'A nourishing, occasionally provoking hybrid of group biography, cultural criticism and travelogue that seeks to restore to Romanticism its radicalism, and also show just how much the countryside shaped its manifesto' Hephzibah Anderson, Mail on Sunday We think we know the Romantic countryside: that series of picturesque landscapes familiar from paintings, poems and music that are still part of Britain's idea of itself today. But for the Romantics themselves, the countryside was a place where radical change was underway both within and around them. 'Romanticism isn't a cultural artefact; it's a way for thought to move,' writes highly acclaimed biographer and poet Fiona Sampson in this transporting and vividly evocative book, in which she spends a year walking in the Romantics' footsteps, from Kent to Kintyre. Setting out across ten landscapes, as the Romantics once did as they wrote, travelled, settled, or tried to define the rural environment, Fiona Sampson walks not with a sense of nostalgic cliche, but radically alive to interaction between the human and the natural world. So how were poets, writers, artists and philosophers of the time shaped by their natural environment? And how can we return to the vividness with which they experienced it? Starlight Wood is part group biography, part cultural history, and part an essay about place. In it, we find Percy Bysshe Shelley and Elizabeth Barrett Browning using diet as a symbol of radicalism, and John Constable revealing the emptiness of the post-Enclosure British countryside; while the young William Wordsworth follows the ideal of radical sensibility into the heart of Revolutionary France, and the biggest military structure in Britain since Hadrian's Wall is engineered on Romney Marsh to keep Napoleon at bay. Moving intuitively between art, politics, agriculture, science and philosophy, and punctuated by the author's personal reflections - most movingly on the death during the pandemic of her artist father, whose line-and-wash drawings act as gateways through which we embark on each walk - Starlight Wood brilliantly examines the importance of the countryside in shaping Romantic attitudes, and offers a gripping insight into the lives of some of the most influential figures of the age.

English art critic John Ruskin was one of the great visionaries of his time, and his influential books and letters on the power of art challenged the foundations of Victorian life. He loved looking. Sometimes it informed the things he wrote, but often it provided access to the many topographical and cultural topics he explored--rocks, plants, birds, Turner, Venice, the Alps. In The Art of Ruskin and the Spirit of Place, John Dixon Hunt focuses for the first time on what Ruskin drew, rather than wrote, offering a new perspective on Ruskin's visual imagination. Through analysis of more than 150 drawings and sketches, many reproduced here, he shows how Ruskin's art shaped his writings, his thoughts, and his sense of place.

A revelatory look at how the mature work of Caspar David Friedrich engaged with concurrent developments in natural science and philosophy Best known for his atmospheric landscapes featuring contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies and morning mists, Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) came of age alongside a German Romantic philosophical movement that saw nature as an organic and interconnected whole. The naturalists in his circle believed that observations about the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms could lead to conclusions about human life. Many of Friedrich's often-overlooked later paintings reflect his engagement with these philosophical ideas through a focus on isolated shrubs, trees, and rocks. Others revisit earlier compositions or iconographic motifs but subtly metamorphose the previously distinct human figures into the natural landscape. In this revelatory book, Nina Amstutz combines fresh visual analysis with broad interdisciplinary research to investigate the intersection of landscape painting, self-exploration, and the life sciences in Friedrich's mature work. Drawing connections between the artist's anthropomorphic landscape forms and contemporary discussions of biology, anatomy, morphology, death, and decomposition, Amstutz brings Friedrich's work into the larger discourse surrounding art, nature, and life in the 19th century.

This catalogue accompanies the first exhibition devoted to a fascinating group of drawings by the Anglo-Swiss Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), one of eighteenth-century Europe's most idiosyncratic, original and controversial artists. Best known for his notoriously provocative painting The Nightmare, Fuseli energetically cultivated a reputation for eccentricity, with vividly stylised images of supernatural creatures, muscle-bound heroes, and damsels in distress. While these convinced some viewers of the greatness of his genius, others dismissed him as a charlatan, or as completely mad. Fuseli's contemporaries might have thought him even crazier had they been aware that in private he harboured an obsessive preoccupation with the figure of the modern woman, which he pursued almost exclusively in his drawings. Where one might have expected idealised bodies with the grace and proportions of classical statues, here instead we encounter figures whose anatomies have been shaped by stiff bodices, waistbands, puff ed sleeves, and pointed shoes, and whose heads are crowned by coiffures of the most bizarre and complicated sort. Often based on the artist's wife Sophia Rawlins, the women who populate Fuseli's graphic work tend to adopt brazenly aggressive attitudes, either fixing their gaze directly on the viewer or ignoring our presence altogether. Usually they appear on their own, in isolation on the page; sometimes they are grouped together to form disturbing narratives, erotic fantasies that may be mysterious, vaguely menacing, or overtly transgressive, but where women always play a dominant role. Among the many intriguing questions raised by these works is the extent to which his wife Sophia was actively involved in fashioning her appearance for her own pleasure, as well as for the benefit of her husband. By bringing together more than fi fty of these studies (roughly a third of the known total), The Courtauld Gallery will give audiences an unprecedented opportunity to see one of the finest Romantic-period draughtsmen at his most innovative and exciting. Visitors to the show and readers of the lavishly illustrated catalogue will further be invited to consider how Fuseli's drawings of women, as products of the turbulent aftermath of the American and French Revolutions, speak to concerns about gender and sexuality that have never been more relevant than they are today. The exhibition showcases drawings brought together from international collections, including the Kunsthaus in Zurich, the Auckland Art Gallery in New Zealand, and from other European and North American institutions.

A romantic view of 19th-century Canada -- a domestic complement to the work of Bartlett, Constable, and Kane.Anthony Flower (1792-1875) lived and worked in New Brunswick for most of his life. A farmer with a lifelong passion for art, he painted until his death at the age of eighty-three. His work opens a window on a time and place now gone. His paintings depict the life that he saw around him in rural New Brunswick and the events and scenes described in newspapers of the day.Anthony Flower's art was among the first in New Brunswick to depict rural New Brunswick. Through his paintings, we learn about day-to-day life, religion, how people dressed, what their interests were, and what was important to them, all important pieces to our understanding of everyday life in nineteenth-century Canada.Une vue romantique du Canada du XIXe siAcle. Un complA (c)ment domestique au travail de Bartlett, Constable et Kane.Anthony Flower (1792-1875) a vA (c)cu et travaillA (c) au Nouveau-Brunswick pendant la majeure partie de sa vie. Agriculteur passionnA (c) par l'art, il peint jusqu'A sa mort A l'Acge de quatre-vingt-trois ans. Son travail ouvre une fenAtre sur un temps et un lieu disparu. Ses peintures dA (c)peignent la vie qu'il a vue autour de lui dans les rA (c)gions rurales du Nouveau-Brunswick et les A (c)vA (c)nements et scAnes dA (c)crits dans les journaux de l'A (c)poque.L'art d'Anthony Flower a A (c)tA (c) parmi les premiers A reprA (c)senter le Nouveau-Brunswick rural. A travers ses peintures, nous apprenons la vie quotidienne, la religion, la faAon dont les gens s'habillent, quels sont leurs intA (c)rAts et ce qui est important pour eux, autant d'A (c)lA (c)ments importants pour notre comprA (c)hension de la vie quotidienne au Canada au XIXe siAcle.