Humanities: Visual Art
An Introduction to Romanticism
The Flipside of Neo-Classicsm?
Romanticism can be interpreted as a reaction against perceived failures of Neo-classicism: rigid
insistence on particular forms even when the beliefs and conditions that had produced those forms had
disappeared; a theory of imitation that hampered originality and imagination; a confusion of real nobility
of spirit with the manners of mere noblemen . Neo-classicism in art left many feeling absolutely bored;
Romanticism sought to present wonder and variety, to re-invigorate art. In many ways, Romanticism
was the flipside of Neo-classicism, and possessed many complementary weaknesses. Just as Neoclassicism left no place for intuition in the act of creation, Romanticism tended to discount the role of
reason and norms. Neo-classicism studied the typical, the normal: the art of this period suggested
models for proper behavior in the belief that, if everyone conformed, a greater good would be served.
Romanticism rejected the normal, instead exalting the unique and the individual. Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, prime inspiration and great hero of the Romantic movement, very effectively promoted the
cult of the individual in his writings. Even if he were not “better” than others, he believed he was at
least different; and to be emphatically, insistently different, to be compellingly unique, was sufficient.
As a guide to human behavior, as a basis for useful communication among human beings, an
extreme insistence on each person’s absolute uniqueness has some serious shortcomings.
Ongoing intellectual trends
Three important intellectual trends already present during the Neo-Classical period continued to
exert an influence during Romanticism. These are: 1. empiricism (represented by David Hume); 2.
rationalism (whose primary exponent was Rene Descartes); and 3. utilitarianism (notably advocated by
Jeremy Bentham). To an extent, one can understand Romanticism by examining which trends it rejected
and which it embraced.
Empiricism involves the study of actual physical phenomena: theories are to be based on
observations. Empiricism is a key component of science, and one might think the Romantics would
have rejected both empiricism specifically and science generally. But empiricism actually formed an
important basis for much Romantic art, and many Romantic artists were quite interested in and
captivated by scientific developments. For instance, the English painter John Constable made careful
studies of clouds, and much of the singularity of his works resides in his ability to conjure up what the
weather feels like. (At the same time, an amateur English scientist was developing a system for
classifying clouds “scientifically.”) The American painter Thomas Cole was, like many intellectuals of
his time, an amateur geologist. To know the world through the senses, as empiricism suggests we
should do, actually empowered Romantic artists, eager to escape formulas and time-honored beliefs and
looking to discover things with their own eyes. And artists became empiricists of their own emotions,
zealously studying and recording their own subjective responses to various experiences.
Rationalism is the belief that logic is the key to understanding: anything that cannot be
expressed in logical form is not actually considered, by a rationalist, to be knowledge. At the risk of
oversimplification, this trend was far less congenial to Romanticism. The same can be said for
utilitarianism, the philosophy summed up by the famous phrase, “the greatest good for the greatest
number.” Romanticism rejected not only arithmetic, but the very idea that any good could be more
important than the individual. The utilitarian outlook suggested that we value things based on their
usefulness; judgements about values were always made within the context of society. During the
Romantic period, many artists moved towards a belief in the value of “art for art’s sake.” Not wanting
anyone measuring the worth of what they were doing, they asserted that it was of supreme and
incalculable value — simply because it was not valuable for anything other than its own being. This
was in great contrast to the Neo-classicists, who, for instance, valued different genres of paintings on the
basis of exactly what sort of social “good” they could do: history paintings, which could teach people
important ethical lessons, were thus the most highly valued paintings in the Neo-classical period.
Is Romanticism to Neo-Classicism as Baroque is to the Renaissance?
It seems fair to ask this question. One reason it seems fair is because many Romantic artists
themselves were deeply interested in cyclical theories of history. The poet Byron, for instance, wrote of
the inevitable fall of great civilizations in his poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. The artist Cole,
inspired by this literary source, took up the theme in his series of paintings The Course of Empire.
