Focus on this artwork and analyze the Style.
The canvas is painted in the Romantic style and captures the aesthetic principles of the sublime and the picturesque. Church was a member of the Hudson River School, a group of landscape artists, whose aesthetic vision was influenced by romanticism. The Romantic movement validated intense emotions. The movement was placing new emphasis on the sentiments of visionary and transcendental experience. Emotions like awe – especially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities – were now entirely new aesthetic categories, and very different from art styles of the same era – the unemotional Realism and of the calm, balanced Classicism – as a source of aesthetic experience.The Sublime view of nature was as something of a large scale dramatic subject, an expression of the sublime – defined by Edmund Burke as the strongest emotion that can be felt.
landscape Edmund Burke Sublime Realism picturesque sublimity Classicism aesthetic Hudson River School awe Romantic style