(Ed.s), The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford University Press. Boston, MA: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Hardy (Ed.s), An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age. Oxford University Press. Kano, family or school of Japanese painters. Chilvers (Ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists. Oxford University Press. Murray (Ed.s), The Oxford Dictionary of Christian Art and Architecture. ARTstor įriedrich, Caspar David, 1774-1840. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art.ĭurand, A. View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm-The Oxbow. Washington, D.C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art. Grasmere, Cumbria, UK: Dove Cottage and the Wordsworth Museum. Referencesīeaumont, Sir George Howland. (1806). Death in the Sickroom invokes the core spiritual issue that troubles people in every human culture: mortality, the specter of one’s own death. Whatever it is, Melancholy seems to suggest that it pervades Munch’s imagination. Oil, tempera, pastel and crayon on cardboard. Unidentified agony distorts the artist’s technique, the shape of the figure’s body, and even the surrounding terrain. We don’t know anything about this tormented human figure. You may well be familiar with Scream, a work as popular as it is puzzling. The Existential Sublime: Edvard MunchĪt a glance, the work of Edvard Munch seems a far cry from sublime landscapes.

Yet without the title what would we see? A classic example of the sublime: we look safely on as men cling to a frail craft, beset by the turbulence of a storm at sea. Christians tend to view this painting in biblical terms: an illustration of Jesus’ power and commitment to caring for His children. Let’s return to it briefly as an example of the sublime. We have explored Rembrandt’s Storm on the Sea of Galilee in terms of technique, e.g. In Cotopaxi, another waterfall seems to transport us into a primordial moment of time in which the earth itself seems to be newly born. Niagara places our perspective on the brink of destruction, the sublime force pulling us downward toward the rocks. A Country Home transforms a typical pastoral scene by pulling back, minimizing the buildings, and drawing our eyes through the opening of the clouds into cosmic light. Our three samplings from Church’s work move progressively into deeper dimensions of the sublime. His unusually extensive travels in the Americas, from the Arctic to equatorial South America, provided material for his most notable works, but he also painted views of Europe and the Middle East ( Church, Frederic Edwin) Soon he extended its romantic realism to treat unfamiliar, frequently awesome subjects with grander and more sensuous physical presence. Our perspective here is detached, the aesthetic sublime, but the title informs us that a ship has been lost, the perspectives of its crew drowned by ice and water.Īs Thomas Cole’s only student, worked as a young man within the context of the Hudson River School. Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Mist iconically captures the vision of the sublime–looking out into infinity! Sea of Ice portrays the majestic destructiveness of arctic cold. As Wordsworth was responding to Beaumont’s sublime painting, Friedrich intentionally evoked the sublime in visions of grandeur, elevated places and destructive elements. Caspar David FriedrichĬaspar David Friedrich was “ a German Romantic painter who, like Wordsworth, had a quasi-religious feeling for Nature, enhanced by a melancholy cast of mind” ( Friedrich, Caspar David). During the Romantic 19th Century, painters opened gateways between our experience of the world and the forces of creation and destruction. Similarly, many people seek simulations of the sublime by riding on scary roller coasters or viewing horror films.Īn experience of the sublime opens spiritual portals into the unfathomably distant, the mysteries of infinity.

Wordsworth is moved by “the lightning, the fierce wind, the trampling waves,” but he stands safely indoors, viewing a painting. In art, the sublime is an Aesthetic experience, offering the thrill of danger but from a safe distance. Some people seek sublime encounters with real danger by climbing mountains or parachuting from airplanes. As this power takes hold of mind and emotions, inertia becomes transport: we are hurried on as if “by an irresistible force.” As the experience recedes, it leaves behind a newly invigorated sense of identity and, frequently, admiration for the blocking power ( Sublime).Ī key component in the sublime is danger, for example heights that project a vision out into infinity. An experience of the sublime characteristically begins with the interposition of an overwhelming force, which shatters equanimity and produces a feeling of blockage.

Elegiac stanzas william wordsworth