Gardner’s Art Through the Ages - C 28
Adams -History of Western Art - C 22
The Enlightenment and its Legacy:
Art of the Late 18th through the Mid-19th Century
Romanticism
Thobaben 2009
1
From Neoclassicism to Romanticism
• Understand the philosophical and stylistic differences between
Neoclassicism and Romanticism.
• Examine the growing interest in the exotic, the erotic, the
landscape, and fictional narrative as subject matter.
• Understand the mixture of classical form and Romantic themes,
and the debates about the nature of art in the 19th century.
• Identify artists and architects of the period and their works.
• Examine the exotic, erotic, the landscape, and fictional narrative
as subject matter.
• Understand the mixture of classical form and Romantic themes
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From Neoclassicism to Romanticism
• Jacques-Louis David's stature and prominence as an artist and
his commitment to classicism attracted numerous students,
including Antoine-Jean Gros, Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson,
and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.
• Although they were deeply influenced by David, these artists also
moved beyond the somewhat structured confines of
Neoclassicism in their exploration of the exotic and the erotic and
in the use of fictional narratives for the subjects of their paintings.
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Napoleon Among the Sick and Dying
Antoine-Jean
Gros's painting of
Napoleon at the
Pesthouse at Jaffa
presents a public
image of Napoleon
as a
compassionate,
fearless leader by
showing him
touching, as if
capable of
miraculously
healing, the sores
of a plague victim.
Gros, Napoleon at the Pesthouse at Jaffa, 1804.
Oil on canvas, approx. 17' 5" x 23' 7”Louvre, Paris.
The mosque courtyard with its Moorish arcades in the background reveals
Gros's fascination with the exoticism of the Near East
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5
Baron Antoine-Jean Gros
(1771-1835)
Gros was one of the most
honored and respected painters
during the reigns of Emperor
Napoleon I, King Louis XVIII and
King Charles X.
For these monarchs he executed
large paintings of contemporary
history and allegory, although he
was also known as a painter of
mythological subjects and of
portraits in a Romantic vein.
Gros: Bonaparte on the Bridge at Arcole, 17 November
1796, oil on canvas, 749×584 mm,
1801, Versailles, Château
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A Tragic Suicide in Louisiana
Based on Chateaubriand's
novel, The Genius of
Christianity, GirodetTrioson's The Burial of
Atala is the tragic love
story of two Native
Americans in the
wilderness of Louisiana.
The exotic locale and the
erotic passion of the story
appealed to the public's
fascination with what it
perceived as the
primitivism of Native
American tribal life.
Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson, The Burial of Atala, 1808. Oil on canvas, approx. 6' 11" x 8' 9". Louvre, Paris.
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Combining the Ideal with the Exotic
Examine how the artist Ingres combined classical form with Romantic
themes. Ingres also departed from Neoclassicism. A Romantic taste for
the exotic and erotic is seen in his Grande Odalisque, which shows a
languidly reclining, nude odalisque.
Ingres, Grande Odalisque, 1814. Oil on canvas, approx. 2' 11" x 5' 4". Louvre, Paris.
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Ingres's paintings of
female nudes
continued through
this period to
culminate in The
Turkish Bath, on
which he worked on
from about 1852
until 1863, when he
was 83.
Some critics have
seen in these
sensual and
voyeuristically
conceived nudes the
only full expression
of Ingres's artistic
imagination.
Ingres: Turkish Bath, oil on canvas affixed to panel, diam. 1.08 m, 1863, Paris, Musée du Louvre
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Drawn to the Music
Ingres's crisp, gracefully
formal portrait of Paganini
precisely records with
meticulously drawn lines
the violinist's features and
demeanor.
Ingres, Paganini, 1819. Pencil drawing
approx. 12" x 81/2". Louvre, Paris.
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The Rise of Romanticism
•
Jean-Jacques Rousseau's concept of freedom contributed to the
rise of Romanticism, which desired not only political freedom but also
freedom of thought, feeling, action, worship, speech, and taste.
