
- Mead, Ryan. “Surveys, Illustrations and Paintings: Framing Manifest Destiny in the Early American Republic.” Review (Fernand Braudel Center), vol. 35, no. 1 (2012): 31–60.
- Pukui, Mary Kawena, and Samuel H. Elbert. Hawaiian Dictionary: Hawaiian-English, English-Hawaiian. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1986.
- “Tavernier’s Picture.” Hawaiian Gazette. February 4, 1885.
- Ulukau, Hawaiian Electronic Library, Hawaiian Dictionary.
- “Uncovering America: Manifest Destiny and the West.” National Portrait Gallery.