Throughout the 18th century, landscape painting had existed primarily for two reasons: as a picturesque setting for some more important, human drama, and as topography, or a quasi-scientific reconstruction of the land masses of a particular area. Both approaches followed conventions of scale, type, and detail; neither was considered to be the significant work of a professional painter. For most artists in training at the beginning of the 19th century, therefore, the notion of working exclusively, or even primarily in landscape was a bizarre one. The situation in France, for example, was not uncommon. Here, artistic education was ordered by genre (first drawing, then painting), by model (first classical casts, then the life model), and by subject (always the human figure). By the time of the regular government-sponsored exhibitions (the Salons) of early 19th-century France, there was a well-established hierarchy of subjects dictating which subjects would be considered the most important, and therefore most worthy, by Salon juries (and therefore, by potential buyers both governmental and private). This hierarchy was headed by subjects predictably predetermined in 18th-century Rococo and Neo-Classical art: history and religious subjects topped the list, with portraiture, especially if treating an important subject, following those. Still life was considered less educational, less uplifting, and therefore less important to the hierarchy; landscape was considered dead last.
The presumption of this hierarchy was, in fact, that landscape could not aspire to the "higher" aims of art--education and inspiration. Actual landscape instruction was therefore minimal, and offered only with the assumption that certain more important subjects might require an outdoor setting. Sketching from nature was allowed, but only as a preliminary stage in one's work, and landscapes included in major exhibitions were notably ignored by critics: although they might be interesting studies, they simply did not merit analysis as works of art. For the French system in particular, landscape's low esteem proved difficult to change. The French Academy's coveted Prix de Rome for art students, for example, had no landscape category until 1817, when "historic" landscapes with some narrative event were reluctantly allowed.
All of these French presumptions about landscapes and their role as background setting rather than as a major means of expression were questioned with the introduction of several new philosophies of nature which began to be promulgated, notably in the northern countries of western Europe, at the end of the 18th century. It was at this time that Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) formulated his notion of individual "Will," thereby admitting a whole world of non-rational urges that must lie beneath a thin veil of consciousness; at that time also the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) proposed an equation of God with the natural order of the world. In addition, one of the most influential of these new philosophies for landscape art was the even earlier theory of the "Sublime," defined in 1756 by the British statesman and political theorist Edmund Burke (1729-1797). The basis of Burke's beliefs was that the life of feeling and spirit depended on a harmony within the larger order of the universe. The sublime, therefore, was the ultimate experience of divinity, a mixture of awe, fear, and enlightenment produced by the contemplation of a powerful, terrifying nature; for Burke, the sublime was already connected to landscape.(1) The association between the power of nature and a recognition of the divinity behind it was a constant theme of early Romantic writing. In 1797, for example, the German philosopher Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829) published his Ideas about Nature Philosophy; in the same year, in a collection of stories entitled Effusions of an Art-Loving Friar, the writer Wilhelm Wackenroder (1773-1798) proclaimed that there exist only two languages through which God allows the human to comprehend the Divine; one of these is reserved for God alone, but the other is given to a few "anointed favorites" who in turn interpret them. As Wackenroder explained, the second language had two components: "They are: nature and art."(2)
The concurrence of these ideas proved fruitful for the beginnings of the "grand tradition" of landscape. German artists, inspired by their contemporaries' writings on the importance of nature for moral and religious education, began to create landscapes that, unlike the French "setting" landscapes, were instead symbolic scenes filled with meaning. When in 1808 Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) exhibited Cross in the Mountains, a landscape intended as an altarpiece for a private chapel,(3) critics condemned his use of landscape for religious expression as sacrilegious.(4) Friedrich responded to these accusations by offering an "Interpretation of the Picture" which identified the natural images as symbols for religious beliefs: "The Cross stands erected on a rock unshakably firm as our faith in Jesus Christ. Evergreen, enduring through all ages, the firs stand round the cross, like the hope of mankind in Him . . ."(5) Friedrich's comments highlight both his view of the landscape as symbol and his belief that the study of nature was an important occupation equal to that of figure study: it could even be a religious image. A work like Friedrich's 1818 Woman in the Morning Sun (Fig. 1)--a painting in which the figure is uncharacteristically large yet typically faces an infinite landscape--can serve as an example of his approach. The figure, seen from the back, is deliberately anonymous, inviting us as viewers to take her place: with arms outstretched towards an expansive horizon and setting sun, she enacts our desired communion with the landscape as means to a Burkean sublime. The path on which the woman stands ends abruptly before her, a symbol of the limitations of everyday reality. She must instead traverse through meditation the remaining landscape, which leads directly into the sun; that is, into another, more spiritual world. In works such as this, Friedrich not only introduced into art the nature worship common to many writers in Dresden, such as his friends "Novalis" (Friedrich Hardenberg, 1772-1801) and Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853), but also offered a model of compositional devices. His solitary, anonymous figures set against expansive vistas demonstrated, visually, the means by which to entice the viewer to take a place in the composition and therefore a part in the sublime experience.
The fact that the Germans were espousing the sublime theories of Burke, a British writer, suggests that an interrelationship of ideas in these two countries existed; for example, not only similar theories but even similar phrases can be found in the contemporary writings of Novalis and the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834).(6) Corresponding to Friedrich's generation of German Romantics, therefore, was an equally important group of English artists who also created sublime landscapes. This generation, usually represented by Joseph Mallord William Turner (see cat. 19) and John Constable (1776-1837), sought expression of the sublime through two different yet complementary means, termed "nature terribilita" and "nature champetre." The depiction of a "terrible" nature--one that overpowered and dominated humanity by virtue of its spectacular effects, from mountaintop views to hurricane winds--was the sublime vision most directly related to Burke's original definition and that which fascinated Turner. Constable, on the other hand, preferred what his friend Wordsworth called a "tranquil sublimity" in nature--one that inspired by means of enduring presence and calm harmony. While the "terribilitą" landscape might emphasize elemental power and spatial infinity, the countryside scene stressed harmonious coexistence in a continuum of eternity. For both artists, however, the notion of landscape as sublime continued to mean, as it did for the German Romantics, the use of the landscape as symbol, and the belief in nature as education. Rather than follow the 18th-century model of landscape as setting or topography, the 19th-century European landscape had become an uplifting moral and spiritual experience.