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Landscape Painting

In the early part of the nineteenth century, landscape painting celebrated nature in the Romantic style for artists like J.M.W. Turner and John Constable. Romantic landscape also flourished on the continent of Europe and in the U.S.:

On the other side of the Atlantic, landscape painting found a public, optimistic role rather different from the one it enjoyed in Europe. Yet American landscapes were still the expression of subjective feelings, still much concerned with ideas of awe and sublimity, solitude and medication, and thus remained within the main current of the Romantic movement.

Constable wrote about his method and described it as follows:

When I sit down to make a sketch from nature, the firs thing I try to do is to forget that I have ever seen a picture.

In part, this is a statement of one of the principles of the Romantic movement, that the artist should turn to nature for inspiration and not take that inspiration from other artists. It is also a statement that would come in time to infuse subsequent art movements, such as the Impressionist movement. An analysis of Constable's work will show the degree to which he lived up to his artistic dictum.

At the height of the Romantic Movement, the nature of society was also changing, at different rates in different places. Britain was well into the Industrial Revolution, which was also having an effect in the United States. The way people saw themselves and their relationship to the world had changed considerably in the previous century with the various revolutions that had brought democracy to America and to Europe, and democratizing influences were also felt in the art world with more art for the masses and less reliance on patronage by the wealthy or the titled. The Romantic movement affected all the arts and was a break from the classical traditions that preceded it. Changes in the styles of artistic expression throughout history have reflected not only dev...

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Landscape Painting. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 06:28, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1708894.html