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Intro |
Points Of View |
North |
South |
Highlands |
Midlands |
East |
West |
Conclusion
The Romantic North
Nature's Identities |
In Focus: Conrad Atkinson |
In Focus: JMW Turner
Nature's Identities:
Heaven and Hell
What are some of nature's identities? First there is
the appearance of the place: what it looks like to visitors and
to those who live there. To the tourist, heaven might seem to reside
in the hills of the Lake District or the more austere Yorkshire
Moors while hell might be found in industrial areas of the large
cities of Sheffield, Leeds and Manchester. But a traveller's perspective
will usually be different from that of the person who lives there.
How, for instance, can you benefit from the beauty of lake or hill
if you have not enough money to buy your next meal? In such a situation
nature could even seem uncaring in its attractions.
Visualising hell
To appreciate a painted landscape you have to be willing to use your imagination in the same way that you do if you try to imagine Heaven or Hell. In the eighteenth century, a kind of game based on the imagination became very popular with art lovers. Participants would try to identify the Sublime - and its opposite, the Beautiful - in nature and art.
To experience the Sublime meant that you imagined scary situations while at a safe distance in the same way that you do today when you read a thriller or play a frightening video game. Since film and photography had not yet been invented, the best way of enjoying the thrills of the Sublime was to look at paintings.
One of the grandest examples of the Sublime is a fourteen
foot painting of sheer cliffs in Yorkshire called Gordale Scar.
James Ward, who painted the picture around 1812-14, invites us to
imagine what it would be like to stand beside the cattle on the
ground and gaze up at the sheer cliffs stretching high above one's
head. Even scarier, of course, would be to imagine oneself standing
rather too close to the edge of the scar.
The artist made many sketches for this painting. Some of them were compared by a critic to the drawings of the great Renaissance artist, Leonardo da Vinci, because of the way Ward has used line to create "forms of a strange, unearthly character".
- Ward increased the scale of Gordale Scar to make it seem even more impressive than it is. Do you think the Sublime still exists today? Do you ever exaggerate to impress your listeners with the drama of something that has just happened to you? Can you think of films or video games which the eighteenth century English might recognise as being Sublime?
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In Focus:
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View in Tate Collection
