Neoclassicism and Romanticism summary and notes

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Neoclassicism and Romanticism summary and notes

Neoclassicism and Romanticism 1770-1850

During the controversies and upheavals in France during the reign of Louis XV, the social critics known as the philosophes voiced louder and louder opposition to the royalty, in part giving rise to the Revolution of 1789. The call for reform of political and social institutions, emphasizing a return to the bedrocks of Western Civilization in the form of the ideals of ancient Greece and Rome, called also for new forms of art. Madame du Barry caused a stylistic change in court patronage when she rejected the Rococo for the new, more sober and austere style of Neoclassicism. Her, and her successors’ in court decoration, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, embrace of the more ethically-based work of the Neoclassicists was, however, superficial. The challenge to the status quo expressed in works such as the playwright Beaumarchais’ The Marriage of Figaro, as well as in a number of other plays and essays, demanded a complete reordering of the French universe, one in which the Royalty and the Church had little or no place. Theorists such as Cardinal Albani in Rome, and his close friend, the librarian Johann Winckelmann advocated a more systemic change in culture, really nothing less than the establishment of new republics in place of the corrupt monarchies. Albani and his circle, like Diderot in France, advocated from the late eighteenth century on the elevation of human dignity through edifying works of art and literature, incorporating the great ideas of Greek and Roman philosophers into contemporary society. The philosophical movement known as the Enlightenment proposed new formulae for the interaction of people in society, based in part on Classical precedents, in part on current political realities, and in part on new scientific theories and categorizations of the nature of human beings.

The underlying assumption of Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire and Rousseau, that of the preeminence of reason was the appropriate foundation for human organization, came in part from the new assessment, by various authorities, of the differing “capacities” of the sexes. Previously scientists and moralists generally spoke of the complementary nature of the sexes, not even using specific words for female sex organs until the nineteenth century. As delineation of the differences between male and female bodies increased, a litany of sex-specific personal, emotional, and intellectual attributes grew alongside the biological lists; indeed they were seen as inextricably linked, with personal qualities arising “naturally” from biological features. Men were considered to possess those qualities in which women were deficient: mental vigor, bodily strength, and reason. Women, on the other hand, were seen to be dominated by weakness, sensitivity, emotionality, and an overwhelming drive towards self-sacrifice: all qualities appropriate to their rightful role as mothers. The modern gender order was codified during the upheaval of the Revolution, with the new archetype of the Autonomous (male) Individual emerging as the new ideal. Autonomy, perceived as a virtuous state of existence, was of course also seen as a male attribute, with females too naturally dependent on others to become independent, reason-driven, human beings. Men became their own gods, meant to serve themselves, rather than a king or spiritual god, pursuing naturally their own self-interest in the jungle of the market, with women creating the shelter of the domestic sphere as a refuge from the survival-of-the-fittest reality of the outside world. As gender roles were formalized, society became likewise bifurcated as into public (male) and private (female) spheres. The Old Regime’s publicly sexual courtier was increasingly perceived as an abomination; sexuality belonged in the new, sacred, domestic space. Sexuality now rightly entailed attachment, part of the female realm, and men in the marketplace of goods and ideals strove to contain their desires within appropriate boundaries, and the sanctity of the church now resided in home and hearth.

Art of this period, whether Neoclassical and Romanticist in tenor, gave shape to this cultural revolution. Artists invested in the creation of a new, more ethical and restrained society looked to the ancients for thematic inspiration, giving their work form appropriate to their position in the debate. The Neoclassicists elevated and depicted Reason as a return to highly refined, controlled, and measured visual form, approaching art as a learned pursuit of dignified men, teaching and controlling members of society by the high moral examples of their subjects.

Neoclassicism in Italy

Cardinal Alessandro Albani, in the tradition of the Renaissance Medicis, amassed a large collection of sculptural objects from ancient Rome, which he displayed in the Villa he built for just such purpose just outside of Rome. Travellers from England and France made Albani’s villa an important stop on their tours of the cities of antiquity, and took home with them a desire for such elegance in their native dwelling places. The cardinal’s credentials for an expert in Greek and Roman antiquities could only be equaled or surpassed by his secretary Johann Joachim Wincklemann, whose taste for classicism was whetted in Dresden, Germany, where interest in the subject had been nascent for some time already. His influential publications, “Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture,” and “The History of Ancient Art” ridiculed the softness of Rococo art, and challenged artists to adhere to the Greek ideal of athletic masculinity, trim, lean, with only the pure muscular form of the male body as an appropriate model for art. He quoted Raphael as saying that “Since beauty is rare among women, I follow a certain idea in my imagination.” Wincklemann exhorted the artist to rise above raw nature, and paint the ideal of the body as exists purely in the imagination, as he had imagined the Greeks had done.

Anton Raphael Mengs, Parnassus, ceiling fresco in the Villa Albani, Rome 1761. A close friend and countryman of Winckelmann, Anton Raphael Mengs, was offered the prestigious commission to decorate the ceiling in the grand gallery of Cardinal Albani’s famous new Villa. Perhaps the first true Neoclassic painting, Parnassus describes how contemporary ideas used classical stories as a springboard for the new social order. This version of the peak of Parnassus, source of inspiration, eliminates the traditional second peak of the mountain associated with Dionysus, focusing instead on the clear, calm, and rational masculinity of Apollo as the source for all good things. Many neoclassicists were highly contemptuous of the Theater, and the expulsion of Dionysus from the heights of artistic inspiration here would seem to echo that sentiment. In Mengs’ idealized Greek landscape, a bevy of soft, submissive female figures pay homage to the mathematical and rational Apollo, giving us the clear message that all arts and letters, including painting, poetry, dance, music, and architecture, must accede to the new classical ideal of reason..

Antonio Canova, Cupid and Psyche, marble, 1787-93. Other Roman artists were soon affected by the Albani/Winckelman movement, notably the Roman sculptor Canova. Born into a Venetian family of stonecutters, Antonio adopted the Neoclassic style after his study with the Scottish painter Gavin Hamilton, and built a tremendously successful career in Rome. He created a number of grand memorial works for famed European leaders, such as tombs, and intimate works of mythological eroticism for private collectors. Venus’s son Cupid, who had fallen in love with the mortal Psyche, here gives his beautiful beloved a kiss of immortality, saving her from the death sleep imposed by his jealous mother. This saving kiss had been sanctioned by Zeus, who took pity on the poor girl. The swooning female figure is given life by the consciousness of the male figure, the female embracing and nurturing the elevated male. Sensuality is exhibited in the sculpture in the service of divine Reason.

