His training took place at the Academy of Art, Copenhagen, but by the age of twenty-four he was in Dresden. The sixth child of a candlemaker, Friedrich had been born in the midst of Lutheran Europe-at Greifswald on Germany’s Baltic coast, as of 1774 ruled by Sweden.
Perhaps this is because Friedrich gives us not only his rich landscapes, he also frequently evokes a strangely mysterious and dreamlike quality, with the human figures he depicts turned away from the viewer, gazing intently into the far distance (Wanderer above the Sea of Fog) his pictures seem to tell a story (Chalk Cliffs on Rügen) that in turn inspires the viewer’s imagination. The German painter, Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), is one of the foremost representatives of this movement, and his pictures have a particularly strong appeal in our own century. Their colours and their forms, were then to meįrom the passionate poet on the rock, painters, too, reached out for the sublime. The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, As Wordsworth stood above Tintern Abbey (1798) in Herefordshire, he wrote these famous lines: In 1757, Edmund Burke had published his Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful which influenced a generation, including Wordsworth and Coleridge who, together, were striding over the Quantock Hills, the Lake District, and other rural regions, marveling at the rocky outcrops, the tangled woodland, the foaming waterfalls, and the tranquil lakes. In Britain, engagement of the sublime had already taken hold. Schubert, too, during his short life was inspired by sublime landscapes and the forces of nature, none more so than in his melancholic song-cycle of unrequited love, Wintereisse (1827).įifty years earlier, in France, Jean-Jacques Rousseau had published Reveries of a Solitary Walker (written in 17), a work of philosophy and observation that was one more signpost towards what became the modern movement, with its metaphysical engagement with nature and landscape. This programmatic symphony reflects the new mood of the times, leading us from feelings of happiness on arrival in the countryside through to the mighty tempest in the fourth movement and on to a meditative and glowing finale, a glorious sunset.
It was three years before his tutor, Haydn’s death in 1808, that Beethoven completed his Sixth Symphony, The Pastoral. Beethoven, too, was in the vanguard of change. In the world of music Joseph Haydn is that rare example of a composer who straddled both these eras, from the formality of many of his early works then, with a giant leap, to the tension and drama of his later works such as The Creation (1798) and The Seasons (1801). The power of the sublime was embraced by the youthful geniuses of the day, who tore themselves from the enlightened but formal style of the early eighteenth century and faced instead into the wild tempest of a new era of sturm und drang. It was the age of the romantic imagination, heightened by what is known as ‘the sublime’. It was a topic and an experience that had engaged the creative mind from the mid-eighteenth century for almost a hundred years.īut these distant objects did much more than please they caused painters, poets, philosophers, and composers to become, to a spiritual degree, inspired by dramatic landscapes, seascapes and the power of nature itself. Why Distant Objects Please is the title of an article (or essay) written in 1822 by the father of modern journalism, William Hazlitt. This romantic imagination became one of the most significant influences of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By the mid-eighteenth century, it was the dramatic landscape that caught the imagination not only of painters but also of poets, writers, and composers.
Sublime art series#
Its powerful legacy brought with it a series of dramatic changes to art and culture.Ī magnificent view is a spectacle that has impressed and pleased us ever since the development of our senses and sensibilities. The sublime or the vision of the romantic imagination introduced a new era of creativity.
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