Paintings

Among the more famous are paintings by JMW Turner. A watercolour of 1825-28 shows Stonehenge beneath a stormy sky, with a dead shepherd and his mostly dead flock in the foreground. The stones themselves are not shown in faithful representation, but appear almost as a half-remembered image, while the carcasses that are strewn about before them are possibly intended to indicate that the Druidic religion is now dead having been vanquished by Christianity:
www.abcgallery.com

Even more atmospheric is a mezzotint dating from around 1824 showing the stones on their raised ground at a distance against a lowering evening sky:
www.royalacademy.org.uk

The other great British artist of the period, John Constable, also visited Stonehenge. His oil painting of 1836 is again a view of the monument beneath a turbulent sky:
www.artunframed.com

As research continued on identifying the original appearance of Stonehenge, it became a favoured topic for illustrated books. This image from 1831 is still thought to be a pretty close estimation of what it would once have looked like:
home.clara.net - (first picture)

Sculpture

Since the early 20th century, there has been a vogue for creating modern replicas of Stonehenge from a variety of materials, especially in the USA. These have ranged in tone from the respectful to the irreverent, but share a common fascination with the enduring power of the monument.

A faithful copy of the original was created at Maryhill, Washington State, by Quaker entrepreneur Sam Hill, to honour the American dead of the first world war. Begun after the war ended in 1918, the Maryhill Stonehenge took until 1930 to complete.
englishriverwebsite.com

Possibly the oddest tribute is Carhenge at Alliance, Nebraska, which was constructed by six local families in 1987. Made from wrecked cars sprayed a uniform grey, the work was considered to be a "garbage dump" by the local authority for many years, but is now recognised as a major tourist attraction in the area:
www.river.org

Refrigerator Henge in Santa Fe, New Mexico, by Adam Jonas Horowitz, began construction in 1996, and was only finished in 2005. Like Carhenge, its title is self-explanatory. The work is intended as a critical comment on the wastefulness of modern consumer society:
www.uzzah.com

Foamhenge, at Natural Bridge, Virginia, is made entirely from Styrofoam, and is the work of Mark Cline. It was completed in 2004:
www.naturalbridgeva.com

There is also an English Foamhenge made from polystyrene for a Channel Five programme, The Ultimate Experience, broadcast in June 2005. Fronted by the leader of North Wiltshire Council, Carol O'Gorman, efforts are now under way to preserve this and give it a permanent home.

Literature

Just as it became an obsession of visual artists of the 19th century, so Stonehenge found its way into literary works factual and fictional.

The American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson visited England in the 1850s to take an outsider's look at the habits and customs of English culture. In the resulting book English Traits (1856), he recounts a visit to the stones and the effect they made on him:

"We left the train at Salisbury, and took a carriage to Amesbury, passing by Old Sarum, a bare, treeless hill, once containing the town which sent two members to Parliament, now, not a hut; and, arriving at Amesbury, stopped at the George Inn. After dinner, we walked to Salisbury Plain. On the broad downs, under the gray sky, not a house was visible, nothing but Stonehenge, which looked like a group of brown dwarfs in the wide expanse, Stonehenge and the barrows, which rose like green bosses about the plain, and a few hayricks. On the top of a mountain, the old temple would not be more impressive. Far and wide a few shepherds with their flocks sprinkled the plain, and a bagman drove along the road. It looked as if the wide margin given in this crowded isle to this primeval temple were accorded by the veneration of the British race to the old egg out of which all their ecclesiastical structures and history had proceeded.

"Stonehenge is a circular colonnade with a diameter of a hundred feet, and enclosing a second and a third colonnade within. We walked round the stones, and clambered over them, to wont ourselves with their strange aspect and groupings, and found a nook sheltered from the wind among them, where C. lighted his cigar. It was pleasant to see, that, just this simplest of all simple structures, two upright stones and a lintel laid across, had long outstood all later churches, and all history, and were like what is most permanent on the face of the planet: these, and the barrows, mere mounds, (of which there are a hundred and sixty within a circle of three miles about Stonehenge,) like the same mound on the plain of Troy, which still makes good to the passing mariner on Hellespont, the vaunt of Homer and the fame of Achilles. Within the enclosure, grow buttercups, nettles, and, all around, wild thyme, daisy, meadowsweet, goldenrod, thistle, and the carpeting grass.

"Over us, larks were soaring and singing, as my friend said, the larks which were hatched last year, and the wind which was hatched many thousand years ago. We counted and measured by paces the biggest stones, and soon knew as much as any man can suddenly know of the inscrutable temple. There are ninety-four stones, and there were once probably one hundred and sixty. The temple is circular, and uncovered, and the situation fixed astronomically, the grand entrances here, and at Abury, being placed exactly northeast, as all the gates of the old cavern temples are. How came the stones here? for these sarsens or Druidical sandstones, are not found in this neighborhood. The sacrificial stone, as it is called, is the only one in all these blocks, that can resist the action of fire, and as I read in the books, must have been brought one hundred and fifty miles."

Stonehenge's most famous appearance in fiction comes at the end of Thomas Hardy's Tess Of The D'Urbervilles (1891), when the doomed lovers, Angel Clare and Tess, on the run from the police on a wild night, stumble upon it in the dark. Only gradually do they realise where they must be. As Tess lies prone on the altar stone, the imagery of her sacrifice to the forces of society is made brutally clear:

"They had proceeded thus gropingly two or three miles further when on a sudden Clare became conscious of some vast erection close in his front, rising sheer from the grass. They had almost struck themselves against it.

" 'What monstrous place is this?' said Angel.

" 'It hums,' said she. 'Hearken!'

"He listened. The wind, playing upon the edifice, produced a booming tune, like the note of some gigantic one-stringed harp. No other sound came from it, and lifting his hand and advancing a step or two, Clare felt the vertical surface of the structure. It seemed to be of solid stone, without joint or moulding. Carrying his fingers onward he found that what he had come in contact with was a colossal rectangular pillar; by stretching out his left hand he could feel a similar one adjoining. At an indefinite height overhead something made the black sky blacker, which had the semblance of a vast architrave uniting the pillars horizontally. They carefully entered beneath and between; the surfaces echoed their soft rustle; but they seemed to be still out of doors. The place was roofless. Tess drew her breath fearfully, and Angel, perplexed, said:

" 'What can it be?'

"Feeling sideways they encountered another tower-like pillar, square and uncompromising as the first; beyond it another and another. The place was all doors and pillars, some connected above by continuous architraves.

" 'A very Temple of the Winds,' he said.

"The next pillar was isolated; others composed a trilithon; others were prostrate, their flanks forming a causeway wide enough for a carriage; and it was soon obvious that they made up a forest of monoliths grouped upon the grassy expanse of the plain. The couple advanced further into this pavilion of the night till they stood in its midst.

" 'It is Stonehenge!' said Clare...

"...In the far north-east sky he could see between the pillars a level streak of light. The uniform concavity of black cloud was lifting bodily like the lid of a pot, letting in at the earths edge the coming day, against which the towering monoliths and trilithons began to be blackly defined.

" 'Did they sacrifice to God here?' asked she.

" 'No,' said he.

" 'Who to?'

" 'I believe to the sun. That lofty stone set away by itself is in the direction of the sun, which will presently rise behind it.' "