Romanticism
“Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the
seeking for ideal truth.”
Georges Sand
“It is emotion recollected in tranquility.”
William Wordsworth
Liszt
Romanticism
Spontaneous personal emotion and its expression;
irrationality
History and nostalgia for the past
Death, mystery, the supernatural
Exoticism and celebration of romantic love
Enthusiasm for nature
Artist as individual
- free spirits, apart from the masses
- no longer craftsmen serving society but free
spirits expressing their own souls with a genius
not granted to the common run of humanity
Predecessors
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
French (1712-1778)
Emile; The Social Contract
Modernity is to the detriment of character;
action should be based on morals, not reason; man in
his natural state is ideal; people must give their
consent to be governed, forming the “social contract.”
Immanuel Kant
German (1724-1804) - Critique of Pure Reason
Life must be understood as being based on the
presence of God. “I had to abolish knowledge, in order
to make room for faith.”
Liszt
Ties
Mary Shelley Frankenstein
English (1797-1851) Percy Shelley’s
wife; Byron’s lover; Blake’s friend
Alexander Dumas
The Three Musketeers French(1802-1870)
friend of Hugo, Sand, Liszt, Rossini
Victor Hugo
The Hunchback of Notre Dame French (1802-1885)
friend of Dumas, Sand, Liszt, Rossini
Georges Sand The Haunted Pool; Isadora
lover of Chopin, Delacroix, Liszt
John Keats
To Sleep
lover; dies of TB
French (1804-1876)
English (1795-1821) Percy Shelley’s
Percy Bysshe Shelley Ode to the West Wind English (1792-1822)
Mary Shelley’s husband, Byron’s lover; Keats lover; dies in
mishap at sea
Lord Byron
Sardanapalus, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
English
(1788-1824) Percy Shelley’s lover; Keats lover; Caroline Lamb’s
lover, along with half-sister Augusta and her half sister Caroline,
etc.; dies in war of Greek Independence
Ties
Frederic Chopin Etude in C Minor
Polish (1810-1849); friend of
Delacroix, Liszt, Sand; dies of TB
Franz Liszt
Hungarian Rhapsody Hungarian (1811-1886); friends
with Sand, Delacroix; Chopin; Hugo; Dumas; Rossini
Hector Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique French (1803-1869); story of
“idea fixe,” opiate dreams based on his unrequited love for Irish
actress Harriet Smithson, whom he married five years later, with
Liszt as his witness); friend of Liszt and Mendelssohn
Gioacchino Rossini
Italian (1792-1868)
William Tell; Barber of
Seville; friend of Liszt, Sand, Delacroix, Chopin, Hugo, Dumas
________________________
Lines Written in Early Spring English (17701850) detested Napoleon, thought Byron gifted but depraved;
champion of the poor
William Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; Kubla Khan
English (1772-1834) close friend of Wordsworth; opium addict
Chopin
Music
Characteristics: Great dynamic range, importance of tone color,
intensely subjective, emotionally expressive, highly
individualistic.
Beethoven is the bridge between Classical composition and
Romantic. His Third Symphony (Eroica) marks his “heroic”
period, where he celebrated the forces of history and the
passions that create it. Romanticism is fully articulated in his
Ninth Symphony.
Robert Schumann
German (1810-1856)
Particularly known for his compositions for piano. Piano
Concerto in A Minor; wife was pianist Clara Schumann, the
object of Brahms lifelong love; life-long depressive; attempts
suicide in 1854 and dies 2 years later.
Frederic Chopin Polish (1810-1849) Also known for his
compositions for piano. Incorporated traditional Polish folk
themes and dances into his compositions. TB.
Music
Franz Schubert Austrian (1791-1828) Particularly known for his lieder.
Quartet in A Minor; Elfking (Goethe’s poem).
Erlkonig
Who rides so late through the dark and wild?
My daughters will cherish your youth and
It is the father with his small child;
beauty.
He protects the boy in his proud arm,
They will dance all night in a dizzy round,
He holds him safely, he keeps him warm.-
And then they’ll cradle you, safe and sound.”
Son, why do you shiver? Your face is white!
Father, O Father, why can’t you see
I see the Elfking, a fearful sight!
The Elfking’s dark daughters calling me?
The Elfking, Father, in cloak and crown! -
My son, my son, they’re only shadows,
My son, it’s the mist, slow drifting down.-
The tossing shapes of old gray willows.
“You innocent child, just come away,
“I love you, your beauty, child, your charm,
So that together we two will play;
So come with me, or I’ll do you harm!”
The flowers on the strand are bright to behold;
Father, O Father, he won’t let me go!
My mother will dress you in cloth of gold”
The Elfking’s hard hands have hurt me so!
Father, O Father, why can’t you hear
The father shudders, his eyes are wild,
The Elfking whispering in my ear? -
He holds in his arms the moaning child,
Be still, my child, be safe, my nestling!
He gallops for home; but drops his head.
What you hear are the dry leaves rustling.-
The boy he holds in his arms is dead.
“My beautiful boy, come home with me!
Music
• Hector Berlioz French (1803-1869)
The original author
of Program Music: Symphonie Fantastique
• Franz Liszt
Hungarian (1811-1886) Particularly known
for his compositions for piano and the Symphonic Poem.
