Supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Empire State Development’s I LOVE NEW YORK program under the Market NY initiative, New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Picturesque and Sublime will present masterworks on paper by major British artists, including Turner and Constable, together with significant oil-on-canvas paintings by Thomas Cole to demonstrate Cole’s radical achievement of transforming the well-developed British traditions of landscape representations into a new bold formulation, the American Sublime. This exhibition is designed to complement the major Cole exhibition at The Met and is curated by Tim Barringer, Paul Mellon Professor in the History of Art at Yale Gillian Forrester, Senior Curator of European Art at the Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester (and previously at the Yale Center for British Art) Jennifer Raab, Associate Professor of the History of Art at Yale and two doctoral candidates at Yale, Sophie Lynford and Nicholas Robbins. But at the same time, any adjustment of nature to the aesthetic tastes of a man makes it for the national parks to be perceived as a reflection of the picturesque.To celebrate the 200th anniversary of Cole’s arrival from England in 1818, the Thomas Cole Site is partnering with the Yale Center for British Art to present the special exhibition Picturesque and Sublime: Thomas Cole’s Trans-Atlantic Inheritance in Thomas Cole’s New Studio. On the one hand, the idea of preservation of nature derived from the recognition of nature’s grandeur and dominance over a man. The issue of whether the American national parks deal more with the sublimity or the picturesque is debatable. The landscape was driven into the frame of art and somehow alienated from nature as the ultimate manifestation of life. The tourists no longer feel the awesome power of the steep mountains and rapid river streams nature in American natural parks is masterly conserved and sold to the tourists desirous to take beautiful pictures and show off to their friends. But are those unique territories sublime in the very essence of this word? If the people admired those places, they would not have created a highly developed infrastructure to get there, and only those who are in awe of nature would manage to make some sacred pilgrimage there.Īs Byerly notes, the wildlife in the United States “has gradually been transformed from a sublime landscape into a series of picturesque scenes” (qtd. Hardly there is a person who will not admire the majestic sceneries of the Yosemite or the Grand Canyon. National parks of the United States have become the symbols of the whole nation. Gilpin’s ideas of pleasure from scenic beauty inspired people to rush in search of picturesque expressions of wildlife, which soon encouraged them to establish national parks as protected territories (Carlson and Lintott 108). ![]() Some pieces of nature, for example, a river or mountain, cannot be perceived as a beautiful thing in itself it becomes beautiful in its surroundings. The object has to bear at least some degree of beauty in itself or surrounding scenery (Gilpin 43). ![]() Sublimity as the highest aesthetic ideal “alone cannot make an object picturesque” (Gilpin 43). ![]() Gilpin states that we pursue the picturesque “through the scenery of nature…we seek it among all the ingredients of the landscape – trees, rocks, broken grounds, woods, rivers, lakes, plains, valleys, mountains, and distances” (42). For him, the picturesque defines the beauty of nature as a person can see it, without any amendments and human interference. The sublime deals with the truth, the essence, and not with visibility, as the beautiful does.Ĭoncerning the issue of the relation between the sublime and the picturesque, one should refer to the thoughts of William Gilpin, the ideologist of the picturesque movement in arts, architecture, landscape design, and tourism. The sublimity of nature is seen not as the splendor of its physical forms but as the phenomenon “which has qualities of wildness and freedom and, in virtue of these qualities, as something that enables us to become aware of our freedom” (Brady 93). It is rather a distinct feeling of delight characterized by admiration or awe (Brady 84). The sublime is not another kind of pleasure, which a human receives while observing something beautiful. The sublime can be understood as one of the fundamental categories of aesthetics, which characterizes the inner significance of objects and phenomena, disparate in their ideal content with real forms of expression.
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