The History of British Art and the Burkean Sublime (original) (raw)

In 1757, London philosopher Edmund Burke proposed the concept of "the sublime" in his text, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of the Sublime and Beautiful. This idea of the sublime describes the feeling one experiences when they observe something in the world around them that is so great in size and terror that it makes them feel extremely small and insignificant in comparison, but in the best and most awe-inspiring way possible, rather than a solely negative sensation. 1 For example, when a subject views a gigantic range of mountains, and has an entirely encompassing feeling of being dwarfed by them, in admiration of creation. Or if one stared at the night sky and is overwhelmed by the sheer number of stars above our heads, dizzied by that unimaginable sum. The idea of the sublime has not been something solely isolated to philosophy, as it has spread into several other avenues of thought, specifically within art. Burke's concept was very quickly adopted into the aesthetics tradition as artists grappled with the question of "… how can an artist paint the sensation that we experience when words fail or when we find ourselves beyond the limits of reason?". 2 This concept was particularly well received by British artists, spanning from the Baroque period onwards, leaving an indelible impression on art history and philosophy. Burke's concept of the sublime evolved from being a philosophical construct to an aesthetic theme etched into the British history of art, exemplified in the works of Enlightenment artists like Philip James de Loutherbourg to contemporary scholars like Eugenie Shinkle. The definition of the sublime has been interpreted in several different iterations over the centuries, and often times gets easily confused with beauty, but in Burke's original text he