Neoclassicism in France

A wide range of ideas and individuals dramatically changed the cultural landscape of nineteenth-century France. With the fall of the Bourbon dynasty in 1789 the entire edifice of governance attached to it fell as well, leaving the nation casting about for some promising new leadership based on the ideas of humanitarian reforms envisioned by political writers, who had in no way foreseen the Revolution. Some scholars credit the performance of The Marriage of Figaro, which had originally been banned by the crown in 1784, with creating a spark for the ensuing flame of insurrection. The play certainly makes no bones about deriding the folly of Rococo decadence, and in advocating the return to a more natural manner of living. In 1794, after six years of chaos, a previously under-employed provincial lawyer, Maximilien Robespierre rose from simply dreaming about the sort of utopia Rousseau had described to heading a government bent on destroying any voice contrary to their new vision of the Nation. Robespierre oversaw what came to be known as the “Reign of Terror,” when executions of anyone associated with the ancient regime or appearing to oppose radical new reforms were rampant. France’s experiment in creating a new republic seemed almost doomed when Napoleon Bonaparte emerged in 1799 as a powerful force in French politics, promising a reign of wisdom and reason, and, ironically assumed the robes of Emperor in 1803. For many, he was the best chance for reviving the hope of a reformed France, for others, he was simply a symbol of much needed order in the land. Neoclassic artistic style followed the emperor like a shadow, and the look, if not the full substance, of French government changed significantly.

As well, scientific advancements, fueled by the new emphasis on reason and objectivity changed culture irrevocably. Rapid developments in transportation, engineering, agriculture, medicine, and manufacturing helped fan the fires of economic and population growth, and a greater understanding of infectious agents led to vaccines and sterilization, making possible a great decline in the rate of death due to disease. A great deal of energy was devoted to medicine especially in the wake of the arrival of Cholera, by way of India, in Europe in about 1830.

Jacques Louis David, 1748-1825. An active participant in the Revolution, David helped to carry out orders for executions of various enemies of the state, and was thoroughly committed to the new, rigorous forms of cultural practice. His embrace of classical Roman and Greek approaches to form, story, and subject matter gained veracity during the six years he spent in Rome during the height and fall of Rococo style in his native France. As did other eighteenth and nineteenth century French painters, David consciously emulated the clarity, stoicism, and masculinity of the Baroque master Nicholas Poussin. David’s painterly statements are directly, honestly presented, with no sense of seduction, only a seemingly earnest, confident, and convincing presentation of important realities. Much of his paintings, however, are as much “contrived” as any Rococo painting: artificial constructions of elements designed to evoke an emotional response in the viewer. Instead of disorienting and coaxing the viewer into the painting by sensuous curves, diagonal axes, and infinite space, the painter sets his subjects in a clear, rectilinear world, with the pictorial space paralleling the viewers’ actual space. The experience contained, however, in his contrivances, suggests an entirely different universe of human life than his Bourbon court forebears.

Oath of the Horatii, oil, 1784-85. Of any artist of the period, David perhaps exemplifies best Diderot’s idea that improvement of public morals can be accomplished through art. He uses the great morality stories of the classic past to demonstrate for viewers the kind of forthright, heroic, and stoic demeanor one needs to don in order to create a just republic. In this story, the sons of Horace of Rome pledge an Oath to the State in their battle with Alba, brandishing and uniting their swords as a demonstration of loyalty to their father. The women in the scene faint and swoon, unable to bear the regimen of revolution and just war, alluding to the newfound purpose of the new French Republic, in contrast to the slack, passive, and inactive members of the Ancien Regime.

Death of Marat, oil, 1793. As a notorious and ruthless activist with the Jacobins during the Reign of Terror, Marat was a much reviled and hated man in the Paris of David’s day. For the artist, however, he cut a heroic figure, a holy martyr in the struggle for liberty. Marat suffered from a debilitating skin disease, and wrote many of his treatises and execution orders at a makeshift desk rigged on his bathtub. Under the pretense of making a petition to one of the most powerful leaders of the Revolution, a young Charlotte Corday slipped into his room and stabbed him as he soaked. The otherwise unlovely Marat leans back, bathed in heavenly light, with a soft and tender visage. David makes the inciter of brutal, bloody riots over into a saintly figure; this sort of artistic whitewashing was nothing new, but the means were radically original. Sparing the viewer excessive rhetoric or overwhelming painterly tricks, he allows the reality of the humbly textured subject speak to us directly. It is difficult not to have sympathy for the gentle man bleeding to death in his austere study as shown to us in David’s imaginative vision.

Napoleon in his Study, oil, 1810. David hailed the new emperor, and was appointed as official portraitist in 1800. Contrast this portrait to that of Louis XIV, or any Rococo portrait; Napoleon stands at the ready, a serious man of study and a stoic warrior. Although accessories of luxury are present in the emperor’s study, one gets the impression of a no-nonsense leader from the upright and direct presentation of the subject.

Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson, 1767-1824, Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Belley, oil, 1797. David’s dominance of French painting brought a number of talented students to his studio, often with original ideas of their own that challenged the master’s rigid program of art. This important student developed a successful career as painter of mythological and literary subjects, in a mode similar to Canova, but gives the subject of this portrait a natural, intense dignity. Associated with several members of the government, Girodet incorporated them or themes of their work into his paintings. Belley, a former slave, came to serve as a representative to the French Republican General Assembly, best known for leading a campaign to abolish slavery in the French held Caribbean Islands. The rich, dark skin of Belley contrasts beautifully with the bust of the philosophe Giullaume Raynal, who originally wrote tracts denouncing slavery. The philosophes, as well as leaders such as Napoleon, were unfortunately divided on the issue of slavery.

Jean Auguste Domenique Ingres, 1780-1896. David’s most influential and loyal student, Ingres, was honored by being probably the only student for whom David ever painted a portrait. Ingres clung to the hierarchy of genres of the Academy, considering his historical and mythological paintings his most important works. Most strikingly original, and ravishing in their sensual beauty, however, were his portraits of the bourgeoisie, the new captains of business and industry, and their wives. In his writings he constantly preaches the gospel of fidelity to nature, describing himself as a humble slave to the model, not assuming to invent or add to the subject. He saw this truthfulness to perception as a virtue of the great Renaissance artists, such as Raphael, an appreciation he gained from the eighteen years he spent in after winning the Prix de Rome. His painting departed from his masters’ in that he tended to paint in “one skin” instead of through multiple layers of translucent glazes; this technique helped to give the flesh of his models a compelling warmth and softness. An important teacher in the academy, he trained a number of admiring students who departed in what for Ingres were unforgivable ways, in embracing the new, brash style of romanticism.

Napoleon I on His Imperial Throne, oil, 1806. The excessive ornamentation and otherworldly glamour of this image of the newly-crowned emperor seems to fly in the face of neoclassic decorum. In his homage to the young, lauded emperor, Ingres creates a physical reality greater than story or character, placing us in the uncanny and rarified atmosphere of absolute and divine power.

The Bather of Valpincon, oil, 1808. One of his first great female nudes, the Bather, comes very close to Ingres’ ideal of classical perfection in its luminous quietude. The painter emphasizes the sensuality and almost erotic charge of the porcelain flesh by repeating essential curves and lines of tension within the body in the surrounding drapery.
The light falling on the swirling striped fabric of the turban freezes and enlivens the entire scene, accentuating the floating quality of the impossibly perfect figure. He must have felt strongly about the success of this nude, since he copied and repeated in a number of times in different paintings.

