An intensely introspective man, one of Friedrich’s first oil paintings was The Cross in the Mountains, painted as an altarpiece for a private chapel and exhibited in 1808. Apart from the cross, it contains no specifically religious elements and it was the first time in Christian art that an altarpiece was created just as a landscape. It provoked a debate about the use of landscape in sacred art. Many of his other landscapes feature meditative figures, trees or ruins set against the sky, usually expressing his individual responses to the natural world. His mystical preoccupations are always conveyed through scrupulous observation of reality and composed from many studies. Celebrated from early on in his career, as the world moved swiftly through the 19th century, Friedrich’s thoughtful work came to be seen as outdated. He died in obscurity, but at the end of the century, the Symbolists rediscovered him and he became appreciated once more.
Key Works
Cross in the Mountains 1807–8, GEMÄLDEGALERIE, DRESDEN, GERMANY
Winter Landscape 1811, NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON, UK
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog c.1818, KUNSTHALLE, HAMBURG, GERMANY
The Sea of Ice c.1823–5, KUNSTHALLE, HAMBURG, GERMANY
TURNER
1775–1851 • ENGLISH LANDSCAPE, ROMANTICISM
Calais Pier
1803 OIL ON CANVAS
172 × 240 CM (67¾ × 94½ IN)
NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON, UK
Painted before Turner became even more expressive, this was not well received when first exhibited in 1803, as critics considered the foreground to be unfinished. Based on Turner’s own experience, the painting depicts a packet boat arriving at Calais in northern France. Nature dominates the dramatic composition, with huge waves, storm clouds and a shaft of hopeful sunlight.
The most famous landscape painter of the Romantic Movement, Joseph Mallord William Turner’s precocious talents enabled him to become one of the youngest full members of Britain’s Royal Academy of Arts. His early landscapes were influenced by past masters, and his later pioneering and atmospheric studies of light had a profound influence on many later painters.
As a child, Turner’s father proudly displayed his son’s work in the window of his barber shop in Covent Garden, London. When he was 15, Turner was accepted as a student of the Royal Academy of Arts and three years later, he won the Society of Arts prize for landscape drawing. At the same time he also took lessons with Thomas Malton (1748–1804), an architectural draftsman. He was soon employed as a copyist, with a group of other young artists, by a physician and art collector, Dr. Thomas Munro (1759–1833). From 1791, he went on regular sketching tours around Britain, producing drawings that he used later as the basis for watercolor views or engravings. He exhibited his first oil painting at the Royal Academy when he was 21, and three years later, he was made an Associate of the Academy. At the age of 26, he became the second youngest person to be elected as a full member of the academy.
A hugely productive artist, Turner’s first paintings show the influence of Claude and of 17th-century Dutch marine painters. As well as exploring the British Isles with enthusiasm, between 1802 and 1830 he made frequent trips abroad to study and sketch the scenery. In addition, he visited Paris and studied the old masters that had been plundered by Napoleon. As his career flourished, Turner’s style became looser and more personal. After 1830, he applied paint in any way necessary to achieve the expressive atmosphere he was aiming for, such as with palette knives or rags. He brightened his palette, and lightened his canvases with an initial coat of white before painting them, and then applied pale washes in layers. Many of his works were revolutionary at the time for their composition, themes and effects and although he was extremely popular, he also had many critics. Unusually, those who admired him appreciated his originality, and he was elected Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy in 1811 and appointed acting president in 1845. The respected art critic, John Ruskin (1819–1900), championed him and further heightened his standing in the art world.
In later life, to ensure freshness, Turner began sending unfinished canvases to exhibitions—on “Varnishing Days,” before the exhibition opened, rather than simply varnish his works, he would finish painting in the exhibition room. With his unique images of the moods and atmospherics of nature, he became known as “the painter of light.” No landscape painter had ever focused so much on the effects of light and he laid the foundations for the Impressionists and later, the Abstract Expressionists.
Key Works
The Shipwreck 1805, TATE GALLERY, LONDON, UK
Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps 1812, TATE GALLERY, LONDON, UK
Frosty Morning 1813, TATE GALLERY, LONDON, UK
The Fighting Temeraire 1838, NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON, UK
Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbor’s Mouth 1842, TATE GALLERY, LONDON, UK
Rain, Steam and Speed—The Great Western Railway 1844, THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON, UK
CONSTABLE
1776–1837 • ENGLISH LANDSCAPE, ROMANTICISM
Flatford Mill
1816–17 OIL ON CANVAS
102 × 127 CM (40 × 50 IN)
TATE BRITAIN, LONDON, UK
Views of ordinary people and places—with no embellishment or symbolism—were not esteemed topics in the early 1800s, and the sheer size of this view of the countryside around Constable’s childhood home was unusual. Based on a close study of his surroundings, Constable achieved natural and lifelike effects by applying a wide range of greens as seen in nature. Painting from a high viewpoint gives the work an almost panoramic view. Without any artificial enhancements, the painting’s emphasis on the commonplace was unpopular with critics.
Best-known for his tranquil landscape paintings of the English countryside, John Constable brought a new energy and importance to landscape painting. By painting in oils in the open air, he began a trend that was taken up throughout Europe and America for the rest of the 19th century, contributing to the development of Impressionism.
Constable is known mainly for his landscape paintings of Dedham Vale in Suffolk, eastern England, the area around his home. As the son of a mill owner and corn merchant, he was trained for a career in the family business, which he interspersed with sketching trips in the surrounding countryside. Sir George Beaumont (1753–1827), a local baronet who was also a collector and amateur painter, showed Constable his collection of paintings, which included Hagar and the Angel by Claude Lorrain. This further strengthened Constable’s ambition to become a painter. By the age of 23, his father reluctantly allowed him to study art at the Royal Academy in London and independently, he copied paintings by the great landscape artists of the past, including Claude, Gainsborough, Rubens and the Dutch landscapists, in particular Jacob van Ruysdael (c.1628–82).
At 26, Constable exhibited at the Royal Academy, but as his paintings were not the traditional heavenly landscapes depicting stories from the Bible or mythology, they were unpopular. He had developed his own style, which was more realistic than Gainsborough and Claude, and closer to the style of van Ruysdael. He believed that the study of nature was imperative and that painting from the imagination or from predetermined traditions was not honest. He produced scores of sketchbooks, filled with studies made from direct observation of nature, and also painted almost complete oil paintings and watercolors in the open air, finishing them off in the studio, which was not the usual practice. For his large canvases (which he called “six-footers”), he also worked unconventionally, creating full-sized oil sketches before embarking on the final painting. Although success eluded Constable in Britain, in 1824 The Hay Wain won a gold medal at the Paris Salon and was particularly admired by, among others, Delacroix and Géricault. Eventually, when he was 52, he was made a full member of the Royal Academy, elected by a majority of only one vote.