Exhibitions: The Aesthetics of Travel: the Beautiful, the Picturesque, and the Sublime

The Sublime: A quality of the imagination

The sublime, the third category of aesthetic experience which both existed alongside and incorporated the picturesque, was a state of mind and not a quality of any object. It was a subjective experience which allowed individual interaction with external and internal limits.

Patterdale, going towards Ambleside, Westmorland by W. Taylor

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Patterdale, going towards
Ambleside, Westmorland

The principle occasions of sublimity described by Edmund Burke are obscurity, darkness, dimension, strong light and sombre colour.
(Burke, 1759)

The sublime world implied by those qualities is one of no definite thresholds, concealed frontiers, and indistinctness; of objects which resist being confined to the finite, threatening to penetrate the infinite. It is a world, typified by Caspar David Friedric's landscapes and Turner's seascapes, where objects overwhelm limited human comprehension, causing suspension in the prostrated mind. This initial stage of the sublime experience forces individual awareness of constraints, the human inability to control landscape through restrictive language and scientific laws.

“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling."
(Burke, 1759)”


“The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force. Astonishment, as I have said, is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree; the inferior effects are admiration, reverence and respect."
(Burke, 1759)”


Daguerreotype: Horseshoe Falls (Niagara) by H.L. Pattinson, Among the first known photographic images of Niagara Falls

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Daguerreotype: Horseshoe Falls
Niagara) by H.L. Pattinson

A second stage in the sublime experience allows the individual to then transcend his/her confinement. Having been struck by reason's inadequacy to comprehend the representation of an object and accompanying abstracts (such as magnitude), the mind, according to Immanuel Kant, takes recourse in ideas of infinity, eclipsing sense to climb to a revelation of being which emancipates humankind from finite forms and empirical knowledge. (Kant, 1952)

"… the beautiful in nature is a question of the form of the object, and this consists in limitation, whereas the sublime is to be found in an object even devoid of form, so far as it immediately involves, or else by its presence provokes, a representation of limitlessness, yet with a super-added thought of its totality. Accordingly the beautiful seems to be regarded as a presentation of an indeterminate concept of understanding, the sublime as a presentation of an indeterminate concept of reason."
(Kant, 1952)"



Cauldron Snout, Teesdale, Durham by W. Le Petit

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Cauldron Snout, Teesdale,
Durham by W. Le Petit


"About four miles above [High Force], is a place called the Cauldron Snout, from its being the mouth of a long canal, where the river sleeps profoundly, and on a sudden pours itself out, over a succession of shelves and falls, for the space of several hundred yards, through a deep opening or gully in the rocks. The grandeur of this scene baffles description… the august beauties must be imagined by the reader, accompanied with the idea, that here a large and powerful river is hurried down from steep to steep, for more than two hundred yards, dashed and distracted by opposing rocks, in various directions, and resounding from the lofty shores, that tremble on their thousand columns. Over the deepest and most awful part of the gulph, [sic] but where the rocks approach nearest to each other, a bridge is laid, formed of one piece of timber, without any rail; where only passengers, who have a brain befitted to aerial flight, may go without horror: the length of the beam appears to be upwards of forty feet from buttress to buttress."
(Hutchinson, 1794)


The concept of the sublime rests entirely in the idea of breaking bounds, of overcoming thresholds, both in terms of Nature and of the breaking of human bounds and limitations. Burke's physical explanation of sublimity suggests this: great dimensions, especially when perpendicular, can be mathematically estimated but our aesthetic comprehension is limited so that a huge object may appear to overwhelm the very end from which its concept is derived; strong light may flood a scene, thus pressurising its retainers, whilst celerity of light is too quick to be caught and contained.

Kant describes an epiphany whereby contemplation of the infinite signifies a revelation concerning our own being. This represents a release from the confines of empirical consciousness; liberation from finite forms. Marjorie Hope Nicolson describes "a gratification in the richness, fullness, vastness of a universe man might not intellectually comprehend, yet which satisfie[s] his unquiet soul". (Nicolson, 1959) Mark Akenside alludes to a similar relief gained from the sublime in The Pleasures of Imagination (1744). In Akenside, the sublime in Nature guides our imaginations to Heaven; the sublime experience releases us from the strictures of balancing sense perception with reason, by raising us to a higher plane of existence. Consequently, "darts the mind, / With such resistless ardour to imbrace / Majestic forms? impatient to be free". (Akenside, 1744)

As William Wordsworth recognised, the picturesque and the sublime are not mutually exclusive concepts for the sublime may encompass the picturesque. What appeals to one person may possess a power which causes fear in another. In the following example, this is illustrated by an anxious expression of the tiger, fearing for self preservation, compared with the favourable description of the location chosen by the hunters.

"On this spot the baghmars, (tiger killers,) set up the spring-bow with a poisoned arrow… The place was one of great interest; the water was surrounded by the high grass; on one side was a cluster of forest trees, and beneath them the slight and delicate babul. The By'a birds were flitting about… The bright sunshine, the deep reflections on the water, the idea that there was danger lurking around, all combined to render this picturesque and secluded spot one of great interest."
(Parlby, 1850)

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