Grand Odalisque, oil, 1814. This haunting image, painted for Napoleon’s sister, Queen Caroline of Naples, both continues and breaks a long traditions of reclining nudes in Western art. Related in conception and form to Michelangelo’s figures of Night and Day for the Medici Tomb, and to David’s nude study for his famous portrait of Mme Juliette Recamier, Ingres conception is nonetheless very much in a world of its own. Paintings of indolent, sensual slave or harem-girls (odalisques) were all the rage, stemming from stories of the exotic Arab world after France’s occupation of Morocco, but Ingres version of the subject follows its own rules. After hearing critics’ protestations of the exaggerated and eccentric anatomy of the figure, (declaring that she had at least three extra vertebrae) Ingres brusquely said that if he’d had to study anatomy, he would have never become a painter. The photographic intensity of detail, merged with an intensely beautiful surface and a figure both alert and absolutely languid calls for an image which lives purely in its own, inarguably compelling, cosmos.

The Comtesse d’Haussonville, oil, 1845. Though he took on portrait commissions more and more reluctantly later in his career, he managed to pour all of his gifts as a painter and story teller into these paintings, lending them a provocative and contemplative immediacy unmatched in his more “serious” works in history and mythology. The subject here, a well educated woman, was to publish later in her life a number of historical romances based on the lives of Lord Byron and the Irish revolutionary Robert Emmet. He finished the painting from a color sketch done from life in 1842, and agonized over the final completion of the portrait. The beautiful young woman seems to pause and consider us as we encroach upon her mysterious solitude. The cards on the dressing table indicate invitations and correspondences with the outside world, but we appear to be transfixed by her gaze into a magical, mirrored space, beyond normal time and activity.

Jean-Antoine Houdon, 1741-1828, George Washington 1788. France’s leading neoclassic sculptor, Houdon, gained, as many artists of the era did, an abiding appreciation for classicism after studying and working in Italy through the support of the Prix de Rome award. There he met and mingled with leading figures in the Italian movement, and brought its principles to bear on a number of portrait commissions for political leaders, ambassadors, and noted figures in the enlightenment such as Voltaire. An admirer of Houdon’s work, Benjamin Franklin, brought the French artist home to Virginia to memorialize the great hero of the American Revolution, Washington. The subject’s figure possesses both a sense of natural athleticism and of classical serenity, a man clearly able to act in concert with his own sense of liberty. He holds a multi-faceted bymbolic device, fasces: thirteen iron rods bundled with an axe face, an ancient Roman icon of authority, braced by a plowshare of peace. The object also alludes to the original thirteen colonies, and a bundle of arrows representing the League of the Iroquois, representing military solidarity and peacetime unity.

Giovanni Piranesi, 1720-78. Carceri, Etching, 1750. A family publishing company, founded by the patriarch Giovanni, produced scores of dramatically enhanced ruins of Rome and Italy, as well as fantastical architectural fictions, in an attempt to slake the growing French and English hunger for continuity with the great ancient past. They created their nostalgic pictures in high quantity and quality through the family business’s mastery of etching. The nations of Europe began building their unique histories, trying to connect their current events with those of the venerable past, such as in the Essays of Monaigne. This imaginary dungeon appealed to patrons’ taste for the complex and picturesque, creating a mood of fascination and fear typical of the concept of the Sublime.

Neoclassicism in America

It is entirely natural that the first grand artistic style in the new United States would be that of the Enlightenment. Neoclassicism took firm root in North America, especially in the architecture of all the new government buildings needed for the republic. Many early leaders in the first government were also members of the Freemasons, who were already fond of the neoclassic style during the eighteenth century in Europe.

Peter Harrison, 1716-75, Redwood Library, Newport, Rhode Island, 1749. This fastidious replica of a design from Palladio’s Four Books of Architecture, by the English born Harrison, brought a definitive neoclassic statement to American shores. The Doric Order, pedimented front porch would have been seen by Palladio as an appropriate architectural format for a serious building such as a library.

Thomas Jefferson 1743-1826, Monticello 1796-1806. The enigmatic enlightenment thinker, who both embraced brave, new democratic ideals, and owned slaves, was gifted with a precocious intellect and talents. He enjoyed designing architecture, and reveled in slowly building his home, attending to and perfecting every detail. The end product brought the grandiosity of neoclassicism into a more refined, and measured French style. His renovation of Monticello fused the heroism of Palladian neoclassicism with humbler materials such as brick in a more modest permutation, with the building more intimately tied into its setting.

Hiram Powers, 1805-73, The Greek Slave, 1843. Cincinnati born and trained, the self-named “Yankee Stonecutter” became the leading American Neoclassic artist of the era. In this work he honors the Greek natives’ struggle against invading Turks, later to be memorialized in the Romantic painter Delecroix’s work. This notorious work was the first American nude sculpture exhibited publicly, and was initially banned in Boston. Subsequently, its notoriety made it a popular exhibit item, traveling to New York and London, and eventually became one of the most attended exhibits at the first World Exposition in London’s Crystal Palace in 1851. It was duplicated numerous times in small scales, and is perhaps the world’s first mass produced souvenirs.

John Smilbert, 1688-1751, Dean George Berkeley and His Family, oil, 1729. As the wealth and sophistication of the residents of the colonies grew, their desire for complete cultural acoutrements grew as well. Smilbert was one of the first accomplished European artists to travel to America to fulfill the demand for classically rendered portraits. He immortalized the Anglican minister George Berkeley as he lays plans with his family to found a university in Bermuda. Solid as statues, the characters in the painting are arranged in a stable wedge, solidly posed in front of classical columns. His work was to influence the first important native colonial painter, Copley.

John Singelton Copley, 1738-1815, Mrs. Ezekiel Goldthwait, oil, 1771. One of the first important professional artists in America, Copley fulfilled the increasing demands for portrait commissions during the first self-consciously formed currents in the arts of the colonies. Employing the dominant upper-class style of neoclassicism, he places his subjects in respectable, luxurious settings, using his considerable skill at painting beautifully realistic texture to place these leaders of the new republic squarely in a stable environment. After moving to England during the Revolutionary war he eventually adopted a Romantic style, creating emotional and dramatic images of human struggle.

Neoclassicism and Rationalism in England

The Palladian-influenced architecture and stage design of Inigo Jones had made variations on classicism popular since the seventeenth century in England. Plays with classical themes such as “The Return from Parnassus,” written by two Cambridge students in 1602-2, had retained popularity throughout the following century, and painters, sculptors, and architects had delighted variously in classical-revivalists sentiments during the heyday of the Baroque and Rococo styles on the island. Neoclassism, however, enjoyed great popularity in England concurrently with the movement in Europe, and had greatly impacted the colonies’ adoption of the idiom. The style’s clearest and most faithful adherent, however, was an Italian trained, Swiss born woman, Angelica Kauffman.

