“Romanticism, attitude or intellectual orientation that characterized many works of literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and historiography in Western civilization over a period from the late 18th to the mid-19th century.”

Romanticism in in landscape photography and art is a style that rejects classical aspects of an image and emphasises the other aspects. For example the nature and the emotion. This is shown in the deep colours of the foliage and the colour contrast between each item of the photo. Additionally, most images of this style often have a haze or tone over them which i think gives them a more old fashion style. This is also due to the style being popularised in the mid twentieth century around 1950 – 1960. This was after the popularisation of colour photography rather than black and white. In Romanticism landscapes the colours are often phased and blended together which reduces the sharpness of the contrast and colour changes. this provides a softer image to look at which therefore makes the image more relaxing to look at and gives a calmer feel. Romanticism can be seen in many different subjects of all different styles. For example poetry and art. Romanticism in art follows very similar patterns as the style in photography.

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Sir Donald McCullin CBE is a British photojournalist, particularly recognised for his war photography and images of urban strife. His career, which began in 1959, has specialised in examining the underside of society, and his photographs have depicted the unemployed, downtrodden and impoverished. He was born on October 9th, 1935 and has now aged 86 years.

McCullin took a range of different kinds of images such as, landscape, rural, war photography, portraits, close ups and much more. He is most known for his war photography because of how powerful most his images are, but he also does have a big amount of good landscape photos.

“Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.” – Don McCullin

Don McCullin landscape photos:

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Image analysis:

In this image you can see multiple people that seem to be running away from something unknown but it can be imagined they are escaping from war that is happening where they are. The image is displayed in black and white due to this photo being taken many years ago which I think makes the image look more effective and creates a dark tone. In the background you can see a lot of fog/smoke which was confirmed to be tear gas due to soldiers gassing the neighbourhood. McCullin seems to be attempting to catch emotion with this image by photographing people who seem to be running for their life which at the time all the people are going to have many emotions at the time such as, frightened, shocked and helpless. On the wall there are people that look like their wearing soldier uniform such as a helmet and some look to be holding a weapon. This means this image must’ve been taken during the World War in the 1940s which is when most of Dan’s images were photographed.

Romanticism was an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from. This period depicted more emotions such as trepidation, horror, and wild untamed nature.

The earliest known landscape photograph was in 1826 taken by a French inventor by the name of Nicephore Niepce.

The Age of Enlightenment (also known as the Age of Reason or simply the Enlightenment) was an intellectual and philosophical movement that dominated Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries with global influences and effects.

Sublime is a aesthetic concept of ‘beauty that is big and dangerous’. Sublime refers to the wildness of nature. In history of ideas it has a deeper meaning, an ideal that artists have long pursued. Taking inspiration from the rediscovery of the ‘Pseudo-Longinus’ and Edmund Burke, British artists and writers on art have explored the sublime for over four hundred years. In the introductory essay Christine Riding and Nigel Llewellyn trace the relationship between British art and the sublime, discussing ideas and definitions of the sublime used in the Baroque, Romantic, Victorian periods and modern periods. The accompanying piece by Ben Quash considers an intractable problem for Christian art – the notion of a separation between the sublime and the beautiful in God’s creation.

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Artists have been painting the landscape since ancient times. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the tradition of depicting pure landscapes declined. It declined until the 16th century when artists began to view the landscape as a subject in its own right. The artistic shift happened because of a growing interest in the natural world sparked by the Renaissance. The photographic side of landscapes was greatly influenced by the rejection of The age of Enlightenment and brought on by the Age of Romanticism. Through landscape photography, the photographers can demonstrate their connection to nature and capture the interesting and great environments around them. 

Examples of Landscape Paintings

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The age of Enlightenment 1700s-1800s

European politics, philosophy, science and communications were radically reoriented during the course of the age of enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers in Britain, in France and throughout Europe questioned traditional authority and embraced the notion that humanity could be improved through rational change. This time period produced numerous books, inventions, laws, scientific discoveries and paintings. Landscape paintings began to become more and more common throughout this era due to the new found interest in landscapes, away from religious beliefs.

There were two main styles of landscape in the 18th century, the Classical and the Dutch styles.