• Individuals claim their own freedom and with it a unique
subjectivity.
• Romanticism believed that the path to freedom was through
imagination and feeling rather than through reason and thinking.
• Feeling is All - Romanticism believed in the value of sincere feeling
and honest emotion. It emphasized feeling, imagination, intuition, and
subjective emotion.
• Romantic artists explored the outer edges of consciousness and
developed a taste for the "Gothick" (the Middle Ages), the fantastic,
the occult, and the macabre, and for the sublime, which inspires
feelings of awe mixed with terror.
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Claustrophobic Dungeon
Not all of Giovanni Battista
Piranesi's prints were of classical
ruins.
His series of etched prints of
imaginary dungeons, the Carceri
(prisons), shows grim, infernallooking architectural fantasies of
massive arches, vaults, piers, and
stairways.
Within the gloomy, menacing
spaces move small, insect-like
human figures.
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Carceri VII, ca. 1750. Etching,
second state, approx. 1' 4" x 1' 9". Ashmolean Museum,
Oxford, England.
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A Nightmarish Vision
Henry Fuseli 's The Nightmare illustrates the Romantic taste in night
moods of horror, in Gothick fantasies, in the demonic, macabre, and
sadistic.
Fuseli, The Nightmare, 1781. Oil on canvas, 3' 4" x 4' 2”,Detroit Institute of the Arts
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Inspired by the Spirits
English artist William Blake
derived the compositions of many
of his paintings and poems from
spirits who visited him in dreams.
He believed that rationalism's
search for material explanations
of the world stifled human
nature's spirituality.
In Blake's highly individual vision
of God in Ancient of Days the
figure's ideal classical anatomy
merges with the inner dark
dreams of Gothick Romanticism.
William Blake, Ancient of Days, frontispiece of Europe: A
Prophecy, 1794. Metal relief etching, hand-colored, approx. 9
1/2" x 6 3/4". Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester.
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Drama, Action, and Color in Spanish Romanticism
• Examine the issues of drama, action, and color in the art of
Spanish artist Francisco Goya.
• Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) emerged
as one of the greatest artists of the Romantic period.
• He first gained attention as a cartoon designer for tapestries.
• A series of outstanding portraits of leading aristocrats earned
him further acclaim.
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Goya's "breakthrough" portrait was of
the minister of state, the second most
powerful man in Spain, The Count of
Floridablanca, 1783.
Here we see Goya (foreground)
kowtowing before his magnificently
red-clothed subject, holding up a
portrait for his inspection.
Floridablanca's pose, gesture and
silvery stare are almost godlike in their
superiority.
Goya, The Count of Floridablanca, 1783,
Oil on canvas, 262 x 166 cm,
Banco Urquijo, Madrid
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Depicting the Spanish Royal Family
As Painter to the King of Spain, Goya painted a naturalistic portrait of The
Family of Charles IV. Besides the King, Queen Maria Luisa, and their
children, Goya also included himself.
…Perhaps, in
imitation of Diego
Velázquez's
painting of Las
Meninas.
Goya, The Family of Charles IV, 1800. Oil on canvas, approx. 9' 2" x 11'. Museo del Prado, Madrid.
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Romance or Fiction?
A tall, slender, dark-haired woman
of exceptional beauty, appears
several times in Goya’s works as a
seductress, traitor and victim.
We know who she is: María del Pilar
Teresa Cayetana de Silva Álvarez
de Toledo, la Duquesa de
Alba.Thanks to Goya's paintings
and the myth that has blossomed
around them, she is one of the great
erotic "presences" of world painting.
The real nature of her relationship to
Goya is less clear than we think.
There are only a few suggestions in
all his work that their relationship
was ever more than a close
friendship. He painted one of them
in 1797.
Portrait of the Duchess of Alba, 1797, Oil on canvas,
210 x 149 cm, Hispanic Society of America, New York
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It's more likely that the duchess represented, for Goya, an erotic "type"
that stirred his fantasies of dark maja-hood and sexuality.
