Landscapes of the Romantic Sublime: The Legacy of Nineteenth-Century Artistic Visions and Contributions to the Development of the Management of Natural Heritage

This chapter considers the influences of the nineteenth-century artistic Romantic movement towards the development of management strategies for natural heritage sites and how the legacy of this perspective pervades into the present day. The author takes primarily a British perspective, analysing the role played by poets, artists and writers in provoking a wider interest in engaging with natural heritage, but with a nod towards developments in the United States and Northern Europe at this time. It is argued that this is an overlooked contribution, and that nineteenth-century artistic attitudes to the natural world in the nineteenth century as well as its accessibility, played an important role in the emergence of the National Trust in 1895, as well as later popular perceptions of natural heritage in the UK. It is further argued that these intellectual currents underpin modern approaches to sense of place and the phenomenology of landscape.