Angelica Kauffman, Cornelia Pointing to her Children as Treasures, 1785. One of the first women admitted into the Royal Academy, and into the inner circle of Joshua Reynolds’ peers, Kauffman was the purest neoclassicist in the period in England. Here she blatantly sets her characters in a Greco-Roman setting, in classical attire, relating a story from Republican Rome. A wealthy visitor proudly displays her casket of jewels to Cornelia, who in turn points to her children as her greatest treasure. Angelica built a solid career in London with classical and historical paintings such as this.

Benjamin West, 1738-1820, The Death of General Wolfe 1770. This friend of Kauffman, anAmerican-born artist, studied in Rome in the acquaintance of Wincklemann, and began a career in neoclassic history painting in London as a member of the Royal Academy. West stunned friends, fellow academicians, and King George III with his rendition of this scene from the Seven Years’ War. He selected a dramatic moment when the British General Wolfe dies before discovering that his troops and allies were victorious over France for control of Canada, using lighting and compositional devices from his training as a neoclassicist. He made the unprecedented move of putting all the characters in the painting in contemporary dress, going against the norm of classical attire for subjects of historical weight. The scene is also frankly emotional, encouraging the viewer to empathize and linger in the emotional state of the protagonist. His approach was wildly popular with the public, and greatly admired by the dramatist David Garrick, who recreated the event of the painting in dramatic performance. Eventually accepted by the King and the academy, his new approach set a new precedent for the depiction of famous events, and paved the way for the acceptance of the nascent style of Romanticism.

Joseph Wright, 1734-97, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air-Pump, 1768. Having studied Italian art during his Grand Tour, Joseph Wright of Derby commenced to bring the clarity and sculptural integrity of neoclassicism to celebrated scientific subjects of the Enlightenment. He became a recorder of the exploits of the first-wave of industrialist entrepreneurs, glorifying the power of reason. Wright here documents the life and death context of scientific invention, giving the individual both power over and responsibility for nature. The scientist demonstrates the creation of a vacuum by pumping all of the air out of the glass sphere housing the bird; as the bird nears death, he releases the vacuum, illustrating the enlightened man’s mastery of nature, and women’s attachment to it.

A Philosopher Giving a Lecture at the Orrey (in which a lamp is put in place of the sun), oil, 1763-1765. Another of the artist’s depictions of education spilling the light of rationality over the physical universe, this precisely rendered illustration of science elevates the ideas of Newton to an almost religious sense of solemnity.

Richard Boyle, earl of Burlington and William Kent Chiswick House, near London, begun 1775. Palladian ideas come to full bloom in England with Boyle’s grand residence, which juxtaposes typically informal English gardens with the clarity and order of rational space, interval, and proportion.

Ironbridge, Coalbrookdale, 1777-79. A design originally sketched by bridge builder Robert Milne, and fully realized by Thomas Pritchard of Salisbury, the bridge over the river Severn is considered to be the first iron bridge. Its spidery framework replaced large, heavy masonry arches, celebrating the Enlightenment victory of reason over nature. Blast furnaces had begun to smelt iron ore in Shropshire as early as the seventeenth century, and the iron and steel industries grew rapidly there during the early Industrial Revolution: a perfect setting for this bold technological innovation.

Romanticism in England

A new emphasis on intense emotionalism pervaded all the arts in England during the nineteenth century. Plays addressing moral issues took on new vitality and power in the development of Melodrama; issues of right and wrong were presented as sharply divided, with a lone moral hero overcoming the forces of evil. The character of Figaro, an outgrowth of Harlequin, served as an archetype for melodramatic saviors, such as Jolly Jack Tar in England and Davy Crockett in America. The noble savage, or the man unencumbered by the corruption of too much society, presented himself in these plays as filled with virtuous revolutionary fervor. The productions of melodrama made use of swelling, dramatic musical accompaniment emphasizing pivotal spoken dialogue, a kind of emotional hyperventilation. The lone individual confronting overwhelming force summoned a new category of human experience, that of the Sublime: the sort of adrenaline rush of awe, terror, and fascination one feels when faced with great forces of nature. Edmund Burke defined this state of mind definitively in his influential “Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful” in 1756. The philosopher Kant promulgated the absolute liberty of the individual; the very personal drama of each person’s encounter with the forces of the world determining how one attains identity. Romanticism describes a range of art that concentrates on the exposition of this internal drama.

This movement takes its name from the rise in popularity of Romantic Novels, which evolved around the general pattern established by Horace Walpole, whose “Castle of Otranto,” published in 1784, laid out the basic elements of the genre. A haunted castle, occupied by ghosts of former inhabitants (representative of the fading power of the aristocracy), is ruled by a ruthless tyrant, and confronted by a virtuous hero, who generally saves beautiful and pitiful victims from degradation. These heroes were unmistakably Christ-like, and emerged as religious reformers like John Wesley, founder of the Methodist Society, preached a greatly simplified moral code to the hoards of rural workers entering the factories in the cities. Popular entertainment expressed the taste for great highs and lows evidenced in the high arts also: the Circus, which began during the reign of Louis XVI, was performed in great amphitheatres, such as the lavish battle spectacles staged in Astley’s Amphitheatre, which reenacted famous conflicts replete with whole squadrons of horsemen and discharge of large numbers of firearms and canon.

Literature was greatly affected by the melodrama; Mary Shelley expanded the disturbing qualities of the monstrosities in the castle, adding elements from contemporary science and society and exploiting popular fears surrounding them. Thomas Dibben, Mrs. Amelia Opie, Douglas Jerrold, and the anonymous author of Maria Marten: Murder in the Red Barn all established what we know would consider stock scenarios of individuals groping their way through difficult or tragic situations thrust upon them. Romanticism gave birth to the cult of the Victim.

George Stubbs, 1724-1806, Lion attacking a Horse 1770. Stubbs made his living by painting portraits of thoroughbred racehorses and their owners; he in fact wrote and illustrated a definitive volume on the anatomy of the horse. Based on his witness of a horse being killed by a lion on a visit to North Africa, he created this vivid image from memory. The stormy environment surrounding the struggling animals supports the tragic story unfolding before us. Instinctively we relate to the whiteness of the horse as a talisman of purity or goodness under assault by the ravenous abstract forces of nature. Compelled to examine the grisly event, we are drawing into an experience of the Sublime.

