Landscape PaintingThe «second class» stature of landscape painting allowed the painters

of the Romantic movement a relatively large amount of creativity. The relative lack of rules left space for experimentation.

William Turner and John Constable were the two principal English landscape artists during the early 1800s.

Landscape Painting• Turner was inspired by the classical landscape artists

who came before him (Poussin and Lorrain), while Constable was more inspired by the Belgian landscape artists.

• Turner relied mostly on watercolors, while Constable partook in a fair amount of oil painting in addition to watercolor.

• Due to the availability of materials and the novelty of the art of landscape painting, this style became widely diffused and very popular.

What are the characteristics of Turner’s paintings?

What are the subjects of Turner’s paintings?

Turner

• His mature work is characterized by a chromatic palette and broadly applied atmospheric washes of paint.

• Turner's imagination was inspired by shipwrecks, fires, natural catastrophes, and natural phenomena such as sunlight, storm, rain, and fog. He was also fascinated by the violent power of the sea.

Constable

• Every universal space is made of concrete objects, according to Constable.

• Details are clear and visible in his paintings. He intended to demonstrate the presence of the objects in the space, as as well as the rapport between the objects in their space.

• The subject’s interpretation of the painting is an important part of how the space is recognized.

The Sublime

• While Burke argues that the sublime arises from an object that incites terror, Kant says that an object can be terrifying and thus, sublime, without the beholder actually being afraid of it.

• Basically, Kant argues that beauty is a temporary response of understanding, but the sublime goes beyond the aesthetics into a realm of reason. Kant transforms the sublime from a terrifying object of nature to something intricately connected to the rational mind.

The Sublime

Kant says that the beautiful in nature is not quantifiable, but rather focused only in color, form, surface, etc. of an object. Therefore, the beautiful is to be "regarded as a presentation of an indeterminate concept of understanding." The sublime should be regarded as a "presentation of an indeterminate concept of reason."

Burke defines the sublime as "whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger... Whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror." Burke believed that the sublime was something that could provoke terror in the audience, for terror and pain were the strongest of emotions. However, he also believed there was an inherent "pleasure" in this emotion. Anything that is great, infinite or obscure could be an object of terror and the sublime, for there was an element of the unknown about them.

The PicturesqueThe artist as an educator

In the first, human feeling gives a particular sense to the natural environment. In the second, the nature awakens a particular sensation in the spirit of the viewer.

In both, nature is the environment of life, which can be welcoming or hostile, but which actively interacts with man.

Veduta emozionata and visione emozionante

1838-39 Turner

Geothe’s “Color Theory” Goethe criticizes Newton’s theory of color (that they are all derived from white, and based on different wavelengths). According to Goethe, colors are actually present in nature, and they are not entirely illusions. At the foundation of colors, he said, is the law of polarity. This law became the universal law of nature for the Romantics. Colors come from the interaction of light (positive) and dark (negative) and Goethe distinguishes several different types of color theory and color perception, among them is the idea that the subject (and the mechanics of his/her eye) interprets the exact color.

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