Interpreting the Visual Evidence
Romantic Painting
Romantic painters shared
with Romantic poets
a fascination with the
power of nature. To convey
this vision of nature
as both an overwhelming power and
source of creative energy, Romantic
painters created new and poetic visions
of the natural world, where human beings
and their activities were reduced
in significance, sometimes nearly disappearing
altogether. At times these visions
also were linked to a backward-looking
perspective, as if the dramatic changes
associated with industrialization provoked
a longing for a premodern past,
where Europeans sought and found
their sense of place in the world from an
awareness of a quasi-divine natural setting
invested with powerful mysteries.
John Martin's The Bard (image A) shows
a highly romanticized vision of a medieval
subject: a single Welsh bard strides
across rocky peaks above a mountain
river, after escaping a massacre ordered
by the English king Edward I. Across the
river, Edward's troops can barely be seen
leaving the scene of the crime, which still
glows with destructive fires. The emotional
qualities of this early expression of
Romantic nationalism are reinforced by
the forbidding and dynamic sky above,
where the clouds merge into the Welsh
mountaintops as if they were stirred by
the hand of God himself.
Other Romantic painters minimized
the significance of human activity in
their landscapes, though without reference
to history. John Constable's Weymouth
Bay (image B) contains a tiny,
almost imperceptible human figure in
the middle ground, a man walking on
the beach, near a thin stone wall that
snakes up a hill in the background. These
passing references to human lives are
completely dominated, however, by
Constable's sky and the movement of
the clouds in particular, which seem to
be the real subject of the painting.
Of all the Romantic painters, J. M. W.
Turner (image C) may have tackled the
tricky subject of the new industrialized
landscape in the most novel way. His
painting Rain, Steam, SpeedThe Great
Western Railway (1844) boldly places the
most modern technology of the period,
the steam train on an arched bridge, into a glowing and radiant painting where both nature's forces and the tremendous
new power unleashed by human
activity seem to merge into one continuous
burst of energy. To the left of the
train, on the river's edge, a fire of indeterminate
but evidently industrial origin
burns, illuminating several small but ecstatic
figures with its light. Most enigmatic
of all, an almost invisible rabbit
sprints ahead of the train between the
rails, highlighting the painting's complex
message about nature and human creation.
Are they heading in the same direction?
Will one overtake the other and
destroy it in the process?
Images
Questions for Analysis
1. fiogf49gjkf0d fiogf49gjkf0d In Martin’s The Bard, what vision of the
individual emerges from this painting,
and how is it different from the rational,
rights-bearing individual that political
liberalism sought to protect? |
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2. fiogf49gjkf0d fiogf49gjkf0d Is Constable’s painting concerned
with nature as a source of nourishment
for humans or is it presented as
a value in itself? |
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3. fiogf49gjkf0d fiogf49gjkf0d How is one to interpret Turner’s explicit
connection between the power
of nature and the new force of industrial
societies? Is he suggesting that
contemplating the industrial landscape
can be just as moving to a
human observer as the sight of nature’s
magnificence? |
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