Like a disaster movie, Turner’s painting transforms a natural catastrophe — with death a near-certainty — into entertainment.
Romanticism in England
Landscape painting was considered lowly subject, but Constable gives them the six-foot treatment.
John Constable, The Hay Wain
Can you paint a portrait of place? Constable makes a case for it with this idyllic depiction of a country estate.
John Constable, Wivenhoe Park, Essex
Fancy a trip to Tate Britain? Visit the largest collection of work by Turner anywhere—no passport required.
J.M.W. Turner at Tate Britain
There are two types of people in the world: those who preserve their lamp oil, and those who don’t. Which are you?
William Blake, The Parable of the Wise ...
Beautifully rendered details of the Dieppe harbor are second only to Turner’s true love—the sublime sun.
J. M. W. Turner, The Harbor of ...
Refusing to idealize, Constable fills his landscapes with the specificity of a fleeting summer day.
John Constable, View on the Stour near ...
A beautiful sunset, but look closer. One of humanity’s most hideous acts—seen in the waves of the indifferent sea.
J. M. W. Turner, Slave Ship
Fuseli’s fairies resist his era’s embrace of the rational in favor of the emotive and fantastic.
Henry Fuseli, Titania and Bottom
In a time when horses were the fastest mode of transit, the railroad was as radical as Turner’s abstraction.
J. M. W. Turner, Rain, Steam, and ...
A prince-regent with a private architect builds a fantasy seaside home mixing all the metaphors of empire.
John Nash, Royal Pavilion, Brighton
People paid to see this apocalyptic painting performed with light and sound—as much theatre as work of art.
John Martin, The Great Day of His ...
The famous battleship on its way to be dismantled is a powerful metaphor for a heroic past, now outmoded.
J. M. W. Turner, The Fighting Temeraire
Somewhere over the rainbow? Constable’s may have been an afterthought, but is bright with meaning.
John Constable, Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows
During the Industrial Revolution, Constable sold images of the landscape to the architects of its destruction.
Constable and the English landscape
What do you get if you combine a naval hero, global religious imagery, and an aquatic agent of Satan?
William Blake, The spiritual form of Nelson ...
Fuseli explores the drama of the unconscious in this work, whose morbid eroticism endeared it to Edgar Allan Poe.
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