Landscape and Nature

Context

• Quintessentially English, Flatford Mill - owned by father, idealised workers and serpentine river
• Six-footer- grand scale of history painting
• Ignores rural poverty/ riots/ crop failure etc., only shown in Deham Vale (1828)

Scientific

• Painting 'legtimate, scientific and mechanical', skying influenced by Luke Howard's studies
• Accurate- cart wheels being cooled, precise time of day 'Landscape Noon'
• Relatively unidealised - accurance botancial reproduction and naturalistic colour

Romantic

• 'Painting is another word for feeling' - pathetic fallacy in clouds, wife Mariah ill
• Died of TB in 1828 - lone figure in Hadleigh Castle (1829)
• Clouds Romantic metephor for transcience, nostalgia for 'careless boyhood'
• Wordsworthian idea of landscape triggering emotion

Influences

• Hannibal recorded by Livy and Polybius 218 BC, also in Fawes 'Chronology of the History of Modern Europe' - battle between Carthagian army and Alpine tribes in big storm
• Turner at Farnley Hall 1810 - thunderstorm, and sketching tours to Isle of Wight
• Poetry- sister art, wrote 'Fallacies of Hope', Gisbourne's 'Walks in a Forest' - paen, Gray's nature poetry with the Alps 'the ruins and wreck of the world'

Politics

• Tyrolese asked London for help against Napoleon- mirrors tribesmen, links to Roman empire
• David's 'Napoleon at St. Bernard's Pass' (seen 1802) - inspired link
• Composition mirrors 'Destrcution of the Bards by Edward I' - England also invaders

Romantic

• Vortex of light and colour- nature's domiance over man
• Lorrain's beautiful (Italian picturesque plains) v. Rosa's Sublime (rugged Alps) links to Last Man
• Romantic idea of suffering through hardship for happiness

Wanderer

• Amalgamation of landscapes 'nature has no outline but imagination does'
• Interlocutor, also uncanny, sense of autoscopy (discused by Koerner)
• Maybe Colonel Von Brinken -killed in Napoleonic Wars, patriotic statement of unified Germany

Romantic

• Nature sensual, Kant's 'Critic of Pure Reason, trips to Alps popular to gain truth
• Uses nature as atlar piece, Timothy 16:6 where figure yearns for God, distanced by void
• Fitche claimed it was artist's job to give world meaning through heightened nature
• Anti-enlightenment yearning for middle ages- reunified Germany/ common culture

Influences

• Nature poets, Gray: 'face the glittering landscape', Kosengarten's shore sermons
• 'Monk by the Sea Shore'- world without God so without light/hope
• 'Sea of Ice' - ref to brother's death, nature to depict hard times
• Honor: 'he sinks a huge cahsm-almost visionary horizon, tantalisingly out of reach'