Essays on classic paintings
For people who feel a painting before they understand it
The Sublime is a classic art blog about famous, beautiful, lonely and sometimes very sad paintings. I start with the feeling a painting gives me, then try to work out why it is there.
I am not an art historian. I am a British art lover living in Germany, and I write for anyone who loves paintings first and explanations second.
Start with Ophelia
Start here
- John Everett Millais
Is Ophelia Already Dead in the Painting?
A young woman floating in a river of flowers, and the uneasy question of why something so painful looks so beautiful.
- Caspar David Friedrich
Why Does Wanderer above the Sea of Fog Feel So Lonely?
A man alone on a rock above the fog. Lonely, yes, but not in a miserable way.
- Alphonse Mucha
Why Mucha's Slav Epic Is a History of Histories
Twenty giant canvases, a sleeping baby, and probably the best art exhibition I have ever seen.
- J. M. W. Turner
Why Is The Fighting Temeraire So Beautiful and So Sad?
An old warship on its last journey, and the sunset Turner gave it on the way.
- John William Waterhouse
Why Does The Lady of Shalott Painting Feel So Hopeful and So Doomed?
A woman in a boat, a candle almost out, and a face full of longing. I want her to be happy. I'm not sure she will be.
- John Constable
Why Does Constable's The Cornfield Make Me Nostalgic for a Time I Never Lived In?
A boy, a lane, a hot summer day. Nostalgia for a countryside that may never have existed quite like this.
What I write about
Mostly, paintings that feel like memories, dreams or places you could almost walk into. Turner's light. Constable's skies. Friedrich's lonely figures with their backs to us. Pre-Raphaelite beauty and tragedy. The gold of Klimt and the richness of Mucha.
I like beauty, sadness, light, story, atmosphere and mystery, often all in the same painting. I am drawn to luminous melancholy: pictures that are sad, and still somehow glow.
Every essay starts by answering the question you probably came with. Then it goes where the painting takes me. Browse by feeling or by artist.
Coming next
- The Birth of Venus, Sandro Botticelli
- Posters and decorative panels, Alphonse Mucha