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The age of romanticism 1800s-1900s

Romanticism was a rejection of the Age of Enlightenment (1700-1800) where science and  rationality were rejected over emotion and aesthetic. They felt that a scientific worldview was cold so as a reaction the Romantics generated paintings which were rich in emotions such as dread, horror, and savage nature.

Examples of Romanticism landscape paintings

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Romanticism landscape paintings were a lot more dramatic and substantial compared to the Enlightenment paintings of the century before, showcasing grander landscapes that look more fictional.

Romanticism paintings started to be transferred into photographs in the mid 1900s by photographers such as Ansel Adams who became known for his photographs of the American west.

Ansel Adams 1902 – 1984

Ansel Easton Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. Adams is considered to be one of the pioneers of photography. Adams chose a career in photography after meeting and seeing photos by Paul Strand. Adams mainly shot in black and white, this was because he felt colour could be distracting, and could therefore divert an artist’s attention from the achievement of his full potential when taking a photograph, he also believed black and white photos had a certain quality that colour photos couldn’t achieve. In 1940 he helped organize the first public collection of photographs, at the Museum of Modern Art, and in 1946 he established the first academic photography department at a California school of arts.

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Ansel Adams and other landscape photographers like him, successfully showcased the vast landscapes around them to really draw viewers in to their work. Adams liked to say that instead of communicating images, he communicated feelings in his work, It is this thought process behind his images which make them so powerful, he created these images knowing exactly what he wanted to portray, before he took the photo.

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This image created by Adams known as “The Tetons and Snake River” greatly portrays the substantial landscape of the American west. The image is shot in black and white, this dramatizes how the rural west of America looks, and adds a lot of intensity to the image making it look almost fictional. Ansel clearly waited for the perfect moment in the weather to take the image, the distant clouds on top of the mountain show a clear contrast to the lower part of the image, almost like they are two different landscapes, the lower half being a very calm landscape and the upper half being a very wild harsh landscape. This adds depth to the image and makes it much more interesting for viewers.

Landscape photography is the technique of capturing images of nature to bring your viewer into the scene. Through landscape photography, the photographers demonstrate their connection to nature and capture the essence of the environment around them. Landscape photography is greatly influenced by Romanticism and the rejection of The age of Enlightenment.

ROMANTICISM AND THE SUBLIME

Romanticism (1770-1850) was a rejection of the Age of Enlightenment (1685-1715) where science and rationality was prised over emotion and aesthetic. By contrast, the Romantics rejected the whole idea of reason and science. They felt that a scientific worldview was cold and sterile so as a reaction the Romantics generated paintings which were rich in emotions such as trepidation, horror, and wild untamed nature.

Romanticism was rejected or ignored by most of the major artists later seen as associated with it, but it nevertheless identified several key tendencies of the period.

Though hard to define precisely, it essentially involves: 1) placing emotion and intuition before (or at least on an equal footing with) reason; 2) a belief that there are crucial areas of experience neglected by the rational mind; and 3) a belief in the general importance of the individual, the personal and the subjective- every painting told a story.

Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry (1757) connected the sublime with experiences of awe, terror and danger. Burke saw nature as the most sublime object, capable of generating the strongest sensations in its beholders. This Romantic conception of the sublime proved influential for several generations of artists.

PAINTINGS TO PHOTOGRAPHY

The talents of Romanticism in paintings were transferred to photography where photographers such as Ansel Adams became  known for his black-and-white images of the American West (as seen below).

These two images, although created over 100 years apart share striking similarities in terms of evoking emotion and technical skill, such as a a large array of tonal values.

Landscape photography is the art of capturing pictures of nature and the outdoors in a way that brings your viewer into the scene. From grand landscapes to intimate details, the best photos demonstrate the photographer’s own connection to nature and capture the essence of the world around them.

Rural Landscapes

Rural landscape photography focus’ on places that are open and less populated, such as the countryside, and capturing the life in these areas which can include photographing trees, mountains, rivers, lakes etc along with its surrounding environment. They can be photographed at any time of day regardless of weather as different types of lighting/weather can change the atmosphere and can even enhance the mood being captured in each image [i.e: shooting in rainy weather at 9pm will create a darker mood compared to shooting in sunny weather at 3pm].

