Table Mountain and the PicturesqueThere is always a viewer (an artist or surveyor) present in front of each landscape, and each depiction of the landscape implies the presence of a spectator (the patron or public). While they may all observe things differently, their observations are seldom indifferent. Both confer value and give meaning to nature. Table Mountain was usually depicted as the central feature of a tamed and civilized landscape, echoing in its painted form or drawn contours the ordered streets of the expanding town below its ramparts. Capturing this new country within the pictorial conventions of the day was a method of pacifying the strange and making the unknown landscape more liveable. The picturesque and sublime depiction of the Cape led to peculiar distortions. Firstly, natural features such as rocks, trees and kloofs were strategically placed like stage-props to help reproduce a picturesque spatial arrangement that suggested the essential order and intrinsic beauty of nature. Secondly, romanticized images of nature as the manifestation of a sublime metaphysical presence, emphasized the twisted crags, gnarled trees and rushing mountain streams - including dramatised storms at sea - in an attempt to intimate the elemental power of nature. The picturesque offered a view that had been suitably composed by re-arranging natural features in a landscape and by reproducing what was pleasing to our eye through the skillful use of spatial recession. The sublime landscape projected the grandeur of a place as the intimation of human frailty and mortality.
Table Mountain and the Panorama |
