Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

35
was not strictly speaking, nature worship; rather it was the use of the natural
world – free from human social enterprise – as a screen against which to project
that sense of value which is also the sense of the Self […], one saw through the
phenomenon of nature into the divine noumenon (or ultimate reality) that lay
behind it [….]. The ultimate union in the divine of the thing-in-itself of nature
and of the Self of the human being, gave a ground of value both to nature and to
the purely human. 113
According to Robert Hughes:
One of the great themes of nineteenth-century romantic painting was the
interplay between the world and the spirit: the search for images of those states
of mind, embodied in nature, that exist beyond or below our conscious control.
On the one hand, there was the scale of the world, seen as a place sanctified by
its own grandeur […]. ‘The passions of men’ William Wordsworth wrote, ‘are
incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature’. On the other
hand, not all painters felt Wordsworth’s visionary yet empirical peace with the
natural world and the further aspect of Romantic extremity was the desire to
explore and record (and so, perhaps assuage) the dissatisfactions of the self: its
conflicts and fears, hungers and barely formulated spiritual yearnings. 114
In other words, images of nature’s sometimes terrifying power or sublimity were just as
important to many of the Romantics as were images of peace and harmony.
The sublime was generally seen as being connected to “vision” – the external view of
the sublime landscape generating in the viewer an inner vision, connected with an
altered state of consciousness “in which the individual ‘clearly feels a qualitative shift
in his pattern of mental functioning, that is he feels […] that some quality or qualities of
his mental process are different’”. 115 The notion of the artist as visionary – that is, as
developing the intensity and uniqueness of the artist’s view of the world to the point
where his or her work has a startling originality – is an important aspect of Romanticism
relevant to Ward’s aesthetic. The word ‘vision’ can serve as a shorthand for this way of
113 Peckham, Romanticism: The Culture of the Nineteenth Century 25.
114 Hughes, The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change 269.
115 Charles T. Tart, Introduction to Altered States of Consciousness, quoted in Twitchell, Romantic
Horizons: Aspects of the Sublime in English Poetry and Painting, 1770-1850 21.