Romanticism
(c. 1810 - c. 1840)
Back to
Neo-Classical Art
Forward to Realism /
Naturalism
Romanticism
is a European and American movement extending from about 1800 to 1850.
Romanticism cannot be identified as a single style, technique, or attitude, but
Romantic painting is generally characterized by a highly imaginative and
subjective approach, emotional intensity, and a dream-like or visionary quality.
Whereas Classical and Neo-Classical art is calm and restrained in feeling, and
clear and complete in expression, Romantic art characteristically strives to
express by suggestion states of feeling too intense, mystical, or elusive to be
clearly defined. Thus, the German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann declared "infinite
longing" to be the essence of Romanticism. In their choice of subject
matter, artists of the Romantic Movement showed an affinity with nature,
especially its wild and mysterious aspects, and for exotic, melancholy and
melodramatic subjects likely to evoke awe or passion.
18th-Century Background
The word "Romantic" first became current in 18th-century English
and originally meant "romance-like", i.e. resembling the
strange and fanciful character of medieval romances. The word came to be
associated with the emerging taste for wild scenery, "sublime"
prospects, and ruins, a tendency reflected in the increasing emphasis in
aesthetic theory on the sublime as opposed to the beautiful. The British
writer and statesman Edmund Burke, for instance, identified beauty with
delicacy and harmony, and the sublime with vastness, obscurity, and a
capacity to inspire terror. Also during the 18th century, feeling began to
be considered more important than reason both in literature and in ethics,
an attitude epitomized in the work of the French philosopher Jean-Jacques
Rousseau.
|
English and German Romantic poetry appeared in the 1790s, and by
the end of the century the shift away from reason towards feeling and
imagination began to be reflected in the visual arts, for instance in the
visionary illustrations of the English poet and painter William Blake, in
the brooding, sometimes nightmarish pictures of his friend, the
Swiss-English painter Henry Fuseli, and in the sombre etchings of monsters
and demons by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya.
|
|
France
In France the formative stage of Romanticism coincided with the Napoleonic
Wars (1799-1815), and the first French Romantic painters found their
inspiration in contemporary events. Antoine-Jean Gros began the transition
from Neo-Classicism to Romanticism by moving away from the sober style of
his teacher, Jacques-Louis David, to a more colourful and emotional style,
influenced by the Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens, which he
developed in a series of battle paintings glorifying Napoleon.
The main
figure in French Romanticism was Théodore
Géricault, who carried further
the dramatic, colouristic tendencies of Gros's style and who shifted the
emphasis of battle paintings from heroism to suffering and endurance. In
his Wounded Cuirassier (1814) a soldier limps off the field as rising
smoke and descending clouds seem to impinge on his figure. The powerful
brushstrokes and conflicting light and dark tones heighten the sense of
his isolation and vulnerability, which for Géricault and many other
Romantics constituted the essential human condition.
-
France 1962. First Day Cover by Jean Louis Theodore
Géricault. The cover is cancelled in Rouen, the artist's birth
place. Further the cancel gives the title of the painting "Officier
de chasseurs à cheval". The artist died only 33 years old, when
he fell from a galloping horse.
|
|
Géricault's immediate successor was the greatest French
Romantic painter, Eugène Delacroix, in his Massacre at Chios (1824). Delacroix often took his
subjects from literature, but he aimed at transcending literary or
didactic significance by using colour to create an effect of pure energy
and emotion that he compared to music.
Rejecting the Neo-Classical
emphasis on form and outline, he used half-tones derived not from
darkening a colour but from juxtaposing that colour and its complement.
The resulting effect of energetic vibration was intensified by his long,
nervous brushstrokes.
His Death of Sardanapalus (1827), inspired by a work
by the English Romantic poet Lord Byron, is precisely detailed, but the
action is so violent and the composition so dynamic that the effect is one
of chaos engulfing the immobile and indifferent figure of the dying king. Read more about
Delacroix on this site
|
Germany
German Romantic painting, like German Romantic poetry and philosophy, was
inspired by a conception of nature as a manifestation of the divine. This led to
a school of symbolic landscape painting, initiated by the mystical and
allegorical paintings of Philipp Otto Runge. Its greatest exponent, and the
greatest German Romantic painter, was Caspar David Friedrich, whose meditative
landscapes, painted in a lucid and meticulous style, hover between a subtle
mystical feeling and a sense of melancholy, solitude, and estrangement. His
Romantic pessimism is most directly expressed in Polar Sea (1824); the remains
of a wrecked ship are barely visible beneath a pyramid of ice slabs that seems a
monument to the triumph of nature over human aspiration.
Another school of German Romantic painting was formed by the
Nazarenes, a group of artists who attempted to recover the style and spirit of
medieval religious art; its leading figure was Johann Friedrich Overbeck.
Notable among later artists in the German Romantic tradition was the Austrian
Moritz von Schwind, whose subjects were drawn from Germanic mythology and fairy
tales.