Some more examples of rural landscapes are:

Key Features of Romanticism

Romanticism was an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850. The artists emphasized that sense and emotions – not simply reason and order – were equally important means of understanding and experiencing the world. Romanticism celebrated the individual imagination and intuition in the enduring search for individual rights and liberty.

The Age of Enlightenment

The Enlightenment, a philosophical movement that dominated Europe during the 18th century, was centred around the idea that reason is the primary source of authority and legitimacy and advocated such ideals as liberty, progress, tolerance, fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state.
This movement’s three central concepts were the use of reason, the scientific method, and progress. Enlightenment thinkers believed they could help create better societies and better people.
Enlightenment thinkers also wanted to improve human conditions on earth rather than concern themselves with religion and the afterlife. These thinkers valued reason, science, religious tolerance, and what they called “natural rights”—life, liberty, and property.

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The impact of the Enlightenment on the arts took various forms. Some artists paid homage to science, others studied the classical past. During this time, Classical art’s realism, restraint, harmony, and order, was in line with Enlightenment thinking. Its influence was strongly felt in the art of the period, in work such as British artist Joseph Wright of Derby’s A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery, 1764-66. Its dramatic use of light was intended to show how inquiry and learning are profound and deeply solemn.

The Age of Romanticism

Romanticism was in part inspired by the idealism of the French Revolution and embraced the struggles for freedom and equality and the promotion of justice. Painters began using current events and atrocities to shed light on injustices in dramatic compositions that rivalled the more staid Neoclassical history paintings accepted by national academies.

Above is Europe: A Prophecy, 1794, by William Blake. In late 18th century England, the mystical visions of William Blake were a powerful counterpoint to Enlightenment rationalism. Blake sought to regenerate mankind spiritually and his artistic style is unique.

Both the English poet and artist William Blake and the Spanish painter Francisco Goya has been dubbed “fathers” of Romanticism by various scholars for their works’ emphasis on subjective vision, the power of the imagination, and an often darkly critical political awareness. Blake, working principally in engravings, published his illustrations alongside his poetry that expressed his vision of a new world, creating mythical worlds full of gods and powers, and sharply critiquing industrial society and the oppression of the individual. Goya explored the terrors of irrationality in works like his Black Paintings (1820-23), which conveyed the nightmarish forces underlying human life and events.

For the majority of his career, Goya suffered from hearing loss, causing him to express his internal thoughts through paintings he did inside of his home. The paintings depicted many characteristics of the Romantic style with his use of intense emotions and ideas such as death and horror.

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At the end of the 18^th century and well into the 19^th, Romanticism quickly spread throughout Europe and the United States to challenge the rational ideal held so tightly during the Enlightenment. The artists emphasized that sense and emotions – not simply reason and order – were equally important means of understanding and experiencing the world. Romanticism celebrated the individual imagination and intuition in the enduring search for individual rights and liberty. Its ideals of the creative, subjective powers of the artist fueled avant-garde movements well into the 20^th century. 

The Sublime

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For Romantics, the sublime is a meeting of the subjective-internal (emotional) and the objective-external (natural world): we allow our emotions to overwhelm our rationality as we experience the wonder of creation. The sublime is further defined as having the quality of such greatness, magnitude or intensity, whether physical, metaphysical, moral, aesthetic or spiritual, that our ability to perceive or comprehend it is temporarily overwhelmed.

Romanticism in Landscape photography

Romanticism has long been associated with the landscape. In the medium of photography, the sense of romance of the landscape features its spirit in full bloom The nature of Romanticism is rather uncontrollable and unpredictable, which is shown in the wild nature of romantic landscape images. Sometimes its quiet and sensual power manifests into beautiful images, and other times it features animals or humans, while at other times the landscape will be empty and bare of any form of life. The most notable feature in a romantic landscape photo is that it will stir the emotion and feelings and cause inspiration of the imagination.  Romantic landscape images typically also have a moody atmosphere – they are more about the subjective feelings of the artist than an objective record of the observable world.

Ansel Adams

Ansel Easton Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating “pure” photography which favored sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph.

