Romantic Landscape Art of the Eighteenth Century. Nineteenth-Century Landscape Art: Plein Air Painting

In England the tradition of landscape art began with a nostalgic, idealized focus on the English countryside. In eighteenth-century England, "landscape was a cultural and aesthetic object," popular with the English gentry who had the funds to purchase landscape paintings (Bermingham 1986, 9). Thomas Gainsborough (17271788), although influenced by Dutch techniques, painted sunlit landscapes (Robert Andrews and His Wife, c. 1748-1750) rather than the shimmering gray landscapes of the Netherlands.

The landscape paintings of John Constable (1776-1837) were nostalgic recollections of the countryside of his youth. Constable wanted to capture a "pure apprehension of natural effect" and painted numerous outdoor studies with this idea in mind (Janson 1991,643). Constable was concerned with light, sky, clouds, and atmosphere rather than with the realistic reproduction of the landscape around him.

Eighteenth-century landscape art was influenced not only by Italian and Dutch ideas about light and atmosphere, but also by Romantic aesthetics. British statesman Edmund Burke's 1757 essay "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful" and English writer William Gilpin's 1792 essay "On Picturesque Beauty" gave to Romantic thought three terms through which to explain and examine the observer's relationship to nature.

The first was the idea of the Sublime, where nature inspired awe, terror, a sense of vastness and of magnificence. The second was the idea of the Beautiful, which focused on a characteristic smallness and smoothness of form. The third, the Picturesque, suggested ruggedness and rustic landscapes.

Landscape art was meant to convey the internalized, emotional reaction of the artist to nature and to inspire the same in the viewer. The paintings of Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) reflected his intense interest in the color of light and of inspiring feelings of awe at nature's power and magnificence. This can be seen clearly in The Slave Ship (1840).

The German painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) used his paintings to demonstrate that humans are "indissolu- ably linked to ... nature" (Stechow 1968,2). Friedrich's The Monk by the Sea (1809) clearly demonstrates the emptiness of the sea and the sky, both of which dwarf the figure of the monk while giving a sense of human beings' powerlessness in nature.

Romantic landscape painters were concerned with making nature look "natural" and enhanced that "naturalness" by giving viewers an emotional, subjective experience rather than a rational, objective one.

Nineteenth-Century Landscape Art: Plein Air Painting. Landscape art in nineteenth-century Europe was in many ways defined by developments in France, which affected landscape art not only in Europe but also in the United States. Sketching or drawing nature from life had been an established technique since the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but it became an important part of an artist's training during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The development of paint in a tube, which allowed for easier transportability of an artist's main tool, meant that painting, as well as drawing and sketching, could be done out of doors. Where many artists such as Lorrain had taken their sketches from nature back to the studio and turned them into pastoral visions without a reference to a particular place, the French painter Camille Corot (17961875) painted oil paintings of particular views at specific times on the spot. Plein air painting, or painting out of doors, resulted in a more natural vision of nature.

The members of the Barbizon school shared some of Corot's techniques. Between the 1830s and 1870s artists such as the Frenchmen Theodore Rousseau (18121867) and Francois Millet (1814-1875) spent hours contemplating the wooded scenery and rural life of the village of Barbizon, near Paris. Both artists recorded a way of life disappearing before the advancing Industrial Revolution and in turn influenced the next generation of painters, some of whom would paint in a style known as "Impressionism.”