The Enlightenment and Its Legacy: Art Of the Late 18th Century through the Mid-19th Century
    
       
  Rococo: The French Taste :: The Enlightenment: Philosophy and Society :: The Enlightenment: Science and Technology :: Voltaire Versus Rousseau: Science Versus the Taste For the "Natural" :: The Revival of Interest in Classicism :: From Neoclassicism to Romanticism :: The Rise of Romanticism :: Imagination and Mood in Landscape Painting :: Various Revivalist Styles in Architecture :: The Beginnings of Photography
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  IMAGINATION AND MOOD IN LANDSCAPE PAINTING

Landscape painting, which became popular in the nineteenth century, often used nature as allegory in which artists commented on spiritual, moral, historical, or philosophical issues.

Landscape Painting in Germany

In Germany, especially, most landscape painting expressed to some degree a Romantic, pantheistic view of nature. Artists participated in the spirit of nature, interpreted the signs, symbols, and emblems of nature's universal spirit, and translated nature's transcendent meanings.

The reverential landscape:

The German Romantic transcendental landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich painted landscapes as sacred places filled with a divine presence. His solemn and deeply reverent Cloister Graveyard in the Snow is filled with emblems of death.		  
       
  28-52: CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH, Abbey in the Oak Forest, 1810. Oil on canvas, approx. 3' 7-1/2"  x 7' 1/4".Staatliche Museen au Berlin-Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Nationalgalerie.
  1. Abbey
  2. Abbey
  3. Abbey
  4. Abbey
  5. Abbey
Landscape Painting in England

Because of its severe effects on the countryside, the Industrial Revolution had an impact on the evolution of Romantic landscape painting in England.

Nostalgia for agrarian England:

John Constable's large painting of The Haywain shows a placid, picturesque scene of the countryside painted with attention to the texture that the atmosphere and state of the weather gave to the landscape. The painting has a nostalgic, wistful air

28-53: JOHN CONSTABLE, The Haywain, 1821. Oil on canvas, 4' 3" x 6' 2". National Gallery, London.
  1. Haywain
  2. The Haywain
  3. The Haywain
  4. The Haywain
  5. The Haywain
The horrors of the slave trade:

Joseph Mallord William Turner's The Slave Ship uses the emotive power of color to convey the tragedy and cruelty of an incident that occurred in 1783, in which the captain of a slave ship ordered the sick and dying slaves thrown overboard. Turner's use of color had an incalculable effect on the development of modern art.

28-54: JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER, The Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), 1840. Oil on canvas, 2' 11 11/16  x 4' 5/16 . Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Henry Lillie Pierce Fund).
  1. Slave Ship
  2. The Slave Ship
  3. The Slave Ship
  4. The Slave Ship
  5. Detail
Landscape Painting in the United States

America's future direction?:

Thomas Cole, a member of the Hudson River School in America, painted his expansive, panoramic view of The Oxbow (the Connecticut River near Northampton, Massachusetts) with a dark stormy wilderness on the left and a sunlit and more civilized landscape on the right.

28-55: THOMAS COLE, The Oxbow (View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm), 1836. Oil on canvas, 4' 3 1/2  x 6' 4". Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (gift of Mrs. Russell Sage, 1908).
  1. The Oxbow
  2. The Oxbow
  3. The Oxbow
  4. The Oxbow
  5. The Oxbow
Wild, wild west:

Albert Bierstadt's large painting Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California presents a panoramic view of breathtaking scenery and natural beauty. Bierstadt's paintings, which called national attention to the splendor and uniqueness of the regions beyond the Rocky Mountains, reinforced the popular nineteenth-century doctrine of Manifest Destiny.		    
       
  28-56: ALBERT BIERSTADT, Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California, 1868. Oil on canvas, 6' x 10'. National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington.
  1. Sierra Nevada Mountains
  2. Sierra Nevada Mountains
  3. Sierra Nevada Mountains
  4. Sierra Nevada Mountains
  5. Sierra Nevada Mountains
Reaffirming righteousness:

Frederic Edwin Church's Twilight in the Wilderness, which shows a panoramic view of the sun setting over a precisely depicted majestic landscape, is firmly entrenched in the idiom of the Romantic sublime. Church's idealistic and comforting view contributed to the national mythology of righteousness and divine providence.
  
       
  28-57: FREDERIC EDWIN CHURCH, Twilight In the Wilderness, 1860s. Oil on canvas, 3' 4" x 5' 4". Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio (Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund, 1965.233).
  1. Twilight in the Wilderness
  
       
 
 
       
       
  Rococo: The French Taste :: The Enlightenment: Philosophy and Society :: The Enlightenment: Science and Technology :: Voltaire Versus Rousseau: Science Versus the Taste For the "Natural" :: The Revival of Interest in Classicism :: From Neoclassicism to Romanticism :: The Rise of Romanticism :: Imagination and Mood in Landscape Painting :: Various Revivalist Styles in Architecture :: The Beginnings of Photography