There are enough parallels between Neo-classicism and the Renaissance, and enough parallels
between Romanticism and the Baroque, to make one wonder whether there is a kind of cyclical logic to
cultural history: lots of rules, then the rejection or subversion of rules; lots of clarity, then a search for
complexity, and so forth. While there may be something to such theorizing, it is important to analyze
the significant differences between apparently “parallel” periods. To suggest one, just glancingly:
While a work of Baroque art often reveals its hidden unity once we intellectually puzzle it out, what
often holds a seemingly chaotic Romantic work together is much more often an emotion or mood than it
is an idea or a “conceit” (in the language of the Metaphysical poets). Perhaps this Romantic emphasis
on emotion was necessary, in some way, because of the general culture’s onward march towards science
and rationalism.
Subjectivity, aesthetics, the sublime and the picturesque, and “nature”
If anyone truly tried to live an entirely “subjective” life, they would probably run into a lot of
problems. On a practical daily basis, we are virtually forced, if we are to survive, to believe that we
share certain things in common with other people: that there is some “objective” reality out there, after
all. Even though Romanticism was a movement of subjectivity, it was, indeed, a movement, and its
proponents shared certain beliefs. One of the unifying aspects of Romanticism was the growing interest
in psychology. What kinds of emotional effects do certain kinds of places or pictures evoke in the
viewer? This was a key question, addressed early in the Romantic movement by the statesman and
philosopher Edmund Burke, who formulated a theory of the sublime. Whereas the Neo-classicists
valued the beautiful and noble, the Romantics cultivated an appreciation of other intense visual
experiences. Burke suggested that beauty is a sensation we feel when we are attracted to something; the
sublime is a sensation associated with repulsion. It is something often evoked by things that are
unimaginably vast. Brought to the brink of a seemingly unfathomable abyss, we experience the sublime.
We are repelled by the abyss, but are fascinated by it. The fascination arises, perhaps, because this
contact with the infinite leaves us with nothing but the fact of our own separate — and, of course,
unique — existence.
Themes such as the biblical Deluge are treated as occasions for the sublime by artists such as
Cole and Turner. The Deluge, like the theme of the rise and fall of civilizations, suggests that huge
sweeps of time can evoke our own smallness, and thus our sense of the sublime, just as effectively as
immensities of space. The Romantic artist will often invite us to gaze out and imagine all the
uncountable generations of living creatures that have lived and died in the vista spread out before us.
Somewhere between the beautiful (the ideal) and the sublime (the unimaginable?) lies the
picturesque. This category refers specifically, as the name clearly suggests, to those scenes and subjects
that offer themselves readily and naturally as subjects for the artist. Such subjects are neither too regular
(boring!) nor too extreme (scary!). People literally cultivated — designed and built — picturesque
landscapes during both the Neo-classical and Romantic eras, but the picturesque was a bit too tame for
many Romantics.
Which brings us to the very important term “nature.” Rousseau suggested that, in his “natural”
state, man was good. (This concept has become known as the myth of the noble savage.) It is the rules
and artifices of society that debase and ruin us, he believed. Earlier more “classical” uses of the word
“nature” usually incorporated the sense of the “normal”: to be “natural” is to act according to a norm, as
most people in a given situation would (or should) behave. Thus, in Macbeth, the hero refers to his own
behavior as unnatural. If all thanes acted as he acts, society would, as he knows all too well, quickly fall
apart; we see, then, that the concept of human nature is closely connected, in this earlier more “classical”
sense, with the notion of a common good. As Romanticism rejected the common good as something to
strive for, the sense of “nature” shifted. Nature became everything untouched and uncorrupted by the
influence of human civilization. The only “natural” people, by extension, are those who are uncivilized.
National tendencies
The Romantic movement coincides not only with a period of tremendous political and social upheaval
generally (e.g., very significantly, the Napoleonic wars) but with the rise of nationalistic sentiments.