Henry Fuseli, 1741-1825, The Nightmare 1785-90. A contemporary of Benjamin West, Swiss-born Heinrich Fussli artist left the ministry at the age of 20, searching for more personal freedom. After traveled to Rome and becoming enamored of Michelangelo and the Mannerists, he finally settled in London, becoming acquainted with artists at the Royal Academy such as Reynolds. Superficially, he embraced the theories of Neoclassicism, but rejected the balance and measure of Poussin and Raphael for extremity of expression and emotional content. His well-known taste for outrageous had its roots in his family of origin, who shared a notorious taste for the irrational and exotic. He created more than one version of this image, his depiction of the story of the incubus, a demon who traveled on the back of a wild horse at night (Night-Mare), sitting on the breasts of young virgins, bringing them frightening erotic dreams. Fuseli perhaps here illustrates his own rejection by his beloved, a young woman who, much to his distress, married a merchant. He informed her that her marriage was would be unlawful since he had already made love to her in a dream, therefore rightfully claiming her as his bride. He cursed her, declaring that she would in the end die a spinster due to her betrayal.

William Blake, 1757-1827. Although Blake never left England, he fully absorbed Michelangelo’s figurative style through engraved copies of the master’s work. A visionary recluse, he claimed to have been regularly visited by angels and spririts since he was a child; his mother supposedly beat him soundly after he informed her that he had clearly seen the prophet Ezekiel sitting in a tree. Holding open house for any visiting spirits every night from two to six a.m., he drew heavily from his visions and prophesies for stories and images. Repelled by the dry academicism of his enemy Joshua Reynolds, Blake claimed to have been taught to draw by a spirit, for whom he drew a portrait. Making a very modest living as an engraver, he filled much of his time illustrating his versions of Dante’s Divine Comedy and the Bible, and his own poetry and theological and prophetic books. The painter-poet battled his entire life with what he saw as stifling Enlightenment establishments and philosophies, taking great issue with the materialism of Kant, Newton, Reynolds, and others, crying out for the primacy of imagination.

Isaac Newton, etching and watercolor, 1795. Blake accused the scientist Sir Isaac Newton of falling prey to “single sight,” seeing only the material aspect of the world, so in chaining the spirit to its limitations. The Freemason Newton becomes so fascinated here to the earth his measuring of experience with his Masonic calipers (finding god through structure rather than nature) that he is in immanent danger of fatal absorption into gross matter. Newton doubles over, in his subterranean cavern, moving more towards the animal realm than the spiritual realm of humanity. He created a number of prints in this style, using what he called “the Infernal Method,” etching away the metal plate in relief, rather than in the traditional intaglio technique of removing the areas to be printed. Blake then hand-colored each image with watercolor, creating in the end a richly textured, luminous surface.

Nebuchanezzar, etching and watercolor, 1795. In the biblical account of the arrogant Babylonian king Nebuchanezzar, the tyrant is condemned to life as a beast in the field for presuming to rebuild the sinful city. It is as if the figure of Newton has fallen on all fours, and started to transmute into some strange underwater being. The king shrieks in horror as his materialism overtakes him.

The Ancient of Days, etching and watercolor, 1795. Blake envisioned the universe to have been created by a morally ambiguous being, one which placed his creation in the midst of irreconcilable dilemmas, with all pleasures suspect and problematic. God the creator (also known by Blake as Old Nobodaddy, a cruel father) forms the earth with his left hand, a symbol of selfish intent, with Blake’s symbol of limitation, the Freemason’s calipers. His criticisms of Newton and soulless science may have been as much political as spiritual; members of the Freemasons exerted a great deal of control over cultural, religious, and political institutions, making professional success much more difficult for nonmembers such as Blake. His conception of the distant, moralizing Father also prefigures for some the psychological idea of the Superego, the harsh parental voice present in all of us.

Whirlwind of Lovers from Dante’s Inferno, watercolor, 1824-27. For Blake, to be taken out of the picture plane is to be freed from the limitations of time and space imposed by the Creator. Dante and Beatrice stop to speak to the legendary illicit lovers Paolo and Francesca, while other couples fly in a delicate Celtic knot into free space. He has reinterpreted the poetry of Dante into a meditation on contemporary problems of morality, pleasure, and freedom.

The Four Zoas, watercolor, 1820. Several of Blake’s books outline his personal, transcendent cosmology and symbolic recreation of the universe. Here his depicts what he calls the four Zoas, or aspects of humanity: physical, emotional, spiritual, and imaginative. In this vision of unity, all things broken and finite are swept up in an exhilarating symbiosis.

Joseph Mallord William Turner, 1775-1851. An ardent watercolorist, Turner brought his skill at building up layers of luminescent color into his depictions of atmospheric conditions of land and sea views. He weaves an unmistakable tapestry of the Sublime, placing human interests and emotions completely at the mercy of fire, storm, and wind. As with other artists of the day, he began to use melodramatic news events, such as shipwrecks, as a subject matter conducive to his interests as a painter. In his work the human endeavor always exists in a tenuous space, always at risk of being entirely and irrevocably swept away.

The Fighting “Temeraire,” Tugged to Her Last Berth to Be Broken Up, oil, 1838. Turner often evoked the melancholy inherent in the passing of time and human affairs and achievement. The “Temeraire” had been a pivotal ship in a British naval victory over Napoleon, but here is towed away into obscurity by a new steam-driven tugboat. The beautiful immaterial surfaces reflect and disperse light and form, an elegiac visual metaphor for the transience of culture.

The Slave Ship, oil, 1840. Originally entitled “Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying,” this painting demonstrates the artist’s interest in uniting intense, real human emotion with color and atmosphere. In the actual event, the captain of a slave ship threw the sick victims of an onboard epidemic into the raging sea; since he had taken out insurance on his “cargo,” he was unconcerned as to their fate. Sharks devour the victims as they struggle and drown as the ship framed against the bloody sky appears equally at risk. The coldness of the green water vibrates against the hot colors, accentuating the roiling violence of the scene.

John Constable, 1776-1837, Wivenhoe Park, Essex, oil, 1820.The great master of English Romantic Naturalism, Constable became a member of the Royal Academy, working his way up from his origins as a miller’s son. His intimacy with the rural landscape of his youth lent him an affection and a natural empathy for the forms of the English landscape that never left him. Although his work is truly a part of the continuum of nineteenth century English landscape shared with the more theatrical Turner, he had little use for the liberties that his contemporary took with color and texture.

John Nash, 1752-1835, Royal Pavilion, Brighton, England, 1815-1818. Architects also began to give free reign to fantasy and orientalist sentiments; taking visual language from their colony in India, the playful forms served as an appropriate backdrop for elegant outdoor entertainments of the British elites.

Charles Barry and A.W.N Pugin, Houses of Palriament, London, 1835. After the burning of the original houses of Parliament, the Commission opened a competition for the new buildings, stipulating that they either be Elizabethan or Gothic. The winners of the job, Barry and Pugin, spoke to the current English taste for Medieval styles, which represented for them a lost purity and spiritual integrity. The ethos of experimentation in various historical and cultural style fashionable on the green isle ironically served as a platform for a kind of native nostalgia in this monument to the rationality of English Government.

