![]() This fresh view of the qualities of our ancestor’s world brought about a rapid change in human appreciation of landscape. There had always been high regard for the pleasurable and safe qualities of well-tended agricultural home-places, and a genuine fear of wilderness, waste and mountains but both the Picturesque and the Romantic movements opened the eyes of those who had the time and money to seek out the uniqueness of each place, whether home or wild. We are still heavily influenced by the aesthetics of the Picturesque and Romantic Movements, but have failed to understand that these ways of interpreting our habitat was as much about the commonplace as about the finest and grandest. We are obsessed with drawing boundaries around areas and designating them as being special, for example The Lake District National Park, or Yellowstone National Park. We then neglect the rest and the consequence is that we are skewing aesthetics and losing sight of beauty in the commonplace. In that age when the art of conversation and the written word was arguably at its finest, critics of views would judge a piece of countryside by the quality of these composed views and use words such as picturesque, sublime, ugly, grotesque, beautiful. Some felt that man should use artifice to enhance these views, while others preferred the natural composition. A central tenet of the Picturesque, and subsequent Romantic Movement, was that landscape was something alive, to experience with all the senses. In those times the extremes of the seasons, as well as danger, disease, poverty, thirst and starvation, and the sounds, sights and smells these generated, were much closer to home and even the wealthy suffered from exposure to raw nature – even in front of their own well-fed hearths. ‘Landskipe’, a word found in Scots and 17th century English, was derived from Middle English (Anglo Saxon) ‘landschippe’, meaning a region or district. I understand that a similar word comes from Dutch. But our modern word ‘Landscape’ was adopted only a few generations ago among those of our cultivated ancestors who had time and opportunity to appreciate high art and to study the ‘rustic’ view as if it were a carefully composed classical painting, or series of paintings. Kaplan Fund.From the Age of Enlightenment to the 20th Century The catalogue is supported by the Willow Springs Charitable Trust and Furthermore: a program of the J. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, Michael Altman Fine Art & Advisory Services LLC, Greene County Legislature through the County Initiative Program of the Greene County Council on the Arts, and the Kindred Spirits Society of the Thomas Cole National Historic Site. ![]() 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. 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.
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