Photographers such as Ansel Adams and Fay Godwin use romanticism in their images, like in the image above. The use of the sublime in clear in this image, with the moody atmosphere and the sense of the looming mountains above. This image is influenced by Adams use of tonal range – there is elements of pure black in the woodland areas of this image, which illustrate the power and darkness of nature, linked to the sublime, a key feature of Romanticsm. Furthermore, there is evidence of the texture and untextured white at the complete other end of the zone system, in the river, tips of the mountains and sky.

Rural landscape photography refers to “photography in the countryside” and covers the rural environment. While rural landscapes often contain architecture – much the same as urban landscapes – rural landscape photography is more about capturing the life and elements found in the countryside.

According to records, the earliest known evidence of a landscape photograph was taken between the years of 1826 and 1827. It was an urban landscape photo taken by a French inventor by the name of Nicephore Niepce.

The Age of The Enlightenment (1700-1800ish)

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The age of enlightenment of ‘age of reason’ shifted art in the sense that it encouraged criticism of the monarchy. This new movement also created a theme of simplicity and elegance

The Age of Romanticism (1800-1900ish)

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Between 1800 to roughly 1850 an artistic movement called romanticism, this was a artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement. Romanticism put an emphasis on emotion, and individualism within art and often portrayed an idealised version of what they were seeing, similar to how we use Lightroom to adjust colours and shadows creating vibrancy and depth.

Sublime – In aesthetics, the sublime is the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual, or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation. 

The Romantic sublime

Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry (1757) connected the sublime with experiences of awe, terror and danger. Burke saw nature as the most sublime object, capable of generating the strongest sensations in its beholders. This Romantic conception of the sublime proved influential for several generations of artists.

Rural Landscape Photography

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Ansel Adams

As the 20th century began rolling in, the world saw American photographers at the forefront of landscape photography, and this was because they had a rather vast and varied array of landscapes to photograph. There are many notable names in landscape photography, and one of the most legendary ones is Ansel Adams. He was an ardent environmentalist who advocated for the natural world and inspired people to show love for the planet by showing love and respect for it. He has produced some spectacular images of canyons and rivers, which have become a sort of inspiration point for photographers that followed.

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Ansel Adams born 20th February 1902 was a landscape photographer born in California. As Well as being an amazing photographer, Adams was also an environmentalist and would use his skills to protect many national parks from being made into building sights.

Ansel Adams mainly captured the natural black and white beauty of the American West and began publishing in the 1921, by 1922 Adams ‘Yosemite’ prints were on sale by ‘Best studio’. 

During the mid 1920’s Ansel experimented with the Bromoil process due to the rise of pictorialism. For many of Adams images, he used a soft focus lens and he described using it as “capturing a glowing luminosity that captured the mood of a magical summer afternoon”. In 1925 Adams has made the decision to reject pictorialism and focus on a more realistic approach of using contrast, exposures and sharpness. One of the key compositional techniques that Adams employed in many of his images was to place the horizon about two-thirds of the way up the frame. This would mean the composition was biased in favour of the landscape rather than the sky and would help to communicate the epic scale of the scene.

The genre of this style of photography is landscape. The mise-en-scene presents the magnificent Teton Mountains and impressive Snake River which creates a loud and interesting composition. The photo has been taken from a forward angle which makes the image look alluring.  The colour (or tone) in this image is striking blacks and intense whites. The leading lines begin at the furthest point that we can see of the river and continue in the snake like trail. Bright lighting through the clouds reflects on the windy river, the rest of the image is captured in ominous dark lighting, the exposure of the image is underexposed due to the dark shadowy mountains. The image portrays a large depth of field and focuses on the river in front. The rivers contrast in tones provide a powerful leading line towards the ominous mountains. 

The sublime

The sublime has long been understood to mean a quality of greatness that inspires wonder. From the seventeenth century onwards the concept and emotions it inspires have been a source of inspiration for artists and writers, particularly in relation to the natural landscape.

During the Italian Renaissance the initial concept started to arise. The depictions of Christ lifeless and suffering by Andrea Mantegna and Masaccio, as well as Raphael’s sketches and analyses of skeletons, inform us of the certainty of mortality and the unknowable – essential elements of the Sublime. However, it was only in the Romantic era that the Sublime as an artistic notion gained traction throughout Europe.

