Beyond the ‘narrow limits of painting’: strategies for visual unlimitedness and the Burkean challenge

Abstract

This article examines the engagement of British Romantic visual artists with the edges of pictorial or graphic representation as a place to experiment with unlimitation. It argues that their heightened interest in these edges was a response to contemporary criticism of the finite nature of painting, and a strategy to rival the verbal arts, which Edmund Burke and some members of the Romantic literary elite considered to be much more capable of communicating the sublime. The dynamic margins of their works are explained in terms of parergonality — a notion elaborated by Jacques Derrida in The Truth in Painting — in order to account for open-endedness and the inscription of the sublime at the edge of representation. The development of new formal paradigms to unlimit representation is shown to have been especially significant in visual media, which were free from the constraint of standardised quadrilateral frames, such as book illustrations, sky studies, and sketches. Book illustrations, which could produce their own edges and interact with text, are examined as privileged places for such explorations. Landscape studies and sketches, which demonstrate the arbitrariness of the framed and finished view, are seen as a pictorial response to the aesthetics of the fragment, of the unfinished and the suggestive, which had stemmed from the reflection on the sublime.