Joseph Paxton, Crystal Palace, London, 1850-1851. Created in the new “undraped” style, which used minimal metal structure and maximum glass shell, Paxton built a space worthy of the Great Exhibition of 1851. A celebration of the products of the Industrial Revolution, the Exhibitions became a sort of international competition, with nations competing for the display of the most progressive philosophy and technology. A modern basilica, a temple to industry, the building was so popular that it was rebuilt in a permanent setting after the close of the temporary exposition.

Romanticism in France and Spain

The Romantic movement in France is bound tightly with the principles of the revolution and the writings of the Philosophes. Although the first generation of Romanticists trained under such conservative figures as Ingres, they embraced an entirely different aesthetic and lifestyle. Their paintings and sculpture often celebrated the passionate, heroic victim, subject to bouts of uncontrollable emotion, and the artists themselves, such as Delecriox, tended to live lives of abandon, continuing the ambience of the revolutionaries they admired, bravely storming one Bastille after another. Artists exemplified, at least in image, the epitome of the new “Bohemian,” a sort of aesthetic refugee, victim of the Bourgeoisie’s cooption of the Revolution for mere profit. Their work glorified desperate moral struggle, and the closeness of intense pleasure, pain, and death.

Modest middle-class behavior and deportment was born in the time between the Revolution of 1789 and the worker’s rebellion of 1848. This was clearly expressed in patterns of theatrical patronage. Highly place men of the Old Regime routinely kept theatre women openly as mistresses, and demonstrated their carnal relationships with extravagant public displays of expensive gifts of jewels and clothing, whereas successful men would be disgraced in the republic if they openly celebrated their liaisons. It was counterrevolutionary for a man to be clearly and financially in thrall to a seductive actress in the new age, and anonymous bouquets of flowers became the fashionable encore gift to shower on the stars of the nineteenth century stage. To emphasize their progressive, rational, masculine philosophy, the power class, the “Notables,” supported arts that expressed the respectability of the new order, distancing itself from the feminine, satisfied, and decadent Bourbon legacy. The visual arts emphasized action, moral drama, and a clear presence of right and wrong within the narrative or subject presented. It was fine to indulge one’s appetite for the hedonistic excess of the savage people of the Orient, for example, as long as it was understood that the sensuality depicted was something to be avoided, not experienced. The taste of this new middle-class dominated French artistic production during the July Monarchy.

The powerful influence of both Bourbon and Napoleonic France on Spain is painfully evident in the work of Francesco Goya, who criticized the irrational waste of life engendered by grandiose political schemes. The intricacy of the two country’s fates during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is brought into relief by the fact that Beaumarchais’s “Figaro,” a blatant attack on the excesses of the monarchy of France, was set in Spain, no doubt so that the French playwright could diffuse persecution, but the play also points to the similarities of the fates of common French and Spanish peoples during this era of rampant abuse of power.

Henri Labrouste, reading room of the Biblioteque Nationale, Paris, 1843-1850. Using a unique fusion of modern materials and classical decorative motifs, Labrouste created an airy modern space dedicated to the expansion of learning. The structural strength of modern metals enabled a kind of Gothic celebration of light.

Jean Gros, 1771-1835, Napoleon in the Plague House of Jaffa 1804.Although David had been active in the Revolution, and was appointed as official portraitist to the emperor, his brightest students soon began to overshadow the master in their dramatic depictions of Napoleon’s exploits, especially in exotic parts of the world. During the French army’s siege on Jaffa, on the Mediterranean coast, the bubonic plague broke out in the ranks. In an effort to calm the sick and dying, and to boost morale, the great emperor supposedly strode fearlessly into the house of pestilence to mingle among the patients, offering succor. In fact Napoleon had order the execution of hundreds of infected soldiers, to lighten the load and keep the campaign moving. With superb control of light and shadow, Gros lingers over engaging details of costume, architecture, and suffering bodies. He brings a new interest on “local color,” depicting the journalistic and at times sensationalistic events captivating the public imagination of France. The painting in effect begins the growing trend in Orientalism, fantastic depictions of the strange, beautiful, savage, and sensual life Europeans imagined were being lived by the peoples of the near and far east. Gros remained torn between his own neo-baroque interests, and loyalty to his master, David’s, insistence on a return to the principles of neoclassisicm. Unable to reconcile his internal contradictions, he died by his own hand in 1835.

Theodore Gericault, 1791-1824, Raft of the “Medusa”, 1818-19. Increasingly French artists began to work in a style more derivative of Rubens and Michelangelo than Poussin, breaking away from the traditions of the Davidian academy of neoclassism. Gericault, a great admirer of Gros, was fascinated by extremities of human experience. A good friend of Dr. Georget, a pioneer in psychiatry, he visited the insane asylum in Paris, rendering a starkly realistic view of the human misery he found there. His short career was punctuated by a remarkable breakthrough painting, a presentation of a famous shipwreck of the day. The “Medusa,” a government ship, gained notoriety when the incompetent and cruel captain that had thrown hundreds of men overboard when his ship fell into danger. Gericault researched the subject tirelessly, interviewing the few survivors, studied corpses in the morgue, and even build a scale model of the raft to achieve accuracy. After doing a number of studies, the artist presents the tragedy from a unique point of view. The perspective of the raft is tipped towards the viewer, allowing us to see a range of experience on the makeshift lifeboat, from the dead, dying, and despairing at the back half, to the hopeful and ecstatic at the front. We are part of a rarified moment, at which some of the passengers sight a rescue ship on the horizon. By placing most of the figures in positions facing away from us, the artist draws us into the scene, straining with the desperate victims to raise our hands to be seen. Representing both real, raw, contemporary human life, and symbolically the emotional reality of all of humanity (we’re all in the same boat), this work epitomizes Romantic concerns of the human struggle for life, emotion and empathic response. It also functions as a political broadside; the captain was an appointee under the Napoleonic monarchy, of which the artist was very critical.

Eugene Delecroix, 1798-1863. Gericault’s premature death after a horse riding accident in 1824, along with the first exhibition of English Romantic painters in France in the same year, had dramatic impact on young artists such as Delecroix. Although he had been a devoted pupil to Ingres, Delecriox emerged as the dominant representative of a clear style in competition with the older master’s serene classicism. Artists and critics rallied around the new master of Neo-Baroque painting, and he willingly led the charge. He was drawn to subjects of brutality, sadomasochistic sensuality, and oriental drama and opulence.

Scenes from the Massacre at Chios 1822-24. The artist’s reputation was made with his 1824 submission to the Salon, a depiction of an 1822 massacre which happened during the Greek war of Independence from Turkey. Delecroix based his painting on eyewitness reports, journalistic accounts, and samples of Greek and Turkish clothing. The artist presents the Turkish fleet wreaking vengeance on the on the peaceful Greeks inhabitants of the island of Chios. During this stopover on their voyage home, the Turks killed or enslaved all the people on the island. Delecroix, among other things, indulges in lavishly seductive images of pain and suffering, lingering over every detail, exploiting every opportunity for gripping emotion. Ingres was said to be so disgusted after seeing this painting in the Salon exhibition that he refused to speak or even look at his bright former pupil for the rest of his life.

