Week 7, Lecture 1
Dr Kathryn Woods (k.woods@warwick.ac.uk)

Caspar David
Friedrich, The
Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (c.
1818)

• ‘Man’ in the Natural World – Changing
Understandings and Attitudes (c.1650-c.1750)
• Nature and Industry
• Domestication and the Pleasure of Nature
• Romantic Depictions of ‘Nature’ in Art and
Literature

• 16 th -17 th centuries - nature was believed to be made for the purpose of man and there was believed to be a fundamental difference between human’s and other kinds of life.
This was supported by:
• Theologians interpretation of the bible – the world before the fall of man.
• Ancient texts (Aristotle) – prominent during the
Renaissance – emphasised human ‘uniqueness’ and differences with other animals.
• Late 17 th century – La Mettrie and Descartes - only human’s possessed a ‘rational’ soul.

• 17 th century – emergence of new kind of ‘natural philosophy’ based on observation, classification, reason and experimentation. New ‘scientific’ inventions such as the microscope led to new ways of ‘seeing’ nature.
• Natural philosophy originally stemmed from utilitarian concerns eg.
Botany-medicine.
• Classifications of nature saw shift away from human centred focus on the world. New focus on the relationship between the species of different organisms.
• Specimen collecting – served to create the idea of dominion over nature through the possession of knowledge.
• Increasing separation of ‘scientific’ and ‘popular’ knowledge about nature.

• People relied heavily on land and the environment for food, clothing, housing and fuel.
• Most people still lived in the countryside and engaged in agricultural production. Their lives depended on the weather and the success or the failure of the harvest.
• Life for most people revolved around daily light hours, the seasons, and the different occupational activities required for the time of year – harvesting, ploughing, fruit picking etc.
• People were dependant on animals for food, clothing and transport.
• Dependence on wild and domesticated animals, and meat consumption, was higher in Britain that elsewhere on the continent.

• Agricultural revolution transformed the landscape – enclosed fields, irrigation of marsh lands, deforestation, and the construction of transport links.
• 1800 there was no more than 2 million acres of woodland in
England and Wales, and by the beginning of the 20th centuries the percentage of the UK covered by woodland was one of the lowest in Europe at 4%.
• New mines, factories, factory villages (eg. New Lanark), transport links (canals, roads, railways and ports) constructed.
• Landowners and prospectors looking to the land for ways of making it economic and production. Eg. Sir John Sinclair.

Maps and extracts from Sir
John Sinclair’s Statistical
Account of Scotland 1791-99).

• Urbanisation connected to population growth and industrialisation.
• An increasing proportion of the population lived in towns. In 1700 over ¾ of the population lived in the countryside, with only 13% living in towns with people numbering over 5,000. By 1800 the urban population had risen to 25% of the population. By 1851 most people lived in towns and cities.
• England was the most urbanised country in Europe.
• Differences between town and country were more pronounced than in earlier periods.
• Many people who lived in towns lost the direct connection with the landscape their ancestors who lived in the countryside had.

• In the Renaissance towns were seen as sites of civility, sophistication and safety.
• As towns expanded in the 18 th century views about them became increasingly critical. Concerns about overcrowding, social anonymity, decline of institutional control, and vice.
• Pollution – coal burning fires, dangerous chemicals used in factories, dirt from carts and wagons, animal waste
(horses and market animals), open drains, dirt roads and streets, and poor quality food.
• Concerns about health, spread of disease (smallpox and syphilis), and the London ‘gin craze’.

Thomas Rowlandson, The Miseries of London (1808)

• As ideas about towns became more negative, the countryside became increasingly idealised.
• Country praised for its fresh air, cleanliness, simplicity and rusticity.
• Country was also seen as a place to relax and as a place that was good for health.
• Emergence of sentimental ideas about village life, cottages and agriculture. Queen Charlotte had a country cottage built at Kew in
1772. Marie Antoinette had a farm built at Versailles in 1783 where she and her friends would dress up as milkmaids and milk cows.
• Led to craze for country visiting – Scotland, Lake District, etc.

Thomas Gainsborough, The
Cottage Door with Children and
Woodcutter (1778-1880)

• Industrial revolution closely connected to the extension of empire.
• Cultivation of new crops, cotton and opium, and the emergence of a global transportation network, had a significant impact on the landscape of the whole world.
• In Britain there was a thirst for knowledge about new lands, people’s, environments, plants and animals.
• Explorers such as James Cook, Sir Joseph Banks) went of in search of new lands - Australia, New Zealand and
Haiti.
• Some of this was driven by a desire for pure knowledge but in most case it had an economic basis – looking for new medicines, goods, products and lands to cultivate and exploit.