Whether as an effect of this or as a parallel development — perhaps because Romantic artists
consciously attempted to express their own experiences rather than strive for a universal style —
Romantic art from various countries is stylistically and thematically quite varied. If one makes a list of
some of the most significant Romantic artists, the resulting collection includes one or two
representatives from a variety of European countries, plus the United States. Taking each of these artists
as somewhat representative of national tendencies (an oversimplification), here is a brief summary:
Francisco Goya (Spain) — brutality; the nightmare of reality; monsters
John Constable (England) — the picturesque; the working (farming) landscape; naturalism: careful
observation of clouds, light effects, plants, etc.
J. M. W. Turner (England) — the sublime; the dissolution of subject matter: the actual processes of
perception and of painting become a subject, or become metaphors for “natural” processes; movement
Eugène Delacroix (France) — the beauty of violence; virtuosity of technique (the elegance and fluidity
of brushstrokes); exoticism (travels to Morocco etc.)
Caspar David Friedrich (Germany) — painstaking attention to detail leading to a sense of unreality; the
motif of a figure with his/her back turned to the viewer; obstructed views/vistas: subjectivity/limitations
of our knowledge
Thomas Cole (United States) — sublimity and grandeur of nature; cyclical nature of civilization;
conflict between nature and civilization
Some key concepts relating to Romanticism in visual art:
— the sublime, the picturesque, the beautiful
— conflict — violence
— Gothic revivalism
— Arcadian fantasies
— the subjectivity of vision: e.g., Friedrich’s use of hidden vistas/obstructed views
— dreams and nightmares
— the crisis of the artist (e.g., Goya’s illness and the subsequent “Black Paintings”)
— the artist as world traveller, collecting (extreme and exotic) experiences for the sake of art
— cycles of history: the rise and fall of civilizations — a tragic view of history?
— high value placed on spontaneity, virtuosity — e.g., the sketches of John Constable
— communion with/transcendence through “nature”
— nostalgia and melancholy
A compendium of quotes on Romanticism:
“A man possessing so strong a judgment and so subordinate a fancy as Dean [Jonathan] Swift would
hardly have been made romantic . . . if he had studied all the books in Don Quixote’s library.”
— John Foster: “Application of the Epithet Romantic”
“. . . [T]he imagination has its own laws which are and always must be problematic for the reason.”
— Goethe
“According to Voltaire genius is only judicious imitation. According to Rousseau the prime mark
of genius is refusal to imitate.”
— Irving Babbitt: From Rousseau to Romanticism
“An original may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius;
it grows, it is not made; imitations are often a sort of manufacture, wrought up by those mechanics, art
and labor, out of preëxistent materials not their own.” “We may as well grow good by another’s virtue,
or fat by another’s food, as famous by another’s thought.”
— Edwin Young: “Conjectures on Original Composition”
“The cult of the picturesque is closely associated with the cult of local color. Here as elsewhere
romantic genius is, in contradistinction to classical genius which aims at the “grandeur of generality,”
the genius of wonder and surprise.”
— Irving Babbitt: From Rousseau to Romanticism
“[These artists] rig themselves up as comic sketches, as grotesques, as caricatures. Some of them wear
frightful mustaches, one would suppose that they are going forth to conquer the world — their brushes
are halberds, their paint-scratchers sabres; others have enormous beards and hair that puffs out or hangs
down their shoulders; they smoke a cigar volcanically. These cousins of the rainbow, to use a phrase of
our old Régnier, have their heads filled with deluges, seas, rivers, forests, cataracts, tempests, or it may
be with slaughters, tortures and scaffolds. One finds among them human skulls, foils, mandolins,
helmets and dolmans. . . The aim to form a separate species between the ape and the satyr; they give you
to understand that the secrecy of the studio has its dangers and that there is no safety for the models.”