The Death of Saranapaulous,, oil, 1827. Delecroix became also a popular and controversial illustrator, often depicting vivid scenes of suffering and injustice in volumes of lithographs. Here, in a scene from Lord Byron’s verse drama about the wealthy and ruthless Arabian rule Saranapaulous, the artist makes us both horrified and titillated by an image of gratuitous carnage. In the face of immanent defeat by an enemy, the sultan orders all his entourage murdered to avoid its being captured by the enemy. Tortured into various erotic poses by warriors, the helpless harem girls become, for the viewer, ultimate vulnerable victims.

Dante and Virgil in Hell, oil, 1822. Though the end of the Napoleonic campaigns reduced the amount of actual sensationalistic subjects, Delecroix could always count on his favorite authors to put him in the right frame of mind. Dante and his guide the Roman poet Virgil enter the Inferno on the turbulent river Styx, crowded with damned souls churning the water with their suffering.

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, 1796-1875. Camille Corot can be thought of as the first French Romantic landscape artist. His early style drew from the landscape tradition of Claude Lorrain and Nicholas Poussin, as well as his English contemporary Constable; he in fact traveled to Italy and painted studies of the landscape around Rome much as Claude had done. Clear, broad planes of light and shade and clearly defined, receding perspective space mark his initial body of mature landscape work. As his career evolved, and as interest grew in the loose school of painters immersing themselves in the idyllic landscape around Barbizon, his manner took a completely unique turn. Instead of recording just the setting, or a fantasy surrounding the setting, each painting began to take on emotion seeming to emanate from the trees, meadows, and skies themselves. Edges disperse into soft contour, derived from observation, but seeming to defy staying in one, present moment. Corot’s arboretums whisper and sway in the wind, making us feel that we are part of a constantly shifting conception of time itself.

A View Near Rome, oil, 1827. In 1825 Corot visited Rome, and spent two years painting the area surrounding the ancient city. These works show the artist clearly defining forms in light and shade, in a more traditional manner, but concentrating on an almost nostalgic sense of light.

Morning, oil, 1840. Edges disperse, light suffuses every surface, and all matter seems caressed by an ancient, delicious aura of serenity in Corot’s mature style. More and more, he sought to paint not the truth of the place, but, as he put it “the truth of the moment.” After twenty years of obscurity, he achieved great success, and was patronized and lionized by the French public and Academy by the end of his life. Like his paintings, though, he always apparently hung on to a humble, unassuming demeanor, content to share a vision of the world beyond just his own personality.

Theodore Rousseau, 1812-1867, A Meadow Bordered by Trees, oil, 1840-45. Many artists were inspired by Corot’s idea of an individual vision of the landscape. French naturalist Rousseau, who came to be the spiritual father of the Barbizon school of painters, sought to render the space delineated by landscape as a meditative refuge. The Baribizon artists, as well as the middle class of Paris, found refuge in the landscape at the edge of Fontainbleau from the increasing congestion, squalor, and chaos of the burgeoning city. Rousseau’s tender paintings seem to call the viewer forth, tempting to take one more step, then another, into the welcoming bower.

Francois Rude, 1784-1855, Departure of the Volunteers (the Marseillaise), stone, 1833-36. In an attempt to reconcile Napoleonic, Bourbon, and Revolution interests, the leader of the so-called July Monarchy (1830-48), Louis-Phillipe, took up the completion of a victory arch begun by Napoleon in 1806 as a gesture of unity. Rude, originally, like David, was an ardent admirer of Napoleon, and retuned from his in Brussels to Paris and won the competition for the arch’s sculptural decoration. Commemorating the volunteer army that turned back the Prussian invasion of France in 1792-93, Rude’s piece innovatively combined neoclassic form (nude and symbolic figures) with Romantic surging emotion. The compact spaces around the figures threatens to explode at any moment, with the vitality and virtue of the soldiers almost audibly emerging from the female figure of victory, known as a Marianne, a virtuous and patriotic female character in the popular play La Marseillaise, which dramatized life in Paris during the Franco-Prussian war.

Francisco Goya, 1746-1828. When Francisco Goya arrived in Madrid in 1766, he was confronted with two influential contemporary artists exploring very different avenues of expression: Mengs and Tiepolo. He was immediately drawn to the dynamism and imagination of Teipolo, and emulated the Venetian master’s style. As he experienced the art and thought of Europe at the height of the Enlightenment, he “jumped over” the neoclassical approach in favor of a style and subjects that appealed to human emotion. His playful, early Rococo style helped to win him a position as court painter of Charles the IV of Spain, whose politics he frankly did not share.

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, aquatint and etching, 1798. Goya was adept at the latest printmaking techniques, and employed them masterfully to express his personal responses to injustices, horrors, outrages, and tragedies brought forth by the Napoleonic wars. In this terrifying image, he illustrates what occurs when the imagination is not harmoniously united with reason; naught but monsters will arise.

The Family of Charles IV, oil, 1800. After taking up his post with the court, Goya abandoned the lightness of his early Rococo brush, opting for the chiaroscuro and intensity of a Neo-Baroque style similar to Delecroix and Gericault. He presents a startlingly revelatory image of a group of sad, doomed royalty, so blinded by the beauty of their clothing and decorations that they are unaware of the vacuity of their own faces. There is surely no more ironic royal portrait in the history of art.

Third of May 1808, 1814-15. Although Goya was not likely an eyewitness, he portrays the poetic soul of two pivotal and nightmarish days in Spanish history. On May second, citizens, enraged by rumors that Joseph Bonaparte’s troops intended to assassinate the royal family, they rebelled against the occupying soldiers. The following night, a group of soldiers exacts revenge by executing the entire family of a banker who allegedly shot a Moorish warrior working for French interest. Goya evokes compassion not so much for a particular political point of view, but makes a plea for humanity in general.

Saturn Devouring his Child, 1820. In the twilight of his career, Goya, after going deaf, and struggling with poor health, withdrew from society. He began a series of paintings which were only exhibited in his house until after his death. He seems to despair of hope for humanity’s ability to overcome its violence and penchant for self-destruction in these works, with image after image portraying human beings in bondage to large, abstract forces. Using the classic story of Saturn, old father-god of the Roman universe, the artist depicts him eating with disgusting and horrified lust, his own child, out of fear and jealousy: an appropriate symbol of Spain devouring and destroying itself with civil war. In spite of the despair encased in these final works, they still strike a note of empathy for these poor, foolish, lost creatures.