Hungarian Rhapsody
• Gioacchino Rossini
Italian (1792-1868)
Author of
bel canto opera: William Tell, Othello; Barber of Seville
• Later: Mendelssohn and Brahms, then Wagner
Berlioz
Francisco Goya
Spanish (1746-1828)
Sleep of Reason Produces
Monsters
Francisco Goya
Dona Teresa Sureda
c. 1805
(110 kB); Oil on canvas, 119.8 x 79.4 cm (47
1/8 x 31 1/4 in); National Gallery of Art,
Washington
Francisco Goya
Saturn Devouring His Son
Oil on plaster transferred to canvas, 4' 9 1/8" x 2' 8 5/8";
Prado, Madrid
Francisco Goya
The Shooting of May Third, 1808 1814
Oil on canvas, 104 3/4 x 136 in; Museo del Prado, Madrid
William Blake
Pity,
1795
William Blake
"I do not behold the outward creation... it is a hindrance and not action."
The
Whirlwind
of Lovers
c.1826
Birmingham Art
Gallery
Literature
18th century predecessors
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The Elfking
William Blake Milton (p. 770); “Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the
forests of the night,” and
The Sick Rose
O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy;
And his dark crimson love
Does thy life destroy
William Blake
Tyger, 1794
Alexander Pushkin (1799 -1837) Eugene Onegin (Piotr
Tchaikovsky) Boris Godunuv; (Modest Mussorgsky) Queen of
Spades
Sir Walter Scott
Scottish (1771-1832) Lochinvar
Alexander Dumas (1802-1870) The Three Musketeers
Victor Hugo (1802-1885) The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) Ode to the West Wind
Lord Byron (1788-1824) Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) Lines Written in Early Spring
John Keats (1795-1821) To Sleep
Georges Sand (1804-1876) The Haunted Pool; Isadora
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) The Rime of the Ancient Mariner;
Kubla Khan
Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849) invents mystery The Fall of the House of
Usher; The City in the Sea
Mary Shelley (1797-1851) Frankenstein
Charlotte Bronte
Emily Bronte
Jane Eyre
Wuthering Heights
Henry Fuseli
Lady Macbeth,
1794
Jean-Auguste Ingres
French (1780-1867)
Napoleon on his Imperial
Throne, 1806
Beethoven
Jean-Auguste Ingres
French (1780-1867)
Odalisque with a Slave, 1840
Oil on canvas mounted on panel, 29 3/8 x 39 3/8 in; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
Theodore Gericault
French (1791-1824)
The Raft of the Medusa, 1819
Eugene Delacroix
Greece on
the Ruins of
Missolonghi
1827
Eugene Delacroix
French (1798-1863)
The Death of
Sardanapal
1827
Musee du
Louvre, Paris
(inspired by
poetry of Byron)
Eugene Delacroix
French (1798-1863)
Liberty Leading
the People
Painted on 28 July
1830, to
commemorate the
July Revolution that
had just brought
Louis-Philippe to the
French throne;
Louvre.
Caspar David Friedrich German (1774-1840)
The Cross on
the Mountain
Kunstmuseum at
Dusseldorf
Schumann
Caspar David Friedrich German (1774-1840)
Solitary
Tree
1823
Caspar David Friedrich German (1774-1840)
Morning
1821; Oil on canvas, 22 x 30.5 cm; Niedersachsisches Landesmuseum, Hanover
Caspar David Friedrich German (1774-1840)
The Sea of Ice 1824/5
J. M. William Turner
English (1775-1851)
Rain,
Steam
and
Speed
1844; Oil
on
canvas,
90.8 x
121.9 cm;
National
Gallery,
London
J. M. William Turner
English (1775-1851)
Slavers
throwing
overboard
the Dead
and Dying Typhoon
coming on
("The Slave
Ship")
1840; Oil on
canvas, 90.8
x 122.6 cm;
Museum of
Fine Arts,
Boston
J. M. William Turner
English (1775-1851)
Mortlake
Terrace:
Early
Summer
Morning
1826
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) Lines Written in Early Spring
I HEARD a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.
The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure:-But the least motion which they made
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.
To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.
The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.
Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And 'tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.
If this belief from heaven be sent,
If such be Nature's holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?
Thomas Cole
American (1801-1848)
The Voyage of Life: Childhood 1839
Thomas Cole
American (1801-1848)
The Voyage of Life: Youth 1839
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; Kubla
Khan, or a Vision in a Dream. A Fragment.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me
That with music loud and long
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
Thomas Doughty
American (1793-1856)
View of the Susquehanna, 1832
Oil on canvas, 18 1/8 x 24 1/8 in. BYU
Thomas Doughty
American (1793-1856)
Carolina Swamp, 1825
oil on canvas laid on board, 24"x36" image, s.l.l.
and…
Camille Corot
French (1796-1875)
Hippolyte Flandrin
French (1809-1864)
Jacques Louis David
French (1748-1825)
The earliest photography, of Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre and William Henry
Fox Talbot, would change art forever.
Oriel window in the South
Gallery at Lacock Abbey,
Wiltshire
Talbot, August, 1835
Schumann
Daguerre, 1839
REALISM
Gustave Courbet, the foremost Realist painter, believed that
painters should paint only their own time and that "painting is an
essentially concrete art, and can consist only of representation of
real and existing things." Realists wanted to give an accurate and
apparently objective description of the ordinary, observable world.
Honore Daumier
The Uprising
1860
REALISM
Often Realist art and literature had a distinct agenda of social and
political reform, ranging from moderate, as in the case of Charles
Dickens, to radical politics, as in the case of Courbet.
Pierre-joseph
Proudhon et ses
Enfants 1865
Gustave Courbet
French (1819-77)
The Wounded Man
1844-54 Musee d'Orsay
Gustave Courbet
French (1819-77)
The Stone Breakers, 1849-50
Jean-Francois Millet
French (1814-1875)
The Gleaners, 1857