Art 108 Study Guide Constable & Blake



“Nature and History in English Romantic Landscape Painting”

Brian Lukacher

Landscape instincts and the picturesque:

1. Who was John Ruskin

2. What was his claim in Modern Painters about predominance of landscape painting?

3. How did Romantic landscape reflect the radical social changes of modernity?

4. What reasons are offered for the preference for landscape painting over history painting in England?

5. Define the picturesque and the debates surrounding it.

6. Who was the Reverend William Gilpin? What were his claims in Three Essays on the picturesque?

7. What was the landscape aesthetic of Humphry Repton?

Ruins and Cities:

8. What is topographic watercolor painting and what was it good for? Who belonged to the Sketching Society and what was their subject? When and where did they work?

9. What was Thomas Girtin’s subject?

10. In what contradictory ways was the landscape conceived in England at this time, the early industrial revolution?

11. Describe the new form of art in the early 19th century, the panorama. What were its subjects? What did Walter Benjamin remark about its appeal?

12. What insights do Girtin’s panoramas give us about the relationship between the city and the countryside at this time?

Constable’s Rustic Naturalism:

13. What did John Constable mean by the “great principles” in painting? What troubled him?

14. Where did Constable live and how did it affect his work?

15. How did his landscape paintings negotiate opposite tendencies of objectivity and subjectivity? What is an “autochthonous union of self and nature?”

16. What qualities of Constable’s art are represented in the landscapes of 1815 of his father’s estate? In what ways, specifically are these personal landscapes?

17. Was Constable’s landscape natural or man made? How were the people who shaped the Stour Valley represented?

18. What is the size of The Hay Wain and Dedham Vale and why did Constable make them that size? Where were they exhibited? What was their social message?

19. What does Lukacher mean by “the vivid optical immediacy” of The Hay Wain? What is going on in the painting? How does Lukacher interpret the painting’s meaning?

Constable and the ruin of England:

20. How does Lukacher interpret Dedham Vale, Haleigh Castle, and Old Sarum? How did the artist’s view of the landscape changed? Why? What are the social and political causes?

Visionary Landscapes of Palmer and Martin

21. Who were “the Ancients” and what artist influenced them? How, specifically, is Palmer’s A Hilly Scene influenced by that artist?

22. What were the Ancients’ literary sources?

23. What were Palmer’s politics and how were they like Constable’s? Did Palmer’s “visionary blindness” endure? Why?

24. Why would John Martin’s apocalyptic landscapes be “an unavoidably popular sensation in post-Waterloo England”?

25. What did Constable think of Martin’s paintings and popular success? How did the literary and fine arts press of the day write about him? Why?

26. What were the literary sources of Martin’s narratives?

27. How were Martin’s images modern?

28. How is the landscape in The Last Man a “visual trope for the proleptic” concept of the painting?

29. What does Lukacher say about the shape of the cliff the last man is standing on?

Turner’s Meaningful Obscurity

30. How was Romanic landscape painting in England developed as a form of historical reflection?

31. How is the tension between optical effect and speculative mind manifested in Turner’s painting?

32. What is the place of man in a Turner landscape? Give an example.

33. How did Turner’s career begin and when did he begin to produce ambitious exhibition landscapes? What were his themes and how were they different from Constable’s? Which pre-modern historical landscape artists did he compete with?

34. What was Turner’s relationship to the Royal Academy? How did he make a living?

35. Describe Turner’s early (1809) painting, London. How does the artist’s poem describe the city of London?

36. What war is the background to both London and Snow Storm? Who was Hannibul and what were the Punic Wars? What analogy was Turner making with the events of his own day?

37. How does Snow Storm manifest “the signal devices of a sublime landscape style”? Where is the hero Hannibul in the painting? Why is he so tiny?

38. What was Constable’s response to Snow Storm?

Turner’s later work

39. How does Dudley, Worcestershire represent the industrial life of Turner’s time? How can it be considered a history painting? What buildings in the distance is he contrasting with the new industrial ones? What was being produced in Dudley?

40. What story inspired Turner’s Slavers (1840)?

41. What was the reception of Slavers in the press and by John Ruskin?

42. What is the subject of Turner’s Rain, Steam, and Speed?

43. How does this painting display antitheses and correspondences between nature and technology? What new mode of perception is Turner capturing?

44. What significance do the few representational detail have?

45. In what does Rain, Steam, and Speed’s Romantic modernity reside?

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