Class, Nation, and the Modern Landscape
Some landscape categories The beautiful ordered, smooth, pleasant. The picturesque like the beautiful in its emphasis on calm. But includes small suggestions of disorder and irregularity designed to generate interest and a sense of particularity. The sublime opposed to the beautiful and the picturesque. Wild, frightening landscapes that test viewers’ limits.
Images from: William Gilpin, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty, On Picturesque Travel, and On Sketching Landscape (1792) William Gilpin, Scene without picturesque adornment, ca. 1792 William Gilpin, Scene with picturesque adornment, ca. 1792
Claude Lorrain, Landscape with Dancing Figures, 1648
Thomas Gainsborough, Mr and Mrs Robert Andrews, ca. 1748-9
John Constable, The Hay Wain, 1821
John Constable, The Hay Wain, 1821 “The sound of water escaping from Mill dams … Willows, Old rotten banks, slimy posts and brickwork. I love such things … I should paint my own places best … They made me a painter (and I am grateful) that is I had often thought of pictures of them before I had ever touched a pencil.” -- John Constable to John Fisher, 1821 John Constable, The Hay Wain, 1821
John Constable, The White Horse, 1819
Eugene von Guérard, William Lang’s Camp on Saltwater River, 1866
Some landscape categories The beautiful ordered, smooth, pleasant. The picturesque like the beautiful in its emphasis on calm. But includes small suggestions of disorder and irregularity designed to generate interest and a sense of particularity. The sublime opposed to the beautiful and the picturesque. Wild, frightening landscapes that test viewers’ limits.
Philippe Jacques Loutherbourg, Avalanche in the Alps, 1803
J. M. W. Turner, Snowstorm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps, 1812 Terms: Carthaginian empire; Second Punic War
David, Napoleon Crossing the Alps at Mount St. Bernard, 1800
Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above a Sea of Mist, 1818
Friedrich, Chasseur in the Forest, 1814
Frederic Church, Niagara, 1857
American artists’ wild and ungovernable spirit is “a true development of the American mind; the result of democracy, of individuality … inspired not only by the irresistible cataract but by the mighty forest … by the broad continent we call our own, by the onward march of civilization, by the conquering of savage areas …” (Adam Badeau, “American Art,” in The Vagabond (New York, 1859))
Jean-Francois Millet, The Sower, 1850-1 Term: Realism Jean-Francois Millet, The Sower, 1850-1
Jean-Francois Millet, Man with a Hoe, 1852-62
Gustave Courbet, The Stonebreakers, 1849-50