It all started with Nicolas Boileau’s translation of On The Sublime 1674 by the ancient Greek Longinus. Longinus stated here that the presenter should seek to create emotion and move his audience rather than just convince them. Longinus, who was primarily interested in languages, did speak momentarily about the aesthetic Sublime in both wildlife and man-made artefacts; in his opinion, vast scale and diversity may generate a sense of the Sublime.

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Théodore welcomes the observer onto the floor of the ship by enabling the sides of the raft to extend past the base of the image. By having the victims facing upwards and away toward the sky you are dragged deeper into the tragic scene of events. He also uses a chiaroscuro light on the fallen people and the sky which pulls focus on to the events that have occurred on the raft

romanticism and enlightenment

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Martin manages to create a senesce of tranquillity and harmony in this image the celestial landscape in the image creates the feeling of salvation the incorporation of the artists and poets who can be seen on the hill creates an angelic feel to the image as they are depicted in all white the darkness around the mountains allows for the people to focus on the green of the hill top in the foreground.

romanticism is a movement in art and literature which began in 1800s the over all characteristics of romanticism is a new emotionalism in contrast to the resistant ideas. it challenged the rational ideals so loved by artists of the Enlightenment. Romantic artists believed that emotions and senses were equally as important as order and reason for experiencing and understanding the world.

Following the French Revolution, the enduring search for individual liberty and rights fueled the Romantic celebration of intuition and imagination. The Romantic ideas of the subjectively creative powers of the artist continued to fuel Avante-Garde movements into the 20th century.

Romantic artists reacting against the sombre Neoclassical style found their expression through music, literature, architecture, and visual art. The Romantic movement encompasses a variety of styles because it valued imagination, inspiration, and originality. Personal connections to nature and an idealized past were a significant theme for many Romantic artists attempting to hold back the waves of industrialism.

In the earliest days of landscape photography, technical restraints meant that photographers were bound to working with static subjects, due to long exposure times which rendered any movement blurry. This made landscapes and cityscapes prime material for their exposures.

Depicting a man having his shoes shined, the single image took ten minutes to make and just happened to capture the individual, who stood statically, one leg perched on a stool. The shoe shiner working on Paris’ Boulevard du Temple that day had no idea he would make his­tory.

As the technical side of photography developed and cameras became more affordable, almost anyone could become a photographer. Whilst democratizing and diversifying the craft, this also gave form to some form of elitism, as certain artists began to distance themselves from the status quo by creating their own visual movements.

 it is hard to trace the exact origin of landscape photography since the very first photograph that we have knowledge of was taken in an urban landscape during 1826 or 1827 by the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce. Then in 1835 the English scientist Henry Fox Talbot came into play with various photography innovations.

Landscape photography was delivering something that only painting was capable of doing until that time – rendering reality in a two-dimensional format.

A lot of landscape images and portraits were taken during the Victorian era of photography, but it was in 1904 when Edward Steichen produced a photograph known as Moonlight: The Pond that landscape photography gained certain recognition in the art world.

Carleton Watkins is a true pioneer of landscape photography. He is an American photographer who is best known for his amazing photographs of the Yosemite Valley.  To capture the extraordinary detail of the breath-taking landscape, Watkins famously packed up his mammoth-plate camera, which used 18X22 inch glass plates, tripods, and tents on mules and trekked through the Valley, returning with 30 mammoth-plate negatives that went on to kick off the National Park movement in the US.

Watkins was also hired by the California State Geological Survey as their official photographer where his team made a large number of photographs that held information about California. The images of Yosemite produced by Watkins were among the first images to be seen of the Yosemite Valley in the Eastern US, caused a stir in the US Congress and these amazing images were, as such, fundamental in convincing the congress and ensuring that Yosemite was preserved as a National Park.

By the time it was announced in 1839, Western industrialized society was ready for photography. The camera’s images appeared and remained viable because they filled cultural and sociological needs that were not being met by pictures created by hand. The photograph was the ultimate response to a social and cultural appetite for a more accurate and real-looking representation of reality, a need that had its origins in the Renaissance.

