Visions of the sublime in Chinese and American landscape painting: Dong Qichang, Shitao, Thomas Cole, and Frederic Church

The aims of the dissertation are fundamentally hermeneutical, attempting to understand the art of the landscape paintings of Chinese painters, Dong Qichang (1555-1636) and Shitao (1642-ca. 1709), and of American painters, Thomas Cole (1801-1848) and Frederic Church (1826-1900), from the aesthetic viewpoint of Edmund Burke (1729-1797). This dissertation offers insights to the comparative study of artistic and religious sensibilities of American and Chinese painters, and to the comparative study of Eastern and Western art. In this dissertation, I will lay emphasis on both the "discipline of seeing the artworks" and the "intellectual understanding of their aesthetics".; In this dissertation, I outline Edmund Burke's aesthetic notion of the sublime, and utilize Burke's categorical definition of the sublime, especially "obscurity" and "vastness", as a lens through which we can appreciate the spirit of the artworks of Dong, Shitao, Cole, and Church. In the major portions of this dissertation, I explicate their landscape paintings via Burke's understanding of the qualities of the sublime. To provide an in-depth discussion of sublimity in each artist's works, I will examine each artist in terms of his aesthetic idea before entering into their world of landscape paintings. I will discuss each artist individually in a chapter comprised of a profile of the artist, an reflection on aesthetic ideas, and a Burkean analysis of landscape paintings.; The concluding chapter reflects on the relationship between artistic vision and religious consciousness. In this chapter, I will compare and contrast the overall aesthetics of Dong-Shitao and Cole-Church. I will also investigate four aspects of religiosity expressed in their landscape paintings. Finally, I will propose some relevant ideas that concern the comparative interdisciplinary study in art in the future.