England and Ireland
In England, as in Germany, landscapes suffused with Romantic feeling
became the chief expression of Romantic painting but the English artists
were more innovative in style and technique. Samuel Palmer painted
landscapes distinguished by an innocent simplicity of style and a
visionary religious feeling derived from Blake.
|
John Constable, turning
away from the wild natural scenery associated with many Romantic poets and
painters, infused quiet English landscapes with profound feeling.
The
first major artist to work in the open air, he achieved a freshness of
vision through the use of luminous colours and bold, thick brushwork. J.
M. W. Turner achieved the most radical pictorial vision of any Romantic
artist. Beginning with landscapes reminiscent of the 17th-century French
painter Claude Lorrain, he became, in such later works as Snow Storm:
Steam Boat Off a Harbour's Mouth (1842), almost entirely concerned with
atmospheric effects of light and colour, mixing clouds, mist, snow, and
sea into a vortex in which all distinct objects are dissolved.
|
|
An interesting painter of this period from The Republic of
Ireland is William Mulready (1786-1863). He was the son of a leather breeches
maker. He married Elizabeth Varley, a landscape painter and sister of the
landscape and architectural watercolourist John Varley. However, they later
separated. They had four sons. The eldest, Paul Augustus (1805-1864), was the
father of the painter Augustus Edwin Mulready. William (1805-1878) and Michael
(1807-1889) were also painters. Mulready studied at the Royal Academy, and
initially began to paint historical genre and landscapes but then turned to
genre scenes inspired by David Wilkie and Dutch seventeenth century masters such
as Adriaen van Ostade and Pieter de Hooch, e.g. which won him critical acclaim.
Many of his later works concern the subject of childhood and education. Two
Mulready-stamps have been issued world wide, one in commemoration of his 200th
birth anniversary, and one in connection with a series of Love Stamps issued by
Eire.
|
|
|
Later he adopted a white ground and more luminous palette, creating a
precedent for the technique of the later Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In 1848,
the year of the founding of the PRB, a retrospective exhibition of the work of
Mulready was held at the Society of Arts. He also taught, painted theatrical
scenery and worked as an illustrator. He exhibited at the Royal Academy, British
Institution and Society of British Artists between 1804 and 1862. In 1815 he was
elected an associate of the Royal Academy, becoming a full member in the
following year. Being recognized as the designer of Sir Rowland Hill's first
stamped envelope, Mulready is of particular interest to philately.
The United States
The major manifestation of American Romantic painting was the Hudson River
School, which found its inspiration in the rugged wilderness of the north-east
United States. Washington Allston, the first American landscapist, introduced
Romanticism to the United States by filling his poetic landscapes with
subjective feeling. The leading figure of the Hudson River School was the
English-born painter Thomas Cole, whose depictions of primeval forests and
towering peaks convey a sense of moral grandeur. Cole's pupil Frederick Church
adapted the Hudson River style to South American, European, and Palestinian
landscapes.
Late Romanticism
Towards the middle of the 19th century, Romantic painting began to move
away from the intensity of the original movement. Among the outstanding
achievements of late Romanticism are the quiet, atmospheric landscapes of
the French Barbizon School, which included Camille Corot and Théodore
Rousseau. In England, after 1850, the Pre-Raphaelites revived the
medievalizing mission of the German Nazarenes.
- France 1996. Camille Corot: "The Bridge of Narni"
(1826 -- Louvre)
- Monaco 1996 Camille Corot "Self-Portrait". (Uffizi)
- France 1977. Camille Corot "The Bridge in
Mantes" (1868 -- Louvre)
Influence
The influence of Romanticism on subsequent painting has been pervasive. A
line can be traced from Constable through the Barbizon School to Impressionism,
but a more direct descendant of Romanticism was the Symbolist Movement, which in
various ways intensified or refined the Romantic Movement's characteristics of
subjectivity, imagination, and strange, dream-like imagery. In the 20th century
Expressionism and Surrealism have carried these tendencies still further. In a
sense, however, virtually all modern art can be said to derive from Romanticism,
for modern assumptions about the primacy of artistic freedom, originality, and
self-expression in art were originally conceived by the Romantics in opposition
to traditional classical principles of art.
Sources and links:
-
Microsoft Encarta 2002.
-
Encyclopedia Britannica 2002.
-
E.H. Gombrich: "Story of the Art" (Danish edition,
ISBN 87-01-79921-3).
-
William
Mulready Biography
Painters and artists from the Romantic period, listed in alphabetical
order. Those marked with an asterisk are represented on this page.
-
Blake, William (British painter)
-
Constable, John (British painter) *
-
Corot, Camille (French painter) *
-
Daumier, Honoré (French painter and sculptor)
-
Delacroix, Eugene (French
painter)
-
Gericault, Théodore (French painter) *
-
Goya, Francisco (Spanish
painter)
|
-
Lundbye, Johan Thomas (Danish painter)
-
Millet, Jean-Francois (French painter)
-
Mulready, William (Irish painter) *
-
Skovgaard, Peter Christian (Danish painter)
-
Stubbs, George (British painter)
-
Turner, Joseph Mallord William (British painter) *
-
Jean-Baptiste
Carpeaux (French sculptor)
|
Back to
Neo-Classical Art
Forward to Realism /
Naturalism
