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Romantic Landscape with Spruce (Elias Martin) - Nationalmuseum - 21679
Summary
A large pine tree dramatically leans into the picture and points towards the high cliffs in the background. In the sky, dark clouds clash as sunlight forces its way through the shrouds of fog. Through the use of the light and haze, the artist attempts to depict the power of the wild, mountainous landscape.
This picture was painted by Elias Martin. In the 1760s and 70s, he spent a total of twelve years in England. During this period, English landscape art experienced a golden age – artists such as Thomas Gainsborough and Richard Wilson strove to capture the typical English nature on canvas. They were fascinated by the wild and free landscape and this lead to the emergence of a new landscape tradition that differed radically from the classicistic, idealized landscape of southern Europe that Claude Lorrain, among others, had established.
This painting shows how strongly Martin had been influenced by his contemporary English colleagues. The painting, most likely painted upon his return to Sweden in 1780 – is an exquisite example of the period’s new interest for wild and untamed nature. The sprawling pine, the rapids, and the inhospitable, shear cliffs, differ markedly from the idyllic or pastoral renditions of nature that, up till then, had dominated landscape art.
Have you discovered the people in the picture yet? In the gloom to the left of the pine tree, a figure can be seen, standing in front of a small cabin. Here, Martin strives to depict the experience of the sublime - that is, man’s smallness in relation to nature’s overwhelming power. The sublime became a central theme in the romantic landscape art of the 1800s. For Martin, the experience of the sublime was linked to a Christian, religious experience of nature. Upon describing his paintings or experiences of nature, Martin’s choice of words was often religion-inspired, and in the face of a landscape and the forces of nature, he felt the presence of God. Svenska: En stor gran lutar sig dramatiskt in i bilden och pekar upp mot de höga klipporna i bakgrunden. På himlen tränger solen fram mellan dimslöjor och mörka moln. Genom det dramatiska ljuset försöker konstnären fånga kraften i det vilda klipplandskapet. Efter tolv år i England återvände Elias Martin 1780 hem till Sverige.
Den här målningen tillkom vid den tiden och vittnar om intryck från den samtida brittiska landskapskonsten. Ett nytt intresse för den otämjda naturen spelade där en
framträdande roll.
By the last decades of the 16th century, the refined Mannerism style had ceased to be an effective means of religious art expression. Catholic Church fought against Protestant Reformation to re-establish its dominance in European art by infusing Renaissance aesthetics enhanced by a new exuberant extravagance and penchant for the ornate. The new style was coined Baroque and roughly coincides with the 17th century. Baroque emphasizes dramatic motion, clear, easily interpreted grandeur, sensuous richness, drama, dynamism, movement, tension, emotional exuberance, and details, and often defined as being bizarre, or uneven. The term Baroque likely derived from the Italian word barocco, used by earlier scholars to name an obstacle in schematic logic to denote a contorted idea or involuted process of thought. Another possible source is the Portuguese word barroco (Spanish barrueco), used to describe an irregular or imperfectly shaped pearl, and this usage still survives in the jeweler’s term baroque pearl. Baroque spread across Europe led by the Pope in Rome and powerful religious orders as well as Catholic monarchs to Northern Italy, France, Spain, Flanders, Portugal, Austria, southern Germany, and colonial South America.
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