Western Romantic Landscape Painting

This thesis takes the western romantic landscape painting as the study object, reviewing the historical and social factors of its emergence and development as well as its artistic characteristics, and probes into some representative western romantic landscape artists and their outstanding works through case analysis. The body part of this thesis could be divided into five sections. Section One discusses the artistic characteristics and spiritual pursuits of two types of fantasy type landscape painting and their contributions to the development of western romantic landscape painting as well. These two types are the "pastoral eclogue" of Constable and the "light and color" of Turner. Constable and Turner are famous English romantic landscape painters As German romantic landscape painting shows a perfect combination of science, religion and humanistic and social science, Section Two aims to study Runge and Friedrich’s artistic language in their paintings with an aim to explore the unrestrained beauty and philosophical connotation of "divine nature". Section Three is on landscape elements’ special significance in contrast as well as metaphor as an indispensable part in the description of historical events favored by some French romantic painting artists, including Gericault and Delacroix. Paintings of American Hudson River School bear all features of romantic paintings, so American Hudson River School is synonymous with Romanticism in this sense. Section Four investigates the subjective and dramatic role that natural elements play in the landscape paintings of some representative painters like Cole and Church. Section Five expounds on "poetic nature" in romantic landscape paintings which is pursued by some European painters by taking the poetic and grand landscape paintings of Coya and Kich as examples. This thesis aims to study the artistic characteristics and humanities factors of romantic landscape paintings in this period through analyzing the reappearance of nature in these works. In addition, it intends to develop the theory on western romantic landscape painting by expounding the natural aesthetic philosophy between man and nature as well as man and society.