Nineteenth-century landscapes. (Report from Europe).(Brief Article)

In art history the term "sublime" means something distinct from, and sometimes contrasted with, the beautiful. In regard to nature the word was often used to describe the wild, grand, and even terrifying, such as mountains and torrents of water. The high point of the sublime in British landscape painting was reached in the mid-nineteenth century with the death of Joseph Mallord William Turner in 1851. It can also be argued that the next phase of the story took place in the United States when landscape painting there came into its own.

Certainly the coincidence of the westward expansion and the rise of artistic talent resulted in the creation of a new school of landscape painting in the United States. One of the first practitioners was Thomas Cole, who was a great devotee of the wilderness. The work was continued by, among others, Frederic Edwin Church, whose immense canvases ...