What is Romanticism?
Romanticism is the Romantics celebrated the spontaneity, imagination, and the purity of nature. Along with these elements it also incorporated a deep feeling of emotion as an authentic source of experience. Romanticism was a reaction against the Enlightenment and against 18th-century rationalism and physical materialism in general. Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.
What is the Sublime?
The Sublime is a western concept of ‘the exalted’ of ‘beauty that is grand and dangerous’. The Sublime refers to the wild but beautiful side of nature. The Sublime is related to agony and to pain, and it is spaces where things happen beyond the need of human control and human manipulation to nature. It overwhelms the viewer, but also excites them with the image.
The Hay Wain – John Constable
This painting is a 6ft landscape made in 1821 named the Hay Wain, which is a classical painting, and is not mundane. Previously, it was called the ‘Noon’, but they changed it. This image is very diverse for it’s time, as landscape wasn’t a very popular genre to paint/ draw. This image consists of very small details planted throughout, so you have to look closely. John’s father was a land owner, so John grew up around nature and had a very environmental life. This image represents the industrial time period where it was a common ideology that machines were taking over. However, this image challenges this as it shows the beautiful side to the time period, and it makes this more significant as this was not a typical landscape that was seen. This image creates a connection between farmers and the land, which therefore makes the image romantic and personal. Especially as John’s father was a farmer, it really connects John to the landscape. Lastly, the rough textures from the paint can link to the textures of the actual texture. For example, the texture for water is similar to the water in real life.
JMW Turner
J.M.W. Turner was a British painter who lived in the late 1700s and early 1800s. He is known for painting powerful and emotional pictures of nature. Turner liked to paint the sea, the sky, and the weather. He often showed things like storms, sunsets, and ships in rough water. His paintings showed both the beauty and danger of nature. As he got older, his style became more loose and blurry, and his work later inspired modern artists.