exclusive, and each profoundly affected attitudes toward nature. Susceptible to the ideas of Blake and other radical theorists and animated by a growing spirit of inquiry into natural phenomena, painters slowly abandoned the picturesque desire to compose and became willing to be moved, awestruck, and terrified by nature unadorned. Early artists of the sublime, such as Alexander Cozens or Francis Towne, worked largely in watercolours and solved the problem of scale by abstraction--use of broad areas of colour to suggest the vast scope of natural forces--an approach developed by Thomas Girtin and John Sell Cotman. By the early 19th century, the watercolourist John Varley was echoing current practice when he told his pupils John Linnell, William Mulready, and William Henry Hunt: "Go to nature for everything." But already two outstanding British landscape painters, John Constable and J.M.W. Turner, were going still further. Both men, while admiring the classical landscapes of Claude Lorrain and Poussin, believed that personal feeling was the mainspring of artistic activity and felt an almost mystical sympathy for the natural world. They made atmosphere almost palpable and painted everything from clouds to lichens with astonishing technical diversity. Constable considered himself before all else a "natural" painter and sought, in his own words, to capture "light--dews--breezes--bloom--and freshness" with scientific precision and deepest affection. For Constable, light clarified and enlivened, and his nostalgia for the Suffolk countryside is personal and explicit. With Turner, light increasingly diffused the objects illuminated, and only a more literary expression satisfied his concept of the sublime, drawing him to mountain grandeur, raging seas, storms, and conflagrations. Turner was one of the greatests landscapists of the XIXth century. Although brought up in the academic tradition of the XVIIIth century, he beca...