Romanticism in Germany

The Sturm and Drang (storm and stress) literary movement took place in Germany during the intense transitional period of 1770-87, during which a rebellion took place against the aridity of Neoclassic forms of art. “Goetz van Berlichingen,” written by the young poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), an influential new play based on the memoirs of a famous sixteenth-century German knight was an important factor in the genesis of this movement. A wide range of artists rediscovered German Gothic style in around 1800, and it inspired a new generation to consider the arts, their functions, and their forms, in a variety of innovative manners. The ideas encased in Goethe’s poetry and published theories on the arts in particular influenced a broad range of writers, artists, and composers, including Franz Joseph Hadyn, who drew directly from Sturm and Drang, and the precocious Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Goethe wrote a new theory of color, in opposition to Newton, which united color with the expression of emotion, emphasizing the contrast of dichotomies than simple use of the spectrum.

Caspar David Friedrich, 1774-1840. For the greatest artists of the era, such as Friederich, the medieval-revivalist ideas of German Romanticism was not a limitation to particular scenarios and narratives, but untapped avenues of spirituality and emotion. Friedrich, a devoted Protestant, found poignant expression of his natural, pantheistic spirituality in images of the landscape in extremis. Perhaps no other artist before or since has been able to imbue natural settings with such intense empathy for human emotion, and perhaps no more direct example of the Sublime. In his paintings humanity is small, the grandeur of God overpowering. His style evolved in Dresden, a city dominated at the time by a sort of stoic Prussian Neoclassicism; there his work became a lightning rod for energy surrounding the new, emotion-laden style.

Abbey in an Oak Forest, oil, 1809-10. This elegiac statement appears to depict human consciousness at the moment of its meeting with death itself. Strong but gnarled oaks encircle a vestige of symbolic resurrection, a solitary abbey window, overarched by a vast space, not really sky melting into not really land: this is a place beyond time. Crosses on graves here and there constitute a gentle counterpoint to the heavy sleepiness of the setting, where only the “eye” represented by the window hints at awareness capable of transcending the dense, cold, pillow of Thanatos.

The Polar Sea, oil, 1824. Like other Romanticists, Friedrich used contemporary events to explore and demonstrate spiritual notions of the Sublime. Based on an event from William Parry’s Arctic expedition of 1819-20, this painting allows the monumental slabs of ice heaved on top of one another to create a eulogy to the contrast of human and divine will. Only a few humble shards of the ship remain, torn asunder and scattered around the monolithic ice-pile, which moves slowly but inexorably onward. Tragedy is made, somehow, strangely beautiful and tender.

Phillip Otto Runge, 1777-1810, Morning, oil, 1808. Runge attended the Copenhagen academy shortly after Friedrich, but used his received tutelage of transcendent neoclassicism to quite different ends. The highlight of his brief career, a series of allegorical paintings involving the times of day, a sort of Romanticist Book of Hours, gives form to the abstract emotions lying at the heart of features of nature, such as color. He seems to try to paint portraits of the spirits within colors, reminiscent clearly of Goethe’s color theory. Here, he envisioned the spirituality underlying nature hinted at by Friedrich, but gives each entity an angelic shape. The universe, for Runge, would seem to be endless layers of benevolent consciousness, each one integrated and complementary with the other. Like William Blake, he represents not so much the spirit itself, but the yearning for that spirit, conveying the fervent faith that something magnificent, indeed, lies just beyond our fingertips.

Romanticism in America

One could argue that Romanticism is the first artistic style to take on truly unique expression in the hands of American artists. During the Nationalistic presidency of Andrew Jackson, patrons in the United States began to encourage artists to embrace subject and styles distinct from the then dominant academicism inherited from Joshua Reynolds. American art took on a grand vision, one which celebrated the vastness of its landscape, and the variety and entrepreneurial spirit of its people.

Thomas Cole, 1801-48, The Oxbow, oil, 1836. An English émigré and admirer of Turner, Thomas Cole began his career at the age of seventeen as an engraver. He learned painting, however, from an itinerant Midwestern limner, and began taking solitary sketching trips in the wilds of New York state along the Hudson River. He soon developed a great gift for “view” paintings, visual descriptions of the new, uniquely American landscape, becoming the leading figure of what would be known as the Hudson River School of painting. Imbuing dramatic, apocryphal compositions of wild lands with rich, moody light and atmosphere, he gave every American viewer the feeling that they, personally, had just discovered this marvelous land.

Frederick Edwin Church, 1826-1900, Niagara, oil, 1857. Cole’s only student, inspired in part by the popularity of diorama painting, created this massive painting of the upstate New York waterfall. A transcendent mix of lofty, awe-inspiring grandeur and true-to-life naturalism, the image of the falls clings to the horizon as it conquers it in a great flourish. The painting was wildly popular, and toured from city to city like a sideshow attraction.

Twilight in the Wilderness, oil, 1860’s. The Hudson River School’s philosophy of natural transcendence is in full force here, hinting at a serene and glorious world beyond the horizon, perhaps beyond the chaos of the contemporary civil war.

Albert Bierstadt, 1830-1902, Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California, oil, 1868. Born in Germany and trained at the Dusseldorf Academy, the expatriate Bierstadt accompanied a group of army engineers in1958-59 who had been commissioned to map a route from St Louis to the Pacific Ocean. He made voluminous sketches and studies of the incredible geography of the wilderness, documenting scenes from the largest wilderness refuges that had ever been created. Returning to his studio, he made dramatic and breathtaking compositions, heightening the effects of light and atmosphere, and occasionally moving around a mountain or two, to achieve overpowering dramatic effects. These were the images that helped propel settlers from the safety of the existing states into the little known territorial holdings of the U.S..

George Caleb Bingham, 1811-79, Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, oil, 1845. Bingham was one of the first members of the Artist’s Union in New York City, artists trying to promote and develop a purely American style of art. Taking the lessons he had learned as part of the Hudson River School west, traveling along the great Missouri river to experience and document the frontier. These traders seem to be adrift in time and space, inhabiting a world of exotic and magical grace. Paintings like this sparked Americans’ imaginations, helping to muster enthusiasm for the conquest of the continent.

John J Audubon, 1785-1851, Wild Turkey, watercolor, 1826-29. Educated in France as a naturist, he turned his attention to the incredible variety of native plants and animals making his father’s Pennsylvania estate home. In one sense, his posthumous illustrations of animals, such as this uniquely American bird, the Turkey, are austere scientific depictions of perceived fact, but, Audubon lent an elegant and restless sense of design and movement to his observations. A clear intent underlies his work, that, these are not just specimens, they are visions of divine beauty, life, and order.

George Catlin, 1796-1872, Old Bear, a Medicine Man, watercolor, 1832.Caitlin approached his study of the native peoples with the same kind of acute sense of respectful observation as Audubon had done with the flora and fauna. Beginning as a portraitist in Philadelphia, he moved to St. Louis in 1830, and used it as a base for his many forays into the vast lands west of the Mississippi. He gives his subjects the dignity of royalty, faithfully recording their faces and clothing, and made careful notes about the manner and meaning of their construction. He exhibited his voluminous studies in 1837 as “The Indian Gallery;” the collection was purchased in 1879 by the Smithsonian Institute.

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