Stepping Westwards: The Sublime Crosses the Atlantic.
For the Americans, the first opportunity to get a taste of the style known as “apocalyptic sublime” was in 1833-4 when the Bristol artist Francis Danby exhibited his Opening of the Sixth Seal in New York. And in 1856, John Martin would show a triptych of his gigantic doom-laden pictures to the people of the Big Apple.[1] One year after Martin’s exhibition an outbreak of British paintings and watercolours would spread across the East Coast cities of America, and journals would appear in imitation of English periodicals like the Art Union and Art Journal. Up until the middle of the nineteenth-century traffic across the Atlantic had been only one-way; artists like Washington Allston, John Singleton Copley, and Benjamin West had come to Europe, and most of them enjoyed great success with the Royal Academy. Allston, a painter and poet from South Carolina, is often considered to be the true pioneer of American romantic art. After graduating from Harvard, Allston sailed to England in 1801; and in that year he was admitted to the Royal Academy when Benjamin West was its leader. Allston bridges the gap between English and American Romanticism because he was good friends with the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge (whose portrait he painted)) and Ralph Waldo Emerson whose ideas on nature and transcendentalism were clearly influenced by the Lake poets. Allston also provides the link between exponents of the “apocalyptic sublime” in England and its American variant because he gave Martin ideas for the painting that made him famous- Belshazzar’s Feast (above). A few oil sketches of this subject by Allston survive inspired by both West’s version and Rembrandt’s masterpiece in the National Gallery.[2] Allston’s academic figurative composition is in complete contrast to Martin’s, and it is easy to see why Martin chose to discard Allston’s ideas in favour of a more spectacular treatment which won him legions of fans.
[1] Andrew Wilton, “The Sublime in the Old World and the New” in American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States 1820-1880, Andrew Wilton & Tim Barringer, (Tate, 2002).
[2] Morton D. Paley, The Apocalyptic Sublime, 128-129.
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