Nocturne in Black and Gold, Whistler

Everyone loves fireworks, including James Abbott McNeill Whistler. It depicts a fireworks show over a city park in London. It is said that Whistler was more intent on showing atmospheric effects rather than precise details. This is evidenced by the glowing clouds of smoke, ignited with color by the explosion of the fireworks. The splattered paint and gold flecks thrilled the audience of his time and still currently. Whimsical and realistic, he captures the nature of a good fireworks show.

Sunrise and the Water Lilies, Monet

The above painting by Claude Monet is my boyfriend's favorite piece of art. Since everyone really was curious about that fun fact. 

It's impressionist style does not directly portray nature in realistic terms, but the suggestions and emotions that come from this painting still remain highly effective and evocative. Most interesting part of the painting is the strong orange orb, the representation of the rising sun over the water. It's choppy reflection in the sea and its exceptionally solid form in the sky draws one's eye immediately. With Monet's wispy brush strokes, the swirling mix of colors so often seen with sunrise and sunset are understood. 

Monet's Water Lilies are some of the most famous pieces of his work. He painted many different varieties and used this subject matter many times. As an impressionist, it was not the direct detail of the water lilies that he was aiming to capture on his canvas. He enjoyed the playing of light around these flowers as they floated on water. As evident in the above painting, his work not only depicts the water lilies themselves but also the reflection of a shore-bound tree in the water.  In this way, though not accurate in precise detail, Monet stays true to the appearance of the natural world. 

Twilight in the Wilderness, Church

Church made it is point to understand the nature he was illustrating and to expose himself to realms of the natural world beyond his home in Hudson, New York. He traveled, and often times on foot, to sketch the different areas of the United States and South America, sketching as he went. Once he was married and his children old enough to travel, Church took his family to see Europe and the Middle East, returning to New York at intervals to paint the scenes that he had witnessed in person.

This scene, painted on the cusp of the American Civil War, speaks to Church's awareness of the coming conflict. He shows the beauty of the land that will be fought over and within the painting, a miniscule eagle can be seen flying amidst this beautiful landscape. The colors are powerful, mostly because they are ones truly associated with a sunset. There is not much embellishment but the effect remains powerful. Some critics even say that the liberal use of red paint speaks to the coming blood shed and Church's opinion that that color should remain in the sunset instead of scattered across the fields.

Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Bierstadt

Bierstadt is able to achieve an incredible, photograph like appearance in this painting. A German painter who specialized in the capturing the awe-inspiring landscapes of the American landscape, he was able to sell many of these paintings for a good amount of money but did not receive much praise from critics of his time. He was known to use light "excessively" and to alter the reality of which he was using as his model, employing a false palette of colors just to make it more appealing to the eye. 

While this painting itself may receive criticism for its idealization of a landscape, it is still able to knock one backwards with the scale and perfection of the landscape. In this case, I'll look at this beyond-perfect landscape all day. 

Oxbow, Cole

I personally love this painting.

There is nothing more amazing to see than the discoloration of the sky at the onset of an incoming rain storm. It doesn't look like what we have water to be in our minds. It is a solid wall of darkness moving towards you. It looks like an extension of the storm clouds stretching completely to the ground. Cole has captured this incredible sight and even enhanced it by the contrast he creates in his picture. The left is filled with the dark rain and thick, green forest while the right shows the impact of civilization, farmland and scars of deforestation on the hillsides. 

The Slave Ship, Turner

In Joseph Mallord William Turner’s painting, The Slave Ship (originally titled Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying - Typhon coming on) nature is once again used as a background to human activity, a vehicle of manipulatable symbolism in the artist’s agenda.  Painted in 1840, it shows a slave cargo ship retreating from an oncoming storm. Looking closer, Turner’s audience can see that this is not simply a ship leaving a typhon in its wake. Lines from Turner’s own 1812 poem can illuminate the tragedy which his painting depicts: 

“Aloft all hands, strike the top-masts and belay;
Yon angry setting sun and fierce-edged clouds
Declare the Typhon's coming.
Before it sweeps your decks, throw overboard
The dead and dying - ne'er heed their chains
Hope, Hope, fallacious Hope!
Where is thy market now?” (History.ucsb.edu)

To coincide with the controversial topic of the slave trade that he was addressing with this painting,  Turner turns to a nature of the most sublime nature, one of “awe mixed with terror” (Kleiner, 795). The frantic nature of his strokes and the tumultuous merging of vibrant colors pulls the eye towards the natural, almost seemingly super-natural, scene being depicted. It is this fantastical setting that ultimately works to draw one’s eye to the very real, inhumane act being committed in the swirling oceans.  Turner’s Slave Ship in a way harkens back to the awe-inspiring natural scenes of the cave paintings in Lascaux in that “the relative scale of the minuscule human forms compared with the vast sea and overarching sky reinforces the sense of the sublime, especially the immense power of nature over humans” (Kleiner, 796). However, the commentary that most viewers come away with is that of the injustice being done to the African slaves, evidence to Turner’s merging of not just simply nature but also a human element as well. It is not to go without saying though that the two, nature and humans, are not put in a most interesting dialogue, causing one to ask how far humans are going against nature in these acts against other fellow inhabitants of this shared earth. 

The Haywain, Constable

This oil on canvas painting holds special significance for its artist, John Constable.  The scene of Flatford Mill was a familiar one, considering his father owned the mill itself. The house next to it still stands today. It is the home of the tenant farmer, Willy Lott. Revered as one of the greatest paintings by a British artist, this painting also gained acclaim in its own day and age, specifically from French artist, Theodore Gericault.
The merging of detail and a general sense of haziness is exquisite. One can tell that the artist truly valued this natural landscape. It was no exotic, foreign panorama, but one that was certainly worth putting onto canvas for posterity's sake.