The Humanistic Tradition, Book 5 Romanticism, Realism, and the Nineteenth-Century World

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TJ123-8-2009 LK VWD0011 Tradition Humanistic 6th Edition W:220mm x H:292mm 175L 115 Stora Enso M/A Magenta (V)

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so that he might “show what such a scene was like.” He sub-
titled the painting “Steamboat off a Harbour’s Mouth mak-
ing Signals in Shallow Water... the Author was in this
Storm on the Night the Ariel left Harwich.” Since no ship
by that name is listed in the records of the port of Harwich,
Turner’s imagination may have exceeded his experience.
Nevertheless, as with many of Turner’s late works,
Snowstorm is an exercise in sensation and intuition. A
swirling vortex of wind and waves, it is the imaginative
transformation of an intense physical experience, which,
recollected thereafter, evokes—as Wordsworth declared—“a
sense sublime/Of something far more deeply interfused,/
Whose dwelling place is the light of setting suns,/And the
round ocean and the living air,/And the blue sky, and in the
mind of man.” Turner’s “landscapes of the sublime” come
closer to capturing the spirit of Wordsworth’s nature mysti-
cism than do Constable’s gentler views of the physical land-
scape. Their expanding and contracting forms and startling
bursts of color, comparable to the impassioned rhythms and
brilliant dynamics of much Romantic music, were daringly
innovative. Critics disparagingly called Turner’s transparent
veils of color—resembling his beloved watercolors—“tinted
steam” and “soapsuds.” In hundreds of canvases that he
never dared to exhibit, Turner all but abandoned recogniza-
ble subject matter; these experiments in light and color
anticipated those of the French impressionists by more than
three decades.

Romantic Landscape Painting


On the Continent, the artists of the Barbizon School—
named after the picturesque village on the edge of the for-
est of Fontainebleau near Paris—were among the first to
take their easels out of doors. Working directly from nature
(though usually finishing the canvas in the studio), they
painted modest landscapes and scenes of rural life. These
unsentimental views of the local countryside were highly
successful in capturing nature’s moods.
The greatest French landscape painter of the mid nine-
teenth century, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875),
shared the Barbizon preference for working outdoors, but
he brought to his compositions a breathtaking sense of har-
mony and order. Corot’s early landscapes, executed for the
most part in Italy, are as formally composed as the paint-
ings of Poussin and David; they are, however, more person-
al and more serene. Corot’s luminescent late paintings are
intimate and contemplative (Figure 27.11). He called
them souvenirs, that is, “remembrances,” to indicate that
they were recollections of previous visual experiences,
rather than on-the-spot accounts. Like many artists, Corot
kept notebooks in which he jotted his everyday thoughts.
One passage perfectly captures the Romantic point of view:
Be guided by feeling alone. We are only simple mor-
tals, subject to error, so listen to the advice of others,
but follow only what you understand and can unite

Figure 27.10 J. M. W. TURNER, Snowstorm: Steamboat off a Harbour’s Mouth, 1842. Oil on canvas, 3 4 ft. Turner’s claim that he was
lashed to the mast may have been inspired by a similar event in the Greek epic theOdyssey. The English writer John Ruskin described
Snowstormas “one of the very grandest statements of sea motion, mist, and light that has ever been put on canvas.”
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