When the idealized representations of the spiritual universe that inspired the medieval mind no longer served the purposes of increasingly secular societies, their places were taken by paintings and graphic works that portrayed actuality with greater verisimilitude. To render buildings, topography, and figures accurately and in correct proportion, and to suggest objects and figures in spatial relationships as seen by the eye rather than the mind, 15th-century painters devised a system of perspective drawing as well as an optical device called the camera obscura that projected distant scenes onto a flat surface (see A Short Technical History, Part I)—both means remained in use until well into the 19th century.

Realistic depiction in the visual arts was stimulated and assisted also by the climate of scientific inquiry that had emerged in the 16th century and was supported by the middle class during the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th century. Investigations into plant and animal life on the part of anatomists, botanists, and physiologists resulted in a body of knowledge concerning the internal structure as well as superficial appearance of living things, improving artists’ capacity to portray organisms credibly. As physical scientists explored aspects of heat, light, and the solar spectrum, painters became increasingly aware of the visual effects of weather conditions, sunlight and moonlight, atmosphere, and, eventually, the nature of colour itself.

William Henry Jackson is famous for his images from the American West and he was a painter, geological survey photographer and explorer. When Jackson served in the Union Army, he spent most of his free time doing drawings. In 1866, Jackson travelled to the West and along with his brother Edward Jackson, settled down in Omaha and got into the photography business.

Jackson worked for Union Pacific in 1869 where his job was to document sceneries along various railroad routes which were to be used for promotional purpose. Ferdinand Hayden discovered Jackson’s work and asked Jackson to join one of their expeditions to Yellowstone river region.

The next year, Jackson was invited to join the US Government survey of the Yellowstone river and rocky mountains that was led by Ferdinand Hayden. He was also a member of the Hayden Geological survey of 1871 and he along with other members of the expedition documenting the Yellowstone region played an important role in convincing the congress to establish the Yellowstone National Park in March 1872, which was the first national park in the US.

Peter henry Emerson was a British writer and photographer who argued about the purpose and meaning of photography. He argued that photography was a form of art and not something that was done for scientific or technical reasons. Inspired by the naturalistic French paintings, Emerson started to photograph country life as naturalistic photography. He got his first album of photographs published in 1856 called the “Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads.”

Sublime

The sublime evades easy definition. Today the word is used for the most ordinary reasons, for a ‘sublime’ tennis shot or a ‘sublime’ evening. In the history of ideas it has a deeper meaning, pointing to the heights of something truly extraordinary, an ideal that artists have long pursued. Taking inspiration from the rediscovery of the work of the classical author the so-called ‘Pseudo-Longinus’ and from the writings of the philosopher Edmund Burke, British artists and writers on art have explored the problem of the sublime for over four hundred years. In the introductory essay Christine Riding and Nigel Llewellyn trace the relationship between British art and the sublime, discussing ideas and definitions of the sublime used in the Baroque, Romantic, Victorian periods and modern periods. The accompanying piece by Ben Quash considers an intractable problem for Christian art – the notion of a separation between the sublime and the beautiful in God’s creation.

The baroque sublime:

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The sublime in art, it has often been suggested, starts with Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry (1757). Before this, so the conventional narrative goes, the sublime was a notion that applied only to rhetoric. However, the sublime in this period was very much concerned with the potential power of style and composition in the visual arts as much as in language, though it had yet to be applied to nature. In recent years the early history of the concept of the sublime has proved a fertile area for research, with attention focusing on the impact of the writings of an ancient Greek writer known as Pseudo-Longinus, which were first translated into English in 1652.The essays and case studies in this section review this earlier sublime, covering the relationships between writing, rhetoric and art in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

The romantic sublime:

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Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry (1757) connected the sublime with experiences of awe, terror and danger. Burke saw nature as the most sublime object, capable of generating the strongest sensations in its beholders. This Romantic conception of the sublime proved influential for several generations of artists.