Goya, The Nude Maja, 1800, Oil on canvas, 97 x 190 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid
The "evidence" of their intimacy, the so-called Naked Maja, isn't evidence at all,
because there is nothing to suggest that either it or its clothed double in the Prado
actually represents the duchess of Alba. It's a spicy bit of gossip but it got into
circulation well after Goya's death
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.
Reconsidering Reason
Goya first welcomed the revolution’s
promise of political enlightenment
but he became disillusioned when
the hoped for reforms were short
lived. This is reflected in his etching
The Sleep of Reason Produces
Monsters, from a series Los
Caprichos (The Caprices).
It shows the artist asleep while
threatening creatures symbolizing
folly and ignorance converge on him.
The image may be interpreted as
showing what emerges when reason
is suppressed.
Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,
from Los Caprichos, ca. 1798. Etching and aquatint,
8 1/2" x 6". The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
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Turmoil in Spain - The Massacre of May 3, 1808
The French invasion was
met with Spanish resistance.
In retaliation for an attack
on French troops by
Spanish patriots on 2 May
1808, the French spent the
next day, 3 May 1808,
executing Spanish citizens.
Goya painted an emotional
record of the ruthless event
in 1814.
In support of Ferdinand
VII’s claim to the throne,
Goya, Third of May 1808, oil on canvas, 2.66×3.45 m, 1814, Madrid,
Museo del Prado
Napoleon sent French
troops to Spain, but after ousting Charles IV and Maria Luisa, installed
his brother Joseph Bonaparte on the Spanish throne.
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Paintings of Dark Emotions
•One of Goya's "Black Paintings,"
which reflect his disillusionment and
pessimism later in life, shows a
terrifying and disturbing vision of
Saturn devouring one of his children.
Francisco Goya, Saturn Devouring His Children, 1819-1823.
Detail of a detached fresco on canvas,
full size approx. 4' 9" x 2' 8”. Museo del Prado, Madrid.
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The French Debate: Color vs. Line
• Understand the French debate over theories related to color
(expression) vs. line (drawing or form) as appropriate to artistic
expression.
• In contrast to the Neoclassical artist Ingres, who claimed
drawing (line) to be the probity of art, the Romantic painter
Eugène Delacroix promoted the value of color.
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Death and Despair on a Raft
•Théodore Géricault's ambitious painting of the Raft of the Medusa shows
the handful of survivors of the frigate Medusa, which, due to the
incompetence of the captain, a political appointee, had run aground on a
reef.
•This grandly conceived, large-scale painting combines a realistic attempt
to record the event accurately with a Romantic taste for the drama and
horror.
Gericault, Raft of the Medusa, oil on canvas, 4.91×7.16 m, exhibited 1819, Paris, Musée du Louvre
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Picturing Insanity
Géricault's portrait of an
Insane Woman (Envy) is
an examination of the
influence of mental states
on the human face,
which, it was believed,
accurately revealed
character.
It reflects the Romantic
interest in mental
aberration and the
irrational states of the
mind.
Gericault: Manic Envy, oil on canvas, 711×533 mm, c. 1822, Lyon, Musée des Beaux-Arts
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A Portrait of Music
Delacroix's painting of Paganini
attempts to convey a sense of the
sound and feeling of the great
violinist's inspired virtuoso
performances.
Compare to Ingres’s
drawing.
Eugène Delacroix, Paganini, ca. 1832. Oil on canvas,
approx. 1' 5" x 111/2". The Phillips Collection, Washington,
D.C.
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Romanticism in Literature
• Romantic American authors, such as Edgar Allan Poe and
Nathaniel Hawthorne, based their writings on the
supernatural/occult and human psychology.
• An early German influence came from Johann Wolfgang Goethe
whose 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther had young men
throughout Europe emulating its protagonist, a young artist with a
very sensitive and passionate temperament.
• Romanticism in British literature developed in a different form
slightly later, mostly associated with the poets William
Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Both poets were also
involved in utopian social thought in the wake of the French
Revolution.
• Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and John Keats
constitute another phase of Romanticism in Britain.
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Inspiring Fiction and Verse
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Orgiastic Destruction and Death
• Delacroix's works were products of his view that the artist's powers
of imagination would in turn capture and inflame viewers' imagination.
• Literature of imaginative power served Delacroix as a useful source of
subject matter.
• The Death of
Sardanapalus, inspired
by Lord Byron's 1821
narrative poem
"Sardanapalus," is an
erotic and exotic orgy
of death and
destruction conceived
as grand drama.
Eugène Delacroix, Death of Sardanapalus, 1826. Oil on canvas, approx. 12' 1" x 16' 3". Louvre, Paris
Delacroix also painted current events, particularly tragic or sensational
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ones.
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Leading the Masses in Uprising
Delacroix captured the passion and energy of the Revolution of 1830 in
his painting Liberty Leading the People.
He balances contemporary historical fact (the 1830 Revolution) with
poetic allegory (the figure of Liberty) and, through the title and his
inclusion of the
towers of Notre-Dame
in Paris, also locates
the scene in a specific
time and place.
Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People,
1830. Oil on canvas, approx. 8' 6" x 10' 8".
Louvre, Paris.
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Delacroix's Colorful Legacy
•
Delacroix's visits to North Africa also heightened his awareness
of the expressive power of color and light, and made him aware
that color appears in nature only in an infinitely varied scale of
different tones, shadings, and reflections.
•
In this regard, Delacroix anticipated the later development of
Impressionist color science.
•
Delacroix thoroughly and definitively explored the domain of
Romantic subject and mood.
•
His technique was impetuous, improvisational, and instinctive,
and epitomized Romantic-colorist painting.
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The Allure of Morocco
Delacroix's trip to North Africa in 1832 renewed his Romantic
conviction that beauty exists in the fierceness of nature, natural
processes, and natural beings, especially animals, which he painted in
scenes
of violent and
exotic tiger
hunts.
Delacroix, Tiger Hunt, 1854. Oil on canvas, approx. 2' 5" x 3'. Louvre, Paris.
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Romanticism in Sculpture
•
Romanticism gave sculptors the opportunity to free
themselves from past models.
•
New works were created based on the imagination and
appealing to the emotions.
•
In France, leading romantic sculptors were:
• François Rude
• Antoine Louis Barye
• Jean Baptiste Carpeaux
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The Dramatic in Sculpture
FranÁois Rude is best known for
his stirring monumental sculptures
on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris,
especially the Departure of the
Volunteers in 1792—also called La
Marseillaise—executed in 18331836.
A great winged figure personifying
Liberty is shown above a group of
men: She is rushing forward,
screaming, urging them on to
battle.
FranÁois Rude, La Marseillaise, Arc de Triomphe,
Paris, 1833-1836. Approx. 42' x 26'.
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Antoine Louis Barye
Barye was perhaps
the finest animal
sculptor since
antiquity.
His meticulously
rendered bronzes
have an air of
authenticity,
suggesting wild
animals observed
in their native
habitats but in
actuality resulting
from Barye's
frequent visits to
the Paris zoo.
Barye, Jaguar Devouring a Hare, 1850-1851. Bronze, approx. 1' 4" x 3' 1". Louvre,
Paris.
This bronze of a Jaguar Devouring a Hare shows the bestial violence and
brute beauty of nature.
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Jean Baptiste Carpeaux
(1827–1875)
•
•
•
A later shift in taste toward a freer
and more naturalistic style is
exemplified by the work of sculptor
Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux.
Breaking with traditional approaches
to historical subjects and portraiture,
Carpeaux infused his sculpture with
a previously unseen freedom and
immediacy
Ugolino, the character that
galvanized peoples' fantasies and
fears during the second half of the
19th century, appears in Canto 33 of
Dante’s Inferno.
