The Sublime is an aesthetic category theorised by Edmund Burke (A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757) and later by Kant, describing experiences of greatness so vast, powerful or terrifying that they exceed rational comprehension and produce a complex of awe, terror and exhilaration. Unlike beauty — which is pleasingly proportioned, comprehensible — the sublime overwhelms. Romantic artists pursued it in mountain ranges, storms, avalanches and volcanic eruptions. Caspar David Friedrich's fog-covered mountains, J.M.W. Turner's snowstorms at sea, the Hudson River School's vast American landscapes — all locate the human figure as a small and humbled presence before an indifferent nature. In the 20th century, Abstract Expressionist painters such as Barnett Newman explicitly used the term for their enormous, field-like canvases, which they hoped would produce the same response.