Romantic Paintings, Sublime Landscape

Cogrove’s article, “Sublime Nature: Landscape and Capitalism,” outlines the 18^th century British Romantic movement as a response to the expanding industrial capitalism of the British state. As land and natural resources like wind, water, and fossil fuels were now being utilized for commercial production, Romantics regarded this as a degradation of the natural environment. Cities grew, and the liberal laissez-faire philosophy of Adam Smith failed as a concept in the midst of capitalist drive. In pushing for the most efficient means of production, which included the use of natural resources, business owners essentially alienated the masses from nature. According to Dr. Jan Oosthoek, “people and nature were objectified and reduced to commodity status.”

In response, the Romantics opted to view nature as an essential source of spirituality and renewal. Cosgrove argues, “In seeking to escape the alienation implied by the isolation of the individual, Romantics failed to locate its origins in the new social relations of production…because they could not accept society as ‘organic.’ Therefore, no resolution was open to in the social order; it had to be found in the natural, moral order which harmonized the individual soul with unspoiled external nature.” In the Romantic sense, land became synonymous with self-preservation and survival instinct, two abstracts that Burke stressed as being individual as opposed to social.

The most accessible means through which Romantics could view sublime nature was the sense of sight. “If the sublime could be apprehended through the senses,” says Cosgrove, “then it could be seen, not directly, but through the sight of those objects which excite the passions of self-preservation.” Romantic painters, therefore, communicated “exalted” ideas of the human experience through the humanized representation of landscape.

I came across this painting in my research, and I find that it embodies a majority of Romantic elements explained in Cosgrove’s article.

It's titled "The Wanderer Above the Sea and Fog," painted by Casper David Friedrich in 1818. It not only illustrates the grandeur and terror so closely associated with the sublime, but it also represents the alienation of man from the natural experience. The subject of the painting stands high above on the rocks overlooking the dark, foggy sea, emphasizing man’s foreign subjectivity in nature. The dark colors enhance feelings of awe and fear associated with the inconceivable greatness of nature, and the fog symbolizes the mystery of the landscape’s sublimity. However, the location and vantage point of the man also suggests human superiority over nature, and thus, the painting as a whole depicts the Romantic conflict between society and the natural world.