Ugolino and His Sons, modeled ca. 1860–61, executed in
marble 1865–67
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Carpeaux's famous group,
La Danse graces the
facade of the Paris Opéra.
The vivaciousness of the
figures and the effect of
rippling light and shadow
created by the modeling of
their surfaces have a
strong affinity with Rococo
art.
Carpeaux, The Dance,1865–69;
formerly on the facade of the Opéra, Paris,
now in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
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American Sculptors in the late 19th century
•
In the U.S., William Rimmer, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and
Daniel Chester French shared a romantic approach in their
allegorical sculptures.
•
Rimmer's Dying Centaur, 1871, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
•
Saint-Gauden's Adams Memorial, 1886-1891, Rock Creek
Cemetery, Washington, D.C. and
•
French's The Angel of Death and the Sculptor (1891-1892),
Forest Hills Cemetery, Roxbury, Massachusetts
• are moving works, demonstrating the American romantic
artists' technical excellence.
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William Rimmer
(c.1816–20-1879)
A painter and a sculptor, Rimmer
worked in clay, not modeling but
building up and chiseling; almost
always without models or
preliminary sketches; and always
under technical disadvantages and
in great haste; but his sculpture is
anatomically remarkable and has
an early Greek simplicity and
strength.
William Rimmer ,The Dying Centaur, 1869;
this cast, 1905, Bronze,
21 1/2 x 25 x 19 in. (54.6 x 63.5 x 48.3 cm)
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Daniel Chester French (1850-1931)
French was an American
sculptor.
His best-known work is
the sculpture of a seated
Abraham Lincoln at the
Lincoln Memorial in
Washington, D.C.
This less famous work,
The Angel of Death and
the Sculptor, was
commissioned in 1889 to
create a memorial for the
Milmore Family, to be
located in Forest Hill
Cemetery in Jamaica
Milmore had been a sculptor himself, French decided to depict the artist
at work, with the Angel of Death interrupting his work.
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Augustus St. Gaudens (1848-1907)
Raised in New York
City, St. Gaudens
traveled to Europe
for further training
and artistic study,
and then returned
to major critical
success in the
design of
monuments
commemorating
heroes of the
American Civil War,
many of which still
stand.
The Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, designed by Saint-Gaudens and
Stanford White, was built in his memory on Beacon and Park Streets in
Boston in 1897.
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The Adams Memorial
"Clover" Adams, wife of the
writer Henry Adams, committed
suicide in 1885 by drinking
chemicals used to develop
photographs. Adams, who
steadfastly refused to discuss
his wife's death, commissioned
Saint-Gaudens to create a
memorial that would express
the Buddhist idea of nirvana, a
state of being beyond joy and
sorrow.
Saint-Gaudens's ambiguous
figure reflects the search for
new insights into the mysteries
of life and death.
Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Adams Memorial, modeled 1886-1891, cast 1969, Roman Bronze Works (Founder) 69
7/8 x 39 7/8 x 44 1/2 in. (177.4 x 101.4 x 112.9 cm.) Smithsonian American Art Museum
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Romantic Landscape Painting
•
Understand the romantic interest in the landscape as an
independent and respected genre in Germany, England, and the
United States.
•
Romantic artists shared a deep desire to express powerful emotions.
Like Atrocities and exotic experiences, nature can evoke deep
feelings.
•
During the Romantic era, landscape painting took on a new
significance.
•
Germany, especially, most landscape painting expressed to
some degree a Romantic, pantheistic view of nature.
•
Artists participated in the spirit of nature, interpreted the
signs, symbols, and emblems of nature's universal spirit,
and translated nature's transcendent meanings.
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Caspar David Freidrich
(1774 –1840)
Freidrich devoted his
career to landscape
painting. Many feature
figures seen from the
back, contemplating a
mysterious natural
setting.
In this painting, we see
no face, so it's
impossible to know
whether the prospect
facing the young man is
exhilarating, or terrifying,
or both.
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog
(1818). 94.8 × 74.8 cm, Kunsthalle
Hamburg.
