Elegy Landscapes: Constable and Turner and the Intimate Sublime

Nonfiction, Art & Architecture, Art History, European, General Art
Cover of the book Elegy Landscapes: Constable and Turner and the Intimate Sublime by Stanley Plumly, W. W. Norton & Company
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Author: Stanley Plumly ISBN: 9780393651522
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company Publication: August 21, 2018
Imprint: W. W. Norton & Company Language: English
Author: Stanley Plumly
ISBN: 9780393651522
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Publication: August 21, 2018
Imprint: W. W. Norton & Company
Language: English

A sweeping look at the lives and work of two important English Romantic painters, from a Los Angeles Times Book Prize–winning author.

Renowned poet Stanley Plumly, who has been praised for his “obsessive, intricate, intimate and brilliant” (Washington Post) nonfiction, explores immortality in art through the work of two impressive landscape artists: John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. How is it that this disparate pair will come to be regarded as Britain’s supreme landscape painters, precursors to Impressionism and Modernism? How did each painter’s life influence his work?

Almost exact contemporaries, both legendary artists experience a life-changing tragedy—for Constable it is the long illness and death of his wife; for Turner, the death of his singular parent and supporter, his father. Their work will take on new power thereafter: Constable, his Hampstead cloud studies; Turner, his Venetian watercolors and oils. Seeking the transcendent aesthetic awe of the sublime and reeling from their personal anguish, these talented painters portrayed the terrible beauty of the natural world from an intimate, close-up perspective.

Plumly studies the paintings against the pull of the artists’ lives, probing how each finds the sublime in different, though inherently connected, worlds. At once a meditation on the difficulties in achieving truly immortal works of art and an exploration of the relationship between artist and artwork, Elegy Landscapes takes a wide-angle look at the philosophy of the sublime.

View on Amazon View on AbeBooks View on Kobo View on B.Depository View on eBay View on Walmart

A sweeping look at the lives and work of two important English Romantic painters, from a Los Angeles Times Book Prize–winning author.

Renowned poet Stanley Plumly, who has been praised for his “obsessive, intricate, intimate and brilliant” (Washington Post) nonfiction, explores immortality in art through the work of two impressive landscape artists: John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. How is it that this disparate pair will come to be regarded as Britain’s supreme landscape painters, precursors to Impressionism and Modernism? How did each painter’s life influence his work?

Almost exact contemporaries, both legendary artists experience a life-changing tragedy—for Constable it is the long illness and death of his wife; for Turner, the death of his singular parent and supporter, his father. Their work will take on new power thereafter: Constable, his Hampstead cloud studies; Turner, his Venetian watercolors and oils. Seeking the transcendent aesthetic awe of the sublime and reeling from their personal anguish, these talented painters portrayed the terrible beauty of the natural world from an intimate, close-up perspective.

Plumly studies the paintings against the pull of the artists’ lives, probing how each finds the sublime in different, though inherently connected, worlds. At once a meditation on the difficulties in achieving truly immortal works of art and an exploration of the relationship between artist and artwork, Elegy Landscapes takes a wide-angle look at the philosophy of the sublime.

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