Romantic View of Nature
Romantic Encounters with Nature





Personification of Nature
Identification with Personified Nature
Elevation of Persona’s Spirit—Rebirth:
feelings of youth
Perception of the Spiritual in Nature
Expansion of Persona’s Vision to a Larger
Humanity
Poetry: Romantic Theories



Wordsworth: “spontaneous overflow of
powerful feelings”; “from emotion recollected
in tranquillity”
Shelley: Poets “the unacknowledged
legislators of the world”
Keats: “truth of Imagination”; “Beauty is truth,
truth beauty”
American Romantics: Emerson,
Thoreau, Whitman

More direct connection with Nature:




Emerson: “transparent eyeball”; “Nature is the
incarnation of thought”
Thoreau: “Am I not partly leaves and vegetable
mould myself?”
Whitman: “My tongue, every atom of my blood,
form’d from this soil, this air”
Identification without personification
Romanticism and Landscape
Pastoral, Picturesque, Sublime
Poussin, Arcadian Shepherds (1638-39)
Stowe: Temple of Ancient Virtue
English Landscape Tradition



Edmund Burke, Philosophical Inquiry into
the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime
and the Beautiful (1757-59)
William Gilpin, Three Essays on
Picturesque Beauty (1794)
Uvedale Price, Essay on the Picturesque
(1794)
Edmund Burke

The Sublime




gives people harsh and antisocial feelings of
“agreeable horror”
associated with things or experiences that are
powerful, threatening, vast or unclear
generally associated with masculine qualities
associated with representations rather than
direct experience
Edmund Burke

The Beautiful



the beautiful gives people harmonious and
sociable feelings.
associated with things that are small, weak, soft,
pastel-colored, or sensually curved
generally associated with feminine qualities.
The Picturesque: Gilpin


Roughness/ruggedness
Subjects: Examples of picturesque





Ruined architecture
Disheveled hair
Patriarchal head
Human body, esp. in action
Animals: worn-out carthorse, cow, goat, ass, colors on
birds

Smooth stallion is beautiful
Picturesque: Gilpin, cont.

Examples (cont.):



Execution: free and bold
Composition: variety of parts united




lakes
Shapes
Light and shadow
Color
Cause: indeterminate
The Picturesque: Price



Roughness, sudden variation (4)
Associated with ruins, not with “the highest order
of created beings” (8)
Examples:





Gothic architecture
Hovels, mills, insides of old barns, stables, etc.
“limbs of huge trees shattered by lightning or
tempestuous winds” (6)
Animals: Ass, sheep, deer, lion (more than lioness)
ruffled birds (6-8)
People: gypsies and beggars (8)
Constable, Wivenhoe Park, Essex (1816)
Constable, The Haywain, 1821
Thomas Cole, The Oxbow (1836)
 Turner
Turner, The Slave Ship, 1840
 Friedrich
th
19
Earlier
C. American
Literature and Painting
The American Landscape
Cole, The Oxbow (1836)
American Landscape Painting

In the U.S. before 1820, landscape painting
was considered inferior to history painting
and portraiture.

Landscape paintings were informational
views of estates or cities: they were not
considered great art.
Benjamin West, Death of General Wolfe (1770)
Gilbert Stuart, George Washington (1795)
Francis Guy, Pennington Mills, Jones Falls, Baltimore, View
Upstream (c. 1804)
American Landscape Painting


However, between the 1820s and the Civil
War, landscape painting became the most
important genre of American painting—the
genre most associated with American identity.
Thomas Cole was largely responsible for this
change.
Thomas Cole (1801-1845)




Born in England
Moved to U.S. in 1818
Largely self-taught
First member of the
“Hudson River School”
of painting
Cole’s Landscapes



Emphasize the grandeur and wildness of the
American landscape
Apply the European concepts of the sublime
and the beautiful to the American landscape
Balance the powers of nature with the powers
of civilization
Cole, Falls of Kaaterskill (1826)
Cole, View of Schroon Mountain (1838)
European Landscape Tradition

The Beautiful: associated with classical
ideas of order, clarity, and harmony

The Sublime: associated with horror, pain,
danger, lack of clarity, disharmony
Claude Lorraine,
Landscape with Dancing Figures (1648)
Salvator Rosa,
Bandits on a Rocky Coast (17th C.)
Cole, The Oxbow (1836)
Cole, The Oxbow (1836)
Cole, View on the Catskill, Early Autumn (1837)
Cole, River in the Catskills (1843)
George Inness,
The Lackawanna Valley (c. 1856)
Transcendentalism and
Luminism
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Lankford, Baltimore Albion Quilt, c.1850
Hicks, Peaceable Kingdom, c.1834
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel:
Dialectic

Thesis-------------------------Antithesis

Synthesis
Dialectic: Example

Thesis: Jimmy Carter

Antithesis: Ronald Reagan

Synthesis: Bill Clinton
Dialectic: Example

Thesis: Louis XVI

Antithesis: French Revolution, Reign of Terror

Synthesis: Napoleon
Dialectic: Example

Thesis: Inductive Method of Bacon

Antithesis: Deductive Method of Descartes

Synthesis: Sir Isaac Newton combines
inductive and deductive thinking (see 589)
Dialectic: Example

Thesis: Renaissance Style

Antithesis: Baroque Style

Synthesis: Wren’s English Baroque
St. Peter’s Basilica, Rome
Borromini, San Carlo
alle Quattro
Fontane, Rome,
1667
Christopher Wren,
St. Paul’s Cathedral, London (1675-1710)
Dialectic: Example

Thesis: Human Being

Antithesis: Nature

Synthesis: Humanity combined with Nature
Thomas Cole, The Oxbow (1836)
Dialectic: Example

Thesis: The Beautiful

Antithesis: The Sublime

Synthesis: The Picturesque