A curious and peculiarly American show opens tomorrow at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum. “Frederic Church, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Moran: Tourism and the American Landscape,” an odd yet intriguing gathering of more than 250 pictures and tourism-related objects, will appeal to anyone who has summered in the Catskills, watched Old Faithful erupt at Yellowstone National Park, marveled at Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon, stopped at a scenic overlook to watch the sun set on the Hudson River Valley, or vacationed elsewhere in this great country of ours.

The show takes as its subject the American landscape and the artists who helped make our natural wonders not only popular tourist destinations but also a source of spiritual inspiration and national pride. In the wall text of the exhibition, we learn that before 1860, approximately 75,000 people took summer vacations annually; this number grew to some 3 million by 1900. As one contemporary writer commented:

The history of all summering-places is alike. An adventurous artist usually ventures into a new field, and whispers his discovery to his friends … After him come pell-mell the would-be [aesthetes], and later the mere fashionables, as the flock follows the tinkle of the bell-wether, and up go the mammoth hotels as fast as mushrooms on a May morning.

It was through such artists as Church, Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, and Asher B. Durand that Romanticism found its way into American hearts and American soil. But “Tourism and the American Landscape” sets its sights not mainly on American Romanticism but rather on American commercialism. The show is primarily a portrait of a time, an attitude, and a place – the adolescent, American wilderness at the end of the 19th century, the budding moment when national self-awareness merged with self-promotion.

Taken purely as informative documentary and historical artifact, the exhibition has its strengths. An idealistic glimpse into the birth of tourism in this country, it offers a surprisingly thorough and scholarly sketch of an America glossed in innocence, nationalism, and nostalgia. In terms of art, though, it is fairly ho-hum.

The show meanders all over the map, literally. It is divided by region – Niagara Falls; the Catskills; the Adirondacks and the Hudson River Valley; the White Mountains of New Hampshire; Maine; Yellowstone, Green River, Grand Canyon, and Yosemite – and can become a tad repetitive. By the end of the exhibition, I felt as if maybe it had tried to cover too much ground.

More important, few of the paintings and drawings at the exhibition’s core are fully satisfying. This creates a structure in which the show’s foundation is maudlin and wobbly. Walking through “Tourism and the American Landscape,” I kept wishing that Claude or Corot had been lured to America to paint its scenic vistas.

The majority of paintings on view are pleinair studies, most of which have their beautiful moments – sunset clouds burning red; a milky-blue sky; a lovely moon – but many of which are cheesy and overdone. The drawings and oil sketches in the show by Church come consistently closest to translating the power and beauty of the American wilderness into pictures that rise above homage and sentimentality, but even they often reach a plateau of fussiness and overkill in which finessed details overwhelm the experience as a whole.

Church is best represented by such plein-air oil sketches as “Sun Rising Over Bar Harbor” (c. 1860), “Niagara Falls in Evening Light” (1856),”View of the Catskills From the Hudson River Valley” (c. 1844), “Church’s Farm, Hudson, New York” (1870-80), and “Five Studies of Autumn Landscape, Possibly Vermont” (1865), as well as by a series of misty graphite and gouache drawings of Niagara Falls. Many of his oil sketches and drawings have a sweet light; they feel quick, fresh, and concerned only with essentials.

Most of the paintings in the exhibition, though, seem to be obsessed with the elements of nature – the spray from Niagara; a rocky cliff face; the intensity of a sunset – rather than with the elements of painting. The experience of the landscape is exaggerated, in a need, seemingly, to elevate nature to the picturesque. Both nature and painting begin to feel stiff, forced, and unnatural, mainly because space and light – essential elements of our experience of both the landscape and painting – are problematic or absent.

Homer’s “Girl Picking Apple Blossoms” (1870), in which a girl is surrounded by trees in a field, is one of his best works on view and almost avoids sentimentality. Yet in the end his touch becomes belabored, as if he were counting the flowers instead of feeling his way through them, overstating them before he had understood them for what they are. Here, as in other Homer pictures, the artist, rather than conveying nature without pretension, telegraphs how he thinks we should feel. Certainly, paintings are not nature, but the artist must convince us of his subject. He must also step aside and allow for a natural interchange: nature to come to us and us to her.

The best elements of “Tourism and the American Landscape” are its supportive objects. Besides its cache of pastoral landscape drawings and paintings by its three featured artists, the show includes kitschy, illustrative wallpaper of American Indians in canoes; magazine illustrations by Homer of tourists in hoopskirts fishing, camping, playing croquet, and climbing around Niagara Falls; a beautiful tile fireplace surround, also by Homer, of a shepherd boy and girl guarding their flock in an idyllic landscape; and a glazed stoneware vase, Edward Timothy Hurley’s “Indian Encampment” (1909), illustrated with woods and a tepee at sunset.

There are also travel brochures, maps, guidebooks, and magazine advertisements; plates and platters adorned with landscapes; gorgeous nature photographs; a brass matchsafe in the form of a fishing basket; and another wonderful matchsafe, in silver – a portrait of an American Indian chief, whose feathers radiate outward from his head like a starburst.

Some of my favorite works here are the daguerreotypes, stereoviews, and photographs that state clearly, without exaggeration or adornment, the natural majesty of the sites. Stereoview photographs of Niagara Falls by Frederic and William Langenheim have a pearly light, and the stereoview “The Whirlpool Rapids-Niagara From the Series Premium Views” (1860-80), photographed by George Barker, has the commanding presence of a print by Hokusai.

A wonderful section of the exhibition is devoted to viewing stereoview photographs. The viewfinder blows up a dozen sepia-toned tourist photographs to illuminated, 3-D, stage size proportions. Images of a snow-covered Niagara Falls, for example, feel big as life; and strange, seemingly flat and cutout vacationers, as if they were props set in the landscape, stand before scenic views.

“Tourism and the American Landscape,” though it might not be sublime as an exhibition, is a perfect summertime show. It will stir up your own American vacation memories – the sunburn, the magnificent views, the tourist traps. It might even put you in the mood to travel. And it serves as a reminder that artists not only change our perception of the world, they change the very fabric of our nation.

From May 19 until October 22 (2 E. 91st Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues, 212-849-8400).