A similarly distorted, evolutionary view was also applied in the twentieth century to discussions of John Constable and J. M. W. Turner, who, for a long time, were essentially understood and valued as precursors of Impressionism.³ This ahistorical approach to the Romantic landscape painters has been corrected by recent scholarship, which encourages us to look at Constable and Turner in the context of their own Romantic predecessors and contemporaries—artists such as John Crome, Alexander and John Robert Cozens, Philip de Loutherbourg, Caspar David Friedrich, and Théodore Rousseau—rather than as incomplete steps on the path toward the twentieth century's mistaken notion of a naturalist and formalist Impressionist ideal.

It is time now to extend to the Impressionists as well the implications of the late twentieth century's revised and historically more viable attitude toward Constable and Turner—to shift our perspective, in other words, so that the Impressionists, too, may be placed more consistently and more meaningfully within the context provided for them by their own predecessors and contemporaries—artists such as Camille Corot, Théodore Rousseau, Charles François Daubigny, and Johan Barthold Jongkind, as well as Constable and Turner. Approached this way, the formal and expressive resemblances between a Turner and a Monet, for example (colorplates 4 and 5; 14 and 15), would no longer be seen as a surprising prefiguration of the later artist on the part of the earlier one, but as the period itself would have been inclined to see it, as a growth and development of the later artist out of a tradition exemplified by the earlier one. As the French novelist and art critic Théophile Gautier wrote in 1877 on the relationship of the contemporary present to the Romantic past: "Today has its roots in yesterday; ideas like arabic letters are linked to what has come before and to what follows."⁴

The assumption of an unbridgeable gulf between Impressionism and Romanticism is thus as pervasive in the recent sociohistoric literature on Impressionism as it was in the older formalist canon. It was also perpetuated, ironically, in the work of Robert Rosenblum, whose 1975 book Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko presented a new and daring alternative reading for the history of modern art, a reading based upon a vision of the centralily of the northern Romantic tradition. Rosenblum persuasively charted a vital and continuous current of Romantic feeling in the art of northern Europe and the United States from Friedrich to Rothko—virtually down to the present day. He saw this continuity, however, only in art that is overtly transcendental or symbolic in its structure or in its imagery and content. And in order to define the character of this art, he depended heavily on the conventional view of Impressionism—and in particular the art of Monet—to provide a contrasting foil. Of a typical Impressionist landscape, Monet's The Banks of the Seine at Argenteuil of 1872 (fig. 1), he therefore wrote:

Certainly, the differences in mood and inflection between Impressionism and German Romanticism, which Rosenblum and others would emphasize, are obviously there. Even in the rare Friedrich landscape where the sun shines and the figures engage in relatively unambiguous, leisure-time activity, as in Chalk Cliffs on Rügen of 1818-1820 (colorplate 8), the human figures are still portentously dwarfed by the colossal forms of nature. In this instance, three well-dressed people, identified as the painter himself, peering over the edge of the cliff, with his wife, Caroline, and his brother, Christian,⁸ are shown exploring the rugged and brightly illuminated landscape on an island in the Baltic. Like them, we cling to the rocks in the foreground, in awe of the abyss below, separated physically by insurmountable spatial barriers from the vastness of the sea and the almost supernatural glow of the light-filled space beyond. Despite the specificity of the place, the people, and their activity, the symbolic implications of the image are unmistakable. The sea here, as in Friedrich's other pictures, can be interpreted as a symbol of infinity, and the ships that move upon it as a symbol of human destiny and transience. In the face of this, a comparable work by Monet provides a marked and misleadingly easy contrast in mood. In the Garden at Sainte-Adresse of 1867 (colorplate 9), Monet's vacationers, also well-dressed members of his own family, sit on a broad and comfortable terrace, which is fenced and smoothly landscaped. Here, there are no luminous and awe-inspiring depths, no rugged and threatening terrain. Instead, flags flutter in the breeze, sailboats and steamships move toward the horizon, and all ...