— Chateaubriand
“The romantic critic . . . confines his ambition to receiving so keen an impression from genius,
conceived as something purely temperamental, that when this creative expression is passed through his
temperament it will issue forth as a fresh expression.”
— Irving Babbitt: From Rousseau to Romanticism
“My art flatters nobody by imitation, it courts nobody by smoothness, it tickles nobody by petiteness, it
is without either fal de lal or fiddle de dee, how then can I hope to be popular?”
— John Constable
“. . . [R]omantic poetry springs from our agony and despair. This is not a fault in our art but a necessary
consequence of the advances made by our progressive society.”
— Charles Nodier: Mélanges de littérature et de critique (1820)
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”
— opening sentence from Rousseau’s Social Contract (1762)
“We [England] have more riches than any nation ever had before; we have less good of them than any
nation ever had before.”
— Thomas Carlyle: Past and Present (1843)
“Deep in the heart of the forest I sought and found the vision of those primeveal ages whose history I
bravely sketched.”
— Rousseau: Confessions
“For [English exponent/theorist of the picturesque William] Gilpin, ‘romantic’ implies a tpe of scene too
irregular even to be accepted as Picturesque. In his Observations on the Highlands . . . (1808) he found
Edinburgh romantic rather than picturesque on account of the ‘odd, misshapen and uncouth’ features of
Arthur’s Seat, adding: ‘. . . a view with such a staring feature in it, can no more be picturesque than a
face with a bulbous nose can be beautiful.’”
— William Vaughan: Romanticism and Art
“. . . [T]oo much time is spent in copying the works of others, which tends to weaken the powers of
invention, and I scruple not to affirm, that too much time may be spent in copying the landscapes of
nature herself.”
— Alexander Cozens: A New Method of Assisting the Invention of Drawing Original
Composition of Landscape (1785)
“None but those who have experienced them can conceive of the enticements of science. In other
studies you go as far as others have gone before you, and there is nothing more to know; but in a
scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder.”
— Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: Frankenstein
John Constable (1776-1837)
John Constable: Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, 1831-3
Constable: Stour Valley and Dedham Church, 1814
Constable: The Vale of Dedham, 1814
Constable: The Haywain, 1821
Constable: Flatford Lock and Mill, 1812
Constable: Flatford Lock and Mill, 1811 (full size “sketch”)
Constable: A Boat Passing a Lock, 1823-5
Constable: A Boat Passing a Lock, 1822-4 (full size “sketch”)
Constable: Hadleigh Castle, 1828-9
Constable: Stonehenge, c.1836
Constable: Study of Clouds at Hampstead, 1821 oil on paper on board
Constable: Cloud Study, 1822 oil on paper on board
Constable: Weymouth Bay
Constable: Flatford Mill, 1816-17
John Constable: Excerpts from his Writings
From Constable's Fourth Lecture (1836)
It was said by Sir Thomas Lawrence, that "we can never hope to compete with nature in the
beauty and delicacy of her separate forms or colours-our only chance lies in selection and combination."
Nothing can be more true-and it may be added, that selection and combination are learned from nature
herself, who constantly presents us with compositions of her own, far more beautiful than the happiest
arranged by human skill. I have endeavoured to draw a line between genuine art and mannerism, but
even the greatest painters have never been wholly untainted by manner. Painting is a science, and
should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not landscape painting be
considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments?
Art and Nature
[1822]
The art will go out; there Will be no genuine painting in England in thirty years. This will be
owing to pictures driven into the empty heads of the junior artists by their owners, the directors of the
British Institution, etc. In the early ages of the fine arts, the productions were more affecting and
sublime, for the artists, being without human exemplars, were forced to have recourse to nature; in the
latter ages, of Raphael and Claude, the productions were more perfect, less uncouth, because the artists
could then avail themselves of the experience of those who were before them, but they did not take them
at their word, or as the chief objects of imitation. Could you but see the folly and ruin exhibited at the
British Gallery, you would go mad. Vander Velde, and Gaspar Poussin, and Titian, are made to spawn
multitudes of abortions: and for what are the great masters brought into this disgrace? only to serve the
purpose of sale. Hofland has sold a shadow of Gaspar Poussin for eighty guineas, and it is no more like
Gaspar than the shadow of a man on a muddy road is like himself.
