Framing Landscape: ‘the Picturesque’ and ‘the Sublime’ unites landscape paintings from the Sir Abe Bailey Bequest, the William Fehr Collection and the ISANG collection for the first time –paintings mostly made in Europe and South Africa between the 1600s and the 1800s.
The works highlight two major modes of landscape art that emerged in this period: ‘the Picturesque’ and ‘the Sublime’. While the Picturesque sought to convey a pleasurable, improved vision of a harmonious nature, the Sublime sought to convey its infinite power and unpredictable moods, often stimulating feelings of awe and terror in the onlooker. The Sublime remains especially vital as humanity now confronts its own fearful and man-made vistas of environmental depredation and climate change.
