The Art of the Sublime

Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry (1757) connected the sublime with experiences of awe, terror and danger. Burke saw nature as the most sublime object, capable of generating the strongest sensations in its beholders. This Romantic conception of the sublime proved influential for several generations of artists.

In this section essays explore how artists responded to the sublime in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with articles on shipwreck and psychiatry, and case studies on the work of Stubbs, Haydon and Constable.