Emotion in Art

Renowned artists often inspire awe by eliciting powerful emotional reactions from viewers, galvanizing them in a shared experience. The most overt examples of this phenomenon generally rely on the expression of emotion through the human form.

The tour I led was meant to be an examination of what artists do to convey emotion in their works of art that feature nonhuman subjects. I built the tour around works that were deeply emotional and had strong technical and formal qualities that clearly contributed to their emotional messaging. I started my tour with Ludolf Backhuysen’s Ships in Distress off a Rocky Coast (1667), then moved on to Frederic Edwin Church’s El Rio de Luz (The River of Light)  (1877), finishing with Sir Edwin Lanseer’s Alpine Mastiffs Reanimating a Distressed Traveler (1820). I chose these paintings because all of them stood out to me as being highly emotional despite lacking the anchor of human emotional expression. The viewing order of each work on the tour was an important aspect of my presentation because it allowed me to demonstrate how some of the same techniques could be used to achieve drastically different emotional responses. This was most clearly demonstrated in a comparison of Ships in Distress off a Rocky Coast and El Rio de Luz. In both paintings, scale and imagery were used in dramatically different ways in order to elicit distinct emotional responses from viewers. In Alpine Mastiffs Reanimating a Distressed Traveler, similar formal techniques were used, but the emotions conveyed were different. I ended the tour with this work because although people are depicted in the dramatic scene, the artist used dogs as the principal messengers and conduits for human emotion.

Film and Television major and Environmental Studies minor, Howard University
Howard University Undergraduate Intern, 2023–2025

Back to Research Reports