Cloud studies as Romantic (and Realist) fragment

Henri Zerner and Charles Rosen’s meditation on the significance of Romantic “fragment” is followed a few pages later by passing reference to Alexander Cozens’s A New Method Assisting Invention in Drawing Original Compositions Landscape (1785–86). They do not elaborate treatise’s relevance for their argument, except observe that “blots” show an early engagement with abstraction. With this off-hand citation, Rosen present readers fragment own. To take up examine rhetorical see Cozens plays crucial role formulation Romanticism Realism are mutually constitutive, they expressions same aesthetic social impulses. In no place made clearer than through deployment cloud studies. consummate expression Friedrich Schlegel’s conception as “a little work art, complete perfect itself, separate from rest universe,” studies nonetheless remain marginal inquiries into history Romanticism. Most scholarship seeks identify presumptive referent, whether contemporary interest meteorology or trends Christian theology. Rather proceeding assumption represent something, article argues exemplary illustrates (and, hence, Realist) theory itself. What more, studies, theorized Cozens, provide visual support new nineteenth-century French resolves its vexed relationship British art.