The Sea of Ice, 1823-24, by David Caspar Friedrich:
Sea Coast at Night, 1837, by Ivan Aivazovsky:
Isle of Graia Gulf of Akabah Arabia Petraea, 1839, by David Roberts:
Descending Geese, c. 1829, by Hiroshige:
Snow Storm, 1812, by J. M. W. Turner:
Desolation, 1836, by Thomas Cole:
The Landscape and Her Children, 1939, by Walter Spies:
All of the selected paintings date from the 19th century, except the last by Walter Spies. Two of the works depict the severity of the elements: a ship smashed in the artic and Hannibal’s troops engulfed by a storm in the Alps. David Caspar Friedrich worked from his careful studies of German landscapes, including ice floes along the Elbe. At that time, explorers sought a passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific, through the labyrinth of waterways in northern Canada. In the expedition of 1819-20, led by William Edward Parry, a ship and crew were locked for ten months in desolation, with three months of arctic night. J. M. W. Turner, another great figure of the romantic tradition, depicts a struggle between soldiers and the wild men of the mountains, amidst a dark, howling storm, with a war elephant in the distance, a scene dramatizing both frailty and resolve. By contrast, in the work of Walter Spies, the Balinese landscape is a nurturing mother, with dense tropical growth, a vastness on the small island. No terraces from this angle; a man carries a rake, but cultivation does not conquer. David Roberts had traveled extensively in the Middle East, making sketches, which became lithographs. In this image, men and camels line the northern shore of the gulf between Sinai and Arabia. Again, a striking sense of form, distance, and expanse. Meanwhile, in the post-empire scene of Thomas Cole, birds perch on a decaying pillar, and the earth quietly reclaims the ruins of power and ambition. Ivan Aivazovsky, a master of night colors, appointed as painter of the imperial Russian navy, depicts boats at rest, black forms against radical moonlight. A certain dramatic tension, but not terror. Compare the serenity of mountains outlined in the woodblock print from Hiroshige, when Japan was mostly closed to the world, decades before the arrival of the black ships, as geese descend against clouds and red haze, boats glide on placid water, with a fringe of black and gray trees into which dwellings fade.