Samuel Palmer (1805–81)Harvesters by Firelight, 1830, Pen and black ink with watercolor and gouache on wove paper, 11 5/16 × 14 7/16 in (28.7 × 36.7 cm)
A FACULTY THAT INVENTS AND ORGANIZES
Imagination is a faculty that allows us to generate mental pictures, ideas, and sensations that do not exist in the world and in some cases cannot exist. These abilities are unique to human beings and no doubt emerged from evolutionary pressures allowing us to predict outcomes of all manner of events, both social and mechanical, and to project desirable strategies for survival.
Today we tend to link imaginative and creative powers and to value them as the engine that underpins much artistic endeavor. This was not always so. Prior to the late seventeenth century, the word was generally paired with “fancy” and thought of as a somewhat mechanical faculty capable of recombining information already experienced. It was also associated with memory and its ability to revive past impressions in the mind. A product of fancy might occur with, say, the combination of a man and a horse, creating a centaur. These kinds of inventions, often referred to as “grotesques,” were seen as entertaining but not central to art making.
From the Renaissance onward, most thinkers regarded the rational mind as the most noble and desirable part of human thought, even when it came to the production of artworks. This changed with the advent of the Romantic movement and in particular with the writings of the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834). In his Biographia Literararia of 1817, Coleridge makes a powerful case for the imagination, observing that it not only invents but also combines elements in a way that is coherent and compelling. In other words, he gives to the imagination the creative powers needed to produce works of art. “It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealise and unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.”
Coleridge felt that this molding and unifying power of the imagination was so important that he coined a new word for it: “esemplastic.” This was radical because it presented the idea, central to the Romantic movement, that art is not generated from nature or artistic precedent, nor was it merely reflective of ideal Platonic realms, but rather comes directly from an individual human being.
See also: Fantasy and Visionary Art on page 74; Creativity on page 52; Romanticism on page 160
Samuel Palmer (1805–81)
Harvesters by Firelight, 1830, Pen and black ink with watercolor and gouache on wove paper, 11 5/16 × 14 7/16 in (28.7 × 36.7 cm)
Joseph Mallord William Turner (1789–1862)
The Evening of the Deluge, c. 1843, Oil on canvas, 29 15/16 × 29 15/16 in (76 × 76 cm)
Both these nineteenth-century artists presented imaginative transformations of landscape in which elements were simplified and then subsumed into an organic and spirited vision.
