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Chapter 5

SHIFTING FOCUS: ART AND THE NATURAL WORLD

Landscape painting, more than any other category, experienced a clear and rapid evolution from compositions and subjects dictated by academic tradition to ones determined either by individual preference or market demands. The classical landscape formula embodied a hierarchical world view consistent with the absolutist era of monarchs. The Sublime and Picturesque offered alternatives considered more responsive to contemporary attitudes, and provided a transition to both Romanticism (which projected emotional/spiritual content into nature) and Naturalism (which focused on the truthful representation of typical moments in nature).

Readings:

Andrews, Malcolm. The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989

Barrell, John. The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730-1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980

Bermingham, Ann. Landscape and Ideology: the English Rustic Tradition 1740-1860. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986

Green, Nicholas. The Spectacle of Nature: Landscape and Bourgeois Culture in Nineteenth-Century France. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993

Hamilton, James. Fields of Influence: Conjunctions of Artists and Scientists, 1815-1860. Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, 2001

Hemingway, Andrew. Landscape and Urban Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992

Herbert, Robert. Barbizon Revisited. New York: Clarke and Way, 1962

Kriz, Kay Dian. The Idea of the English Landscape Painter. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1997

Miller, Angela. The Empire of the Eye. Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics 1825-1875. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1993

Mitchell, Timothy. Art and Science in German Landscape Painting 1770-1840. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1993

Novak, Barbara. American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007

Saul, Nicholas. The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009

Vaughan, William. German Romantic Painting. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1980