Romantic Landscape Painting: The Sublime, the Picturesque, and the Turn to Nature

Few developments in the history of Western art are more striking than the rise of landscape painting from a minor decorative genre in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to one of the highest and most ambitious forms of nineteenth-century art. The Romantic period produced a transformation in the way painters, critics, and the public thought about the natural world and about the art that represented it. Landscape, for the Romantics, was not just a background for human action; it was a subject in its own right, a source of spiritual and moral insight, and a window onto the deepest truths of the human condition. This page explores this transformation and its major figures.

The Eighteenth-Century Background

The elevation of landscape painting was prepared by a long series of developments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Dutch seventeenth-century landscape school — Ruisdael, Hobbema, van Goyen, Cuyp — had already established landscape as a major genre. The French painters of the seventeenth century — Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, Gaspard Dughet — had given landscape a high classicizing form, in which the order of nature revealed the order of the divine. The Italian and English “ideal landscape” tradition continued this work into the eighteenth century.

What the Romantics added to this inheritance was a new intensity, a new interest in the dark and the sublime, a new attention to the actual specificity of particular landscapes, and a new sense of the spiritual significance of the natural world. The result was one of the great periods in the history of Western art.

Caspar David Friedrich and German Romantic Landscape

The leading figure of German Romantic landscape painting was Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840). Working in Dresden and the Baltic coast, Friedrich produced paintings of haunting, almost spiritual intensity: misty mountain peaks, frozen seas, ruined Gothic abbeys, lone wanderers, and silent contemplative figures. His most famous work, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (c. 1818), is one of the most iconic images of the Romantic age, and our page on Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog explores its meaning and legacy in depth.

Other important German Romantic landscape painters include:

• Philipp Otto Runge — whose allegorical landscapes combined German Romantic sensibility with Christian symbolism.
• Carl Gustav Carus — physician, painter, and writer on landscape aesthetics; a major theorist of the “earth-life” of the soul.
• Karl Friedrich Lessing — historical landscape painter, author of paintings of medieval ruins and Alpine scenes.
• The Nazarenes — a group of German and Austrian painters who worked in Rome in the early nineteenth century, producing landscapes and religious paintings in a deliberately pre-Renaissance, “primitive” manner.

Turner and British Landscape

The two great English Romantic landscape painters were J.M.W. Turner and John Constable. Turner (1775–1851) was the great painter of light, atmosphere, and dramatic weather. His early career was devoted to topographical watercolors, but he soon developed into the supreme painter of the storm, the sea, the alpine pass, the burning city, and the apocalyptic scene. His later works — the paintings and watercolors of the 1830s and 1840s — are often near-abstract, anticipating Impressionism and even twentieth-century abstract painting. The page on Turner’s storms explores this radical development.

Constable (1776–1837), by contrast, was the painter of the particular English landscape of his native Suffolk — the meadows, the streams, the great East Anglian skies. His “six-footers,” the huge canvases of the late 1810s and 1820s (The Hay Wain, Flatford Mill, The Leaping Horse), transformed the scale and ambition of English landscape painting. Constable’s work was much admired in France, where it helped prepare the way for the Barbizon School and the Impressionists.

Other important British Romantic landscape painters include Richard Wilson, the “father of British landscape”; Thomas Girtin, Turner’s contemporary and a major watercolorist; John Sell Cotman and John Crome of the Norwich School; and Samuel Palmer, the visionary painter of late landscapes that almost recall Blake.

The Hudson River School

In America, the major Romantic landscape movement was the Hudson River School, which flourished from the 1820s to the 1870s. The school’s founder was Thomas Cole (1801–1848), the English-born painter who settled in the Hudson Valley and produced a series of grand allegorical landscape cycles, including The Course of Empire (1833–36) and The Voyage of Life (1842). The school also included:

• Asher Brown Durand — author of Kindred Spirits (1849) and many detailed, devotional landscapes of the American wilderness.
• Frederic Edwin Church — the great painter of the Andes, the Arctic, and the Niagara Falls, the most successful American artist of his generation.
• Albert Bierstadt — the German-born painter of the American West, famous for his luminous, large-scale paintings of the Rocky Mountains and Yosemite.
• Thomas Moran — English-born painter of the Western landscapes, whose paintings of the Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon helped convince the U.S. Congress to create the first national parks.

The Aesthetic of the Sublime

The Romantic landscape painters worked in conscious relation to the aesthetic theory of the sublime, as developed by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and refined by Kant in the Critique of Judgment (1790). The sublime was the experience of awe, terror, and exaltation before vast, overwhelming, or terrifying objects — Alpine peaks, Atlantic storms, vast deserts, deep chasms, the open ocean.

The great Romantic landscapes are often paintings of the sublime. Turner’s storms, Friedrich’s misty mountains, Church’s Andean peaks, Bierstadt’s Yosemite — all of these are paintings designed to overwhelm the viewer, to dissolve the ordinary self into a larger whole, and to give access to what Burke called “a delightful horror.” Our page on The Sublime in Art explores this further.

The Long Influence of Romantic Landscape

The Romantic landscape tradition shaped almost every major development in nineteenth- and twentieth-century painting. The Barbizon School in France, the Impressionists, the Post-Impressionists, the Symbolist landscape painters, the German Expressionists, the American Abstract Expressionists — all of these are in some sense descendants of the Romantic revolution in landscape. The contemporary concern with the natural world, with climate and ecology, with the meaning of wilderness, draws on ideas first given powerful visual form by the Romantic landscape painters. Our page on Romanticism and environmentalism traces this important legacy.

Further Reading

• The Cambridge Companion to Caspar David Friedrich (Cambridge, 2002, ed. Jochen von Gross and Sabine Rewald) — for the German tradition.
• Andrew Wilton, Turner and the Sublime (British Museum, 1980) — for the English.
• John Wilmerding, ed., American Light: The Luminist Movement 1850–1875 (National Gallery of Art, 1980) — for the American school.

Related Pages

• Romantic Art
• Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog
• Turner’s Storms
• The Pre-Raphaelites
• The Sublime in Art
• Romanticism and Environmentalism
• The Legacy of Romanticism