[1829]
In art, there are two modes by which men aim at distinction. In the one, by a careful application
to what others have accomplished, the artist imitates their works, or selects and combines their various
beauties; in the other, he seeks excellence at its primitive source, nature. In the first, he forms a style
upon the study of pictures, and produces either imitative or eclectic art; in the second, by a close
observation of nature, he discovers qualities existing in her which have never been portrayed before, and
thus forms a style which is original. The results of the one mode, as they repeat that with which the eye
is already familiar, are soon recognised and estimated, while the advances of the artist in a new path
must necessarily be slow, for few are able to judge of that which deviates from the usual course, or are
qualified to appreciate original studies.
[Found on a scrap of paper among his memoranda:] My art flatters nobody by imitation, it courts
nobody by smoothness, it tickles nobody by petiteness, it is without either fal de lal or fiddle de dee, how
then can I hope to be popular?
From Constable's Second Lecture (1836)
But the climax of absurdity to which the art may be carried, when led away from nature by
fashion, may be best seen in the works of Boucher. Good temper, suavity, and dissipation characterised
the personal habits of this perfect specimen of the French School of the time of Louis XV, or the early
part of the last century. His landscape, of which he was evidently fond, is pastoral; and such pastorality!
the pastoral of the opera-house. But at this time, it must be remembered, the court were in the habit of
dispersing into the country, and duchesses were to be seen performing the parts of shepherdesses,
milkmaids, and dairymaids, in cottages; and also brewing, baking, and gardening, and sending the
produce to market. These strange anomalies were played off on the canvases of Boucher. His scenery is
a bewildered dream of the picturesque. From cottages adorned with festoons of ivy, sparrow pots, etc.,
are seen issuing opera dancers with mops, brooms, milk pails, and guitars; children with cocked hats,
queues, bag wigs, and swords-and cats, poultry, and pigs. The scenery is diversified with winding
streams, broken bridges, and water wheels; hedge stakes dancing minuets-and groves bowing and
curtsying to each other; the whole leaving the mind in a state of be-wilderment and confusion, from
which laughter alone can relieve it.-Boucher told Sir Joshua Reynolds "that he never painted from the
life, for that nature put him out."
It is remarkable how nearly, in all things, opposite extremes are allied, and how they succeed
each other. The style I have been describing was followed by that which sprung out of the Revolution,
when David and his contemporaries exhibited their stern and heartless petrifactions of men and womenwith trees, rocks, tables, and chairs, all equally bound to the ground by a relentless outline, and destitute
of chiaroscuro, the soul and medium of art.
[1822]
I have been to see David's picture of "The Coronation of the Empress Josephine." It does not
possess the common language of the art, much less anything of the oratory of Rubens or Paul Veronese,
and in point of execution it is below notice; still I prefer it to the productions of those among our
historical painters who are only holding on to the tail of the shirt of Carlo Maratti, simply because it
does not remind me of the schools. I could not help feeling as I did when I last wrote to you of what I
saw at the British Institution. Should there be a National Gallery (which is talked of) there will be an end
of the art in poor old England, and she will become, in all that relates to painting, as much a nonentity as
every other country that has one. The reason is plain; the manufacturers of pictures are then made the
criterions of perfection, instead of nature.
[1835]
. . . I have seen David's pictures; they are indeed loathsome, and
the room would be intolerable but for the urbane and agreeable manners of the colonel. David seems to
have formed his mind from three sources, the scaffold, the hospital, and a brothel. . .