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The Reverential Landscape
•Friedrich
painted
landscapes
as sacred
places filled
with a divine
presence.
•His solemn
and deeply
reverent
Cloister
Graveyard in
the Snow is
filled with
emblems of
death.
Caspar David Friedrich, Cloister Graveyard in the Snow, 1810. Oil on canvas, approx. 3'
11" x 5' 10" (painting destroyed during World War II).
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Landscape Painting in England
• Because of its severe effects on the countryside, the Industrial
Revolution had an impact on the evolution of Romantic landscape
painting in England.
• John Constable (1776-1837) , perhaps the best known painter of
the English landscape artists, is renowned for his views of the Stour
Valley in Suffolk, north of London.
• The Haywain provides
no hint of the Industrial
Revolution that was
transforming rural England.
• No pollution mars the sky
or pollutes the water .
Rather, Constable ignored
the effects of industry to
portray a nostalgic
feeling of nature.
John Constable, The Haywain, 1821. Oil on canvas, 4' 3"
x 6' 2". National Gallery, London.
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John Constable, Wivenhoe Park, 1816
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John Constable, Salisbury Cathedral ca. 1825
Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851)
In contrast to the
calm Romantic
yearnings of
Constable’s
landscapes, his
contemporary
J.M.W.Turner strove
to portray the
uncontrollable and
frightening power of
nature.
The shipwreck of the Minotaur, oil on canvas., Calouste Gulbenkian Museum,
Lisbon
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J.M.W.Turner, The shipwreck of the Minotaur, oil on canvas., Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon
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The Horrors of the Slave Trade
Turner's The Slave
Ship uses the
emotive power of
color to convey the
tragedy and cruelty
of an incident that
occurred in 1783, in
which the captain of
a slave ship ordered
the sick and dying
slaves thrown
overboard. Turner's
use of color had an
incalculable effect on
the development of
modern art.
Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Slave Ship, 1840. Oil on
canvas, 2' 11 3/4" x 4' 1/4". Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
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Landscape Painting in the United States
• One group of American landscape painters known as the
Hudson River School formed the country’s first art
movement.
• Led by Thomas Cole (1801-1848), Hudson River artists painted the
unspoiled woods and valleys of the Hudson River and Catskill mountains
of upstate New York.
• During the 1860s, Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) traveled westward
and painted the sublime majesty of the Rocky mountains and Yosemite
Valley.
• The second generation of Hudson River school artists emerged to
prominence after Cole's premature death in 1848, including Cole's prize
pupil Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900).
• Works by artists of this second generation are often described as
examples of Luminism, or the Luminist movement in American art
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Thomas Cole (1801-1848)
•Cole, a member of
the Hudson River
School, painted his
expansive, panoramic
view of The Oxbow
(the Connecticut
River near
Northampton,
Massachusetts) with
a dark stormy
wilderness on the left
and a sunlit and more
civilized landscape on
the right.
Thomas Cole, The Oxbow (Connecticut River near Northampton), 1836.
Oil on canvas, 6' 4" x 4' 31/2". The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
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Cole was primarily a painter of landscapes, but he also painted allegorical works.
The most famous of these are the five-part series, The Course of Empire.
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Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902)
Bierstadt was not held in high esteem by critics of his day. His use of
uncommonly large canvases was thought to be an egotistical indulgence,
as his paintings would invariably dwarf those of his contemporaries when
they were displayed together.
The romanticism evident in his choices of subject and in his use of light
was felt to be
excessive by contemporary
critics.
His paintings emphasized
atmospheric elements like
fog, clouds and mist to
accentuate and
complement
the feel of his work.
Bierstadt sometimes
changed details of the
landscape to inspire awe.
Albert Bierstadt, Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California, 1865. Oil on
canvas, 641⁄2 x 961⁄2 in. (163.83 x 245.11 cm.).Birmingham Museum of Art,
Birmingham, Ala.
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Albert Bierstadt, Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California, 1865. Oil on canvas, 641⁄2 x 961⁄2 in. (163.83 x
245.11 cm.).Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Ala.