• Before 1700 most animals kept for practical uses and were often treated cruelly.
• After 1700 pet keeping became popular. Horses, dogs, cats, monkeys and birds were now kept for emotional gratification rather than practical economic functions.
• Pet keeping led to increasingly sentimental views about animals and movements against animal cruelty – bear baiting, cock-fighting, hunting of wild birds and children killing animals for fun. Cockfighting made illegal 1849.
• Increasingly believed that animal cruelty made people cruel to one another and should be banned as a result.

• Public parks, orchards and tree linked walks became increasingly popular in towns from
1650 onwards. Eg. Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in London
• Before 1760 the preferred style ordered, symmetrical and formal gardens. Planting of exotic plants and trees became increasingly popular over the 18 th century.
• After 1760 more ‘natural’ and informal gardening styles, and gardens which resembled the ‘natural’ landscape of the countryside, became more popular.

‘In highly cultivated countries, such as England, where landed property is all lined out, and bounded and intersected with walls and hedges, we endeavour to give our gardens…the charm of variety and novelty, by imitating the wilderness of nature in studied irregularities.
Winding walks, hanging woods, craggy rocks, falls of water, are all looked upon as improvements; and the stately avenues, canals, and lawns of our ancestors, which afforded the beauty of contrast, in ruder times, are now exploded’.
William Marsden (1783)
Warwick Castle gardens by Capability Brown

• New taste for scenery and countryside visiting emerged in the 18 th century. Lake district, Snowdonia, the Scottish
Highlands and Switzerland were especially popular.
• Views of waterfalls, mountains, rivers and glaciers.
• New interest in the countryside emerged as people increasingly lived in urban environments. They were looking for historical and ‘natural’ British landscape.
• Better transport links (road and rail) made visiting easier.
Popular middle and upper class pastime by 19 th century.
• Coleridge 1803: ‘The father I ascend from animated nature, from men and cattle and the common birds of the woods and fields…the greater becomes in me the intensity of the feeling of life…God is everywhere.’

Robert Southey (1807): ‘within the last 30 years a taste for the picturesque has sprung up; and in the course of summer travelling is now looked upon to be… essential…while one of the flocks of fashion migrates to the sea cost, another flies off to the mountains of wales, the lakes of the northern provinces, or to Scotland; some to mineralogize, some to botanise, some to take views of the country – all to study the picturesque.’

Paul Sandy, Falls of the Clyde (1747-52). Reproduction print.

John Constable, The White Horse (1819)
J.

Thomas Gainsborough, Mr and Mrs Andrews (1748)

Jakob Phillip Hackert, Goethe in Rome Visiting the Colosseum
(1786).
Classism and Neo Classism
• Prominent artistic style throughout the 18 th century.
• Based on classical Greek and Roman
Art and Architecture.
• Idea was that beauty was an objective quality and that there was a precise definition of beauty according to order, proportion, harmony and symmetry.
• Prominent classical styles in English gardens.
• Ruins and classical buildings prominent in landscape pictures.

• Emerged c.1750 after the publication of Edmund Burke’s
Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Ideas of the Sublime and the
Beautiful (1757)
• ‘Sublime’ refers to the quality of greatness - physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual, or artistic.
• Landscape paintings that explored the sublime depicted ‘terrifying’ images of nature – mountains, waterfalls and valleys.
• Immanuel Kant in his Critique on the Faculty of Judgement (1790) emphasised that sublime was found primarily in ‘formless’ objects
– like nature.

‘If the pain is not carried to violence, and the terror is not conversant about the resent destruction of the person, as these emotions clear the parts, whether fine or gross, of a dangerous and troublesome encumbrance, they are capable of producing delight; not pleasure, but a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquillity tinged with terror; which, as it belongs to self preservation, is one of the stronger of all the passions. Its object is the sublime. Its highest degree I call astonishment; the subordinate degrees are awe, reverence, and respect, which by the very etymology of the words show from which source they are derived, and how they stand distinguished from positive pleasure.’ Edmund Burke (1757)

‘Bold, overhanging, and, as it were, threatening rocks, thunderclouds piled up the vault of heaven, borne along with flashes and peals, volcanoes in all their violence and destruction, hurricanes leaving in all their track the boundless ocean….make our power of resistance if trifling moment in comparison with might’. Immanuel
Kant (1790)

• Artistic, literary and intellectual movement of the late
18 th and early 19 th centuries.
• To do with the experience of authentic feelings and emotions. From the sublime it inherited an interest in feelings of terror, awe and horror.
• Rooted in the German Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) movement.
• In the visual arts it was particularly associated with landscape painting – J.M. Turner, Caspar David
Friedrich & John Constable.
• Romantic literary figures repeated wrote about nature
- William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John
Keats, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelly,
Robert Burns and Walter Scott .

J. M. Turner, Dudley (1832)