If the sublime was not a manifestation of divine power and moral judgement working through nature, it risked being merely horrid, incapable of elevating the mind or the imagination. Ruskin’s acknowledgment of ‘terrible sublimity’ can thus be seen as an indication of his difficulty in understanding nature on a theological basis, especially as he focused his analysis of the sublime in terms of its effect on the beholder. 4 One could even go so far as to argue that it was Ruskin who made Turner sublime by rescuing the visual from itself and returning it to language.īy 1853 Ruskin had shifted his position to accept the sublime as a separate aesthetic category that related to the experience of awe and terror, but he still struggled with the Burkean notion of ‘terrible sublimity’, maintaining that a susceptibility to terror was a sign of religious doubt, even atheism. In particular, it was the force and conviction with which Ruskin relayed what he felt to be the sublime pessimism of Turner’s art that influenced subsequent opinion about the greatness of the artist’s work, overcoming contemporary objections that his abstract compositions appeared incomprehensible, even ridiculous, like soap or treacle.
A figure of quasi-biblical authority in his own day, Ruskin was one of the first critics to write about art with poetry and feeling, and it was the unprecedented intensity of the language he used to evoke the sublime that helped elevate the status of art criticism in British writing. Because he was such a prolific writer – the standard edition of his works amounts to thirty-nine volumes – his criticism is useful for calibrating the shifts in aesthetic judgement that took place during the period. Ruskin was the most important English art critic of his time with a career spanning almost the entire reign of Queen Victoria. This view owes much to John Ruskin’s championing of the artist in his book Modern Painters.
In the second part of the essay I look at the return to ‘affect’ – the explicit appeal to emotion through expressive painterly means – in the later nineteenth century, at works which seem to signal a revisiting of the Romantic and Turnerian models of the sublime but within a more troubled theological framework informed by the spirit of agnosticism that followed in the wake of the evolutionary theories advanced by Charles Darwin, and that in some cases can be regarded as a visual parallel to the art critic John Ruskin’s notion of the grotesque. I start by asking if there was something peculiar to the aesthetic ideals which predominated in the mid-nineteenth century that caused the sublime to drop out of circulation, and then proceed to look specifically at the Pre-Raphaelite landscape, at works which ostensibly eschewed the visual rhetoric of the sublime out of a concern for objectivity and ‘truth’, but which at the same time offered new ways of harmonising analysis with symbolism in confronting themes such as judgement, vastness, transcendence and terror, all traditionally regarded as manifestations of the sublime.
While these ways might be regarded as marginal to mainstream artistic tendencies, they are too important to be overlooked, especially as they engage with contemporary social, scientific and cultural developments. The test cases show that although the sublime may have been in crisis, it nevertheless continued to have an impact in multifarious ways. Although this approach might be regarded as restrictive in not allowing for a central narrative, the heterogeneity of the chosen examples does enable coverage of the principle areas in which the subject manifested itself in British landscape painting. Because so little published material exists on the idea of the sublime in the Victorian period, this essay takes the form of case studies of works in the Tate collection to pose questions about the category. This essay considers why the sublime should have fallen out of favour in intellectual circles, using this as the background to examine various ways in which artists continued to engage with the concept in landscape painting during this so-called recessive period.
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