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Wild, Wild West
Albert Bierstadt's large painting Among the Sierra Nevada
Mountains, California presents a panoramic view of breathtaking
scenery and natural beauty.
Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California, 1868.
Bierstadt's paintings, called national attention to the splendor and
uniqueness of the regions beyond the Rocky Mountains, and reinforced
the popular nineteenth-century doctrine of Manifest Destiny.
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Bierstadt, Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California, 1868. Oil on canvas, 5' 11" x 10'.
National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution,
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Frederic Edwin Church (1826 –1900)
While committed to the natural sciences, Church was "always concerned
with including a spiritual dimension in his works".
Frederic Church, Heart of the Andes (1859), Metropolitan Museum of Art
In 1853 and 1857, Church traveled in South America. He was inspired by
the Prussian explorer Alexander von Humboldt's Cosmos and his
exploration of the continent; Humboldt had challenged artists to portray the
"physiognomy" of the Andes.
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Frederic Church, Heart of the Andes (1859), Metropolitan Museum of Art
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Reaffirming America's Righteousness
Church's Twilight in the Wilderness, shows a panoramic view of the sun
setting over a majestic landscape, is firmly entrenched in the idiom of the
Romantic sublime. Church's idealistic and comforting view contributed
to the national mythology of righteousness and divine providence.
Frederic Edwin Church, Twilight In the Wilderness, 1860. Oil on canvas, 101.6 cm. x 162.6 cm.
The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio
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The Aftermath of Civil War
Winslow Homer's The Veteran in a New Field is a simple and direct
commentary on the effects and aftermath of the American Civil War.
The painting also comments symbolically about death, both the
deaths of the soldiers and of Abraham Lincoln. It also contributed to
the continuing myth making about national conditions.
Homer, The Veteran in a New Field, 1865. Oil on canvas, 2' 1/8" x 3' 2 1/8". The Metropolitan Museum of Art
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Winslow Homer, The Veteran in a New Field, 1865, Oil on canvas; 24 1/8 x 38 1/8 in. (61.3
x 96.8 cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art
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Romantic Revivalist Styles in Architecture
• Examine the variety of revivalist styles in architecture, the origins
of the designs and their impact.
• In the nineteenth century, nations came to value their past as
evidence of the validity of its ambitions and claims to greatness.
• Art and architecture of the remote past came to be regarded as a
product of cultural and national genius.
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Restoring the Artisanship of the Middle Age
When the Houses of Parliament were rebuilt following the fire in 1834, the
architect A. W. N. Pugin designed a
Neo-Gothic building because of the moral purity and spiritual authenticity
he associated with religious architecture of the Middle Ages.
Charles Barry and A. W. N. Pugin, Houses of Parliament, London, designed 1835.
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The Impact of Imperialism
John Nash's design for The Royal Pavilion at Brighton exhibits a wide
variety of non-Western artistic styles. The exterior is a conglomeration of
Islamic domes, minarets, and screens ("Indian Gothic"), while the interior
decor ranges from Greece and Egypt to China.
John Nash, Royal Pavilion, Brighton, England, 1815-1818
A view of the Royal Pavilion as seen from the garden
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Adapting Baroque Opulence
J. L. Charles Garnier employs a festive and spectacularly
theatrical Neo-Baroque design for the Paris Opéra.
J. L. Charles Garnier, the Opéra, Paris, 1861-1874
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Discussion Questions

Discuss the Romantic movement in art, music, and literature in
Europe and America.

Describe the architectural revivals associated with Romanticism.

Discuss the role the Salon in 19th-century France.

Describe the themes prevalent in Romanticism and show how
works of art illustrate them.

Describe the psychological insights evident in Goya's paintings.

Discuss the aesthetic of the sublime and its expression in painting.

Compare and contrast Romantic painting in England, France,
Spain, Germany, England, and America.

Compare Rude's La Marseillaise with Delacroix's Liberty Leading
the People.
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