A Grand Victorian Masterpiece Portraying the Picturesque Llyn Idwal, Snowdonia, Isaac Cooke, RBA (1846–1922)

A Museum-Worthy Masterpiece: Capturing the Sublime in Nineteenth-Century Landscape Painting

In the first half of the nineteenth century, landscape painting reached its zenith with the Romantic generation, spearheaded by JMW Turner and John Constable. These artists, influenced by eighteenth-century British theories of the Picturesque and Sublime, crafted a distinctive landscape idiom that responded to the awe-inspiring scale and features of nature.

The Sublime in the Romantic Era (1820-1880)

In the twenty-first century, terms like "Sublime," "Beautiful," and "Picturesque" have lost some of their earlier precision. Eighteenth-century British essayists defined the Sublime with reference to phenomena such as thundering waterfalls, erupting volcanoes, tempestuous seas, and violent storms. Edmund Burke, in his seminal work Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), described the Sublime as evoking astonishment, overwhelm, and fear, yet being "delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such circumstances." Burke emphasized that the Sublime is an aesthetic response to overwhelming phenomena experienced through art or literature, rather than direct encounters with danger.

Burke contrasted the Sublime with the Beautiful, which he characterized by small scale, smooth surfaces, and gentle luminosity. The Sublime, in contrast, was vast, rough, irregular, and marked by extreme contrasts of light and dark—like lightning illuminating a towering mountain peak amid a storm, with a thundering waterfall nearby and perhaps an erupting volcano in the distance.

The Picturesque, defined in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as midway between the Sublime and the Beautiful. Picturesque scenes feature textured surfaces, irregular lighting and shadowing, and moderate scale. They might include roughened rocks, tree bark, a canopy of leaves, or a burbling stream. The Picturesque is experienced intimately and at close range, whereas the Sublime is vast and territorial. The Picturesque world often includes pathways, textured fences, or lichen-covered cottages, indicating human habitation. The Sublime, however, either subordinates or avoids human elements, as the overwhelming forces of nature take precedence.

Transcendentalism and the Sublime

Ralph Waldo Emerson, a key figure in New England Transcendentalism, championed the idea that individuals could perceive the enormity of the universe and the presence of God through intense vision and meditation, without the need for organized religion. In some paintings, figures stand in the foreground with their backs to the viewer, gazing into the landscape. These figures act as surrogates for viewers, inviting them to transcend the immediate facts of nature and experience a higher, more universal realm.

As we view these paintings, the clarity of detail, clearness of lighting, and orderly arrangement of ordinary elements may lure us into experiencing the divine or the universal within the specifics of particular places. When we stand at the threshold of the vast and universal in a moment of profound stillness, we enter the realm of the Sublime.