Landscape Painting in the early 19th century

Romanticism didn't just rely on human subjects, it also drew heavily on landscape painting. We know that landscape painting first became popular as one of the more secular subjects in northern European art in the 17th century, and it had continued as a relatively minor form of painting, much less prestigious than history painting or even portraiture throughout the By the early 19th century, landscape was really having a resurgence. Living in Colorado, we've probably all seen a landscape which is awe-inspiring and takes our breath away. Early 19th century romantic painters acknowledged the power and the majesty of the scenery and landscape to have an effect on human emotions. In the 19th century, landscape painters often also started to experiment with landscape. Landscape is no longer just the faithful reproduction of what you see before you, but landscapes can be used to express feelings and to express emotions. And we see that kind of impulse in Turner's The Slave Ship. On the surface, this is simply a painting of a ship at sea sailing into a storm on the left-hand side, and we see the beautiful, intense, dramatic colors of that storm and the visible brushstroke the paint is applied to the canvas in a heavily textured way. And it appears at first glance to simply be a quite dramatic but also quite beautiful landscape painting. I even use this painting on the cover of your book. However, when we dig into this painting more deeply, we see a much more sinister underlying story. Turner's basing this painting on a book he read. And again, like Jericho in the last video, this book has an abolitionist message. This was a book of horrors of the slave trade. And the particular story that Turner is painting here tells the story of a slave captain whose insurance would cover cargo, that is slaves, who were lost at sea, but not slaves who got sick and died during transport, as so many did. So he ordered any slaves who looked to be sick to be brought up on deck and thrown overboard. And Turner mostly doesn't show us the gruesomeness of this story, but if we look closely enough, we can find hints. In the center bottom here, we see some shackles, and we see one solitary limb slipping beneath the waves over here on the right-hand side. What Turner is doing here is mostly expressing his intense disgust and unhappiness with the slave trade through the technique of his painting, through that visible textured brushstroke, and through the color. Likewise, Turner experiments with landscapes in other ways in his other paintings. He paints a painting, for instance, of London, where he moved the houses of Parliament. And this is a famous building, so people knew that he had done this. And his work was quite controversial in the early 19th century. Other painters also use landscape to convey a political or an emotional message. Thomas Cole is often claimed as an American painter. He is born to American expatriate parents in Britain. He spends much of his young adulthood in Italy training to be an artist, but he does come home to America, and he's the founder of what's today called the Hudson River Schools of Paintings, a kind of school of American painters that are focused in New York. And here in the Oxbow, Cole is using landscape to show a political message. Cole believed strongly that the way that the Americas would compete with Europe was in natural resources and in geography, that Americans didn't have the kind of antiquities that Europeans had. And like many white people of his day, Cole kind of ignored the Native people that existed here in the Americas already. And he saw America as a vast, empty space simply waiting to be claimed and waiting to be colonized. And so we see him painting this view here from the top of Mount Holyoke, showing an oxbow in the Connecticut River. And we see the artist's tools just right here at my cursor, and they're miniscule, they're tiny in relationship to the size of the landscape. Similarly, we see this storm moving off the left-hand side of the painting. And Cole saw this as the light of white Western European civilization that was coming and dispelling the storm of savagery in the Americas. Again, we can see some obviously problematic things with that statement today. But like with Turner, we see Cole using landscape not just as pretty scenery and not just to celebrate the beauty of the landscape, but to convey a deeper meaning and an emotional meaning to the landscape.