Notions of the sublime are closely linked with the English Romanticism – artists and writers who were concerned with humankind’s relationship to, and reverence for the natural world; in particular those works of painting or poetry that celebrate the majesty and overwhelming power of the natural world. Paintings like Turner’s Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth – with lashing waves and whipping storm clouds, clearly articulate Nature’s majestic and terrifying power. If one witnesses an extreme or terrifying situation and survives, one is then free to experience delight – a ship battling through a violent storm, traversing a precipitous mountain ridge, stumbling through a pitch black forest and finding, at last, a road. The tension between terror and relief is the source of Burke’s sublime feeling – a delight in surviving terror. This is especially the case in art where we become, in a sense, voyeurs of terror; the viewer understands that the terrifying scene they are witnessing is not real and is therefore free to feel a delicious frisson of fear at the idea of being there.

Joseph mallard William turner:

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Joseph Mallord William Turner RA, known in his time as William Turner, was an English Romantic painter, printmaker and watercolourist. He is known for his expressive colourisations, imaginative landscapes and turbulent, often violent marine paintings.  English artist and a Royal Academician. He is noted for his body of work that depicted the visual proof of the unfolding Industrial Revolution in England. Above all, Turner is known for his loose brushstrokes, vibrant colours, and his subtle rendering of light on landscapes.

Turner effortlessly enjoyed painting various landscapes styles. His art composition incorporated various drawings from all around the world.

Of all Romantic painters influenced by the aesthetic of the sublime, his works have been widely recognised as the most successful in capturing the effect of boundlessness which Burke and Kant saw as a prerequisite for the sublime in verbal and visual representation – the sublime being something that can be evoked but not achieved. Those works by Turner typically seen as sublime employ a formal language that avoids precise definition, instead using paint to hint at the terrifying and awesome but on a relatively modest scale when compared to the bombastic productions of painters such as Francis Danby and James Ward. Through juxtapositions of dark and light, obtrusive facture and subtle blending effects, combined with energetic centrifugal and vortex configurations and exaggerated distortions of scale, Turner’s works have been seen to both elevate and inspire perception in the beholder.

The Victorian sublime

After the Romantic era Victorian artists took a step away from the vastness of the sublime and developed a keener interest in the pursuit of beauty. The following essays and case studies consider why the sublime should have fallen out of favour in this period, and explore the work of those Victorian artists who continued to engage with a sublime aesthetic.

The chief philosopher of the Sublime, Burke in 1757, favoured this aesthetic idea over Beauty because, he said, astonishment, obscurity and vastness cause a more powerful physical reaction in us than Beauty’s orderly calm. Constable’s painting is balanced between these two aesthetic ideas.

RURAL LANDSCAPE

The term “rural landscape” describes the diverse portion of the nation’s land area not densely populated or intensively developed, and not set aside for preservation in a natural state. All kinds of rural land use are involved: agriculture, pastoralism, forestry, wildlife conservation and tourism. Planning also provides guidance in cases of conflict between rural land use and urban or industrial expansion, by indicating which areas of land are most valuable under rural use.

• The cultivated land. It is the space intervened by the work of man, both for cultivation and for forest products, which allocates very little space for the development of infrastructure or public services.
• The reduced public transport. The development of transport services in the rural area is low and low frequency. Its route usually joins the main routes with the nearest villages.
• The low population density. The rural area has few residential areas, and the houses are very far apart. They are mostly inhabited by employees who work in the field.
• The abundant vegetation. A large number of plants, grasslands, and trees are spread throughout the rural territory in a uniform way, naturally or by human intervention.
• The division of the land. The rural area has delimited lands that can be smallholdings (small agricultural properties and not very profitable by type of soil ) or large estates (large properties and very profitable for its nutrient-rich soil).
• The low percentage of environmental pollution. The rural area has a reduced level of carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide emissions, compared to urban areas that have a high concentration of vehicles and transport.
• Rural tourism. The country houses and the farms are usually a destination requested by people living in the cities, to enjoy the tranquillity and recreation during the seasons or on weekends.

Rural photos

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Rural photography refers to photography in the countryside and covers the rural environment. Rural landscapes consist of agriculture. A rural area is an open swath of land that has few homes or other buildings, and not very many people. A rural areas population density is very low. Many people live in a city, or urban area. Their homes and businesses are located very close to one another.