‘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 which put new emphasis on emotions such as apprehension, horror and terror, and awe.’

‘The sublime involves the formlessness of uplifting spectacles and produces feelings of awe and terror.’

History of Romanticism and The Sublime

Mini Fact File About Romanticism

• Major movement in the 18th century because of the Enlightenment
• It was seen typically as calm, harmony, balance, idealization and rationality of Classicism and Neoclassicism
• Romantics celebrated the purity and imagination of nature
• Romanticism photography went on to something that photographers could escape to – almost like a envisioning a new reality

Mini Fact File About The Sublime

• The Sublime was first seen in philosophy in an essay, ‘Peri Hupsous’, translating to ‘on the sublime’ that meant “power of grand conceptions”
• Sublime is normally used as an adjective describing something as delightful
• Artists see the word as, awe-inspiring, life-threatening, edge-of-catastrophe because of nature’s power and beauty
• One of the artists Ansel Adams saw the sublime and romantic photography as pure