The Romantic Sublime in Art

Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, 1781. 

Fuseli was a lover of Mary Wollstonecraft's before she met William Godwin, 

Mary Shelly's father. He was also married. Wollstonecraft  proposed a ménage à trois,

which Fuseli rejected, and dropped her. 

Joseph Wright of Derby, An Experiment on a Bird in an Air-Pump, 1768. 

Not an instance of the Sublime, the painting does indicate how experimentation might be undertaken in private homes, to educate members of the household. Wright is interested in depicting a moment of drama: Will the vacuum be released, allowing in oxygen to revive the asphyxiated bird (in the glass bell at top)? The drama is shown in the varied responses of the subjects--including the lovers at the left, who take no notice of the scene.

Caspar David Friedrich, The Wanderer Above the Mists, 1818

This definitely Romantic solitary figure, contemplating the magnificence of Nature, is a contemporary and maybe a kindred spirit of Victor Frankenstein.

Frederic Church, Niagara Falls, 1857. 

One of the most celebrated works in the Corcoran Gallery collection of American art.

Gilbert Moran, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, 1875

European expansion into North America may have influenced the increasing interest in the Sublime. To 19th-century Europeans, America meant vast expanses of breath-taking natural wonders; Americans themselves identified expansionism and "Manifest Destiny" with a growing interest in preserving (as well as exploiting) these apparently limitless wonders.

Karl Bodmer, Niagara Falls, 1830s

Horace Vernet, Stormy Coast After a Shipwreck, 1820s

JMW Turner, The Wreck of a Transport Ship, 1810

John Martin, The Great Day of His Wrath, 1853

Francisco Goya, Saturn Devouring His Son, 1820s

Vincent Van Gogh, Starry Night, 1889

The Photographic Sublime: Landscape Photography

Greenland fjord by Bob Ford for Reuters, 1009


The Technological Sublime: Human-Made Power

From James Whale, Frankenstein, 1931

In the twentieth century, it appeared that Sublime themes could be impressively represented in motion pictures--not only in genres that evoke a "delightful" feeling of apprehension or terror, but also in contemplation of the vastness of Nature, as in Westerns or Science Fiction. 

The representation of the power of electricity or of nuclear fission suggests what has been called a "technological Sublime," which appears when we are overwhelmed by the power of human-made machinery, or even theories about the cosmos.