“Picturesque” means “like or suitable for a picture.” In most instances, if a landscape warrants our attention, it probably has “picturesque” elements in it. Those were unquestionably sublime moments.įew landscapes, of course, are sublime. Jefferson no doubt saw Harpers Ferry at more dramatic moments, though probably less tumultuous than the times in 19 when hurricanes increased the quantity of water through the pass by multiples of 52 and 37. Melrose painted Harpers Ferry on a peaceful day, a decade after the Civil War had brought man-made destruction to the site.
Near Harpers Ferry, 1870-80s, Andrew Melrose, bequest of Lora and Claiborne Robins, 2013.86.5. Mountains were formed when rocks were pushed westward over the top of bedrock by enormous forces generated when land masses to the east were squeezed together. We know today that Jefferson’s scene of “riot and tumult” was less the result of rivers rushing to the sea, albeit their effect over an immense period of time is not to be dismissed, but more so it was the result of powerful geological forces beneath the surface, 1,000 to 1600 million years ago. ” In Jefferson’s description the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers “rush together against the mountain, render it asunder, and pass off to the sea,” leaving “piles of rock on each hand.” Jefferson saw the sublime also at Harpers Ferry because he considered the passage of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers through the Blue Ridge Mountains at that location to be “one of the most stupendous scenes in nature.” He imagined “a war between rivers and mountains, which must have shaken the earth itself to its center.” The sight of that battleground, he suggested, is “worth a voyage across the Atlantic. He argued that such a landscape should be visited and it followed that it should be replicated in paint for those not able to see it on location. Jefferson found that a human standing beneath the towering arch of Natural Bridge or peering down over its edge feels physically dwarfed and intellectually taken aback. Also “sublime” are extreme conditions that threaten our existence-such total stillness, total darkness, and death. More relevant to the painter were those powerful forces of nature and those elements visible in nature that threaten our self-preservation and make us aware of the futility of human arrangements.īurke considered “sublime” the cataclysmic natural forces-tidal waves, tornadoes, hurricanes, conflagrations. He labeled “beautiful” those things that are smooth, varied in form, or delicate, and induce in us a sense of affection and tenderness-like a rose or the bend of a swan’s neck. The British statesman-to-be Edmund Burke offered a philosophy about the landscape that guided connoisseurs and artists in Europe and America for more than a century. A traveler wrote in 1852 of “staring upwards in stupid amazement at so grand a work of the Great Architect.”
Natural Bridge, 1882, Flavius Fisher, Lora Robins Collection of Virginia Art, 1995.98. What did Thomas Jefferson mean when he reported “emotions arising from the sublime”? The explanation is that he had been reading Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), which led the future president to search the Virginia landscape to find evidence of sublimity.
He wrote, “The fore part of him slowly rose from the water for an instant his whole marbleized body formed a high arch, like Virginia’s Natural Bridge, and… the grand god revealed himself, sounded, and went out of sight.” The future president made Natural Bridge so famous that it was remembered a half century later by Herman Melville when the author described the sublime whale he created, Moby Dick. Thomas Jefferson wrote that Natural Bridge is “the most sublime of nature’s works”: “It is impossible for the emotions arising from the sublime to be felt beyond what they are here.” He purchased the bridge from King George III so that so potent a landmark would remain accessible to the public, and his exclamatory statements about the bridge’s intoxicating power were widely circulated when they appeared in his book Notes on the State of Virginia (1785).
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