Tracing the Romantic impulse in 19th-century landscape painting in the United States, Australia, and Canada

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to identify essential characteristics of the first generation of Romantic landscape painters and painting movements in a given English-speaking country which followed the generation of Turner, Constable and Martin in England, and then trace how the second generation of Romantic-realist painters represents a different paradigm. For a paradigmatic construct of the first generation, the focus is on the lives and major works of the American arch-Romantic landscape painter Thomas Cole (1801--1848) and the Australian Romantic landscape painter Conrad Martens (1801--1878). The second generation model features the American Frederic Edwin Church (1826--1900), the Australian William Charles Piguenit (1836--1914), and the British Canadian Lucius Richard O'Brien (1832--1899). Cole and Martens, closer to their predecessors in England, created dynamic paradigm shifts in their new countries. Following them, the second generation of Romantic-realists produced a synthesis of romanticism, scientific naturalism, and nationalistic symbolism.