From Constable's Last Lecture (1836)
The decline of painting, in every age and country, after arriving at excellence, has been attributed
by writers who have not been artists to every cause but the true one. The first impression and a natural
one is, that the fine arts have risen or declined in proportion as patronage has been given to them or
withdrawn, but it will be found that there has often been more money lavished on them in their worst
periods than in their best, and that the highest honours have frequently been bestowed on artists whose
names are scarcely now known. Whenever the arts have not been upheld by the good sense of their
professors, patronage and honours so far from checking their downward course, must inevitably
accelerate it.
The attempt to revive old styles that have existed in former ages may for a time appear to be
successful, but experience may now surely teach us its impossibility. I might put on a suit of Claude
Lorrain's clothes and walk into the street, and the many who know Claude but slightly would pull off
their hats to me, but I should at last meet with some one more intimately acquainted with him, who
would expose me to the contempt I merited.
It is thus in all the fine arts. A new Gothic building, or a new missal, is in reality little less absurd
than a new ruin. The Gothic architecture, sculpture, and painting, belong to peculiar ages. The feelings
that guided their inventors are unknown to us, we contemplate them with associations, many of which,
however vague and dim, have a strong hold on our imaginations, and we feel indignant at the attempt to
cheat us by any modern mimicry of their peculiarities.
It is to be lamented that the tendency of taste is at present too much towards this kind of
imitation, which, as long as it lasts, can only act as a blight on art, by engaging talents that might have
stamped the Age with a character of its own, in the vain endeavour to reanimate deceased Art, in which
the utmost that can be accomplished will be to reproduce a body without a soul.
The Voice of God in Nature
excerpt from a letter written by John Constable to Maria Bicknell (later to be his wife) in 1814,
reflecting upon the view of the rectory at East Bergholt (near his father’s house) where he had met
Maria:
I believe we can do nothing worse than indulge in an useless sensibility — but I can hardly tell you what
I felt at the sight from the window where I am now writing of the fields in which we have so often
walked. A beautiful calm autumnal setting sun is glowing upon the gardens of the Rectory and on
adjacent fields where some of the happiest hours of my life were passed.
observations by Constable contrasting the coloration of a landscape in the morning and in the evening:
The dews and moisture which the earth has imbibed during the night cause a greater depth and coolness
in the shadows of the Morning; also, from the same cause, the lights are at that time more silvery and
sparkling; the lights and shadows of Evening are of a more saffron or ruddy hue, vegetation being
parched during the day from the drought and heat.
description of “Constable country” — an area in Suffolk, near the border with Essex, along the river
Stour in the East Anglia region of Britain — by the political journalist William Cobbettt:
You can, in no direction, go from it a quarter of a mile without finding views that a painter might crave,
and then the country round about it so well cultivated; the land in such a beautiful state, the farmhouses
all white, and all so much alike; the barns, and everything about the homesteads so snug; the stocks of
turnips so abundant everywhere; the sheep and cattle in such fine order; the wheat all frilled; the
ploughman so expert; the furrows, if a quarter of a mile long, as straight as a line, and laid as truly as if
with a level: in short, here is everything to delight the eye, and to make the people proud of their
country; and this is the case throughout the whole of this county. I have always found Suffolk farmers
great boasters of their superiority over others; and I must say that it is not without reason. (Rural
Rides)
Constable had visited Hadleigh Castle, a thirteenth-century building looming about 150 feet above the
Thames near Southend-on-Sea, in 1814 at a time when his courtship of Maria Bicknell was going very
poorly (due to the opposition of her grandfather, who disliked the idea of his daughter wedding the
aspiring painter son of a miller). He had made a drawing of the castle in his sketchbook. Maria’s death
in November 1828 seems to have recalled the desolate spot and its gloomy associations to him, and he
started to work on a painting of Hadleigh Castle for the 1829 exhibition of the Royal Academy. Shortly
before the exhibition, Constable finally was made a full academician. Constable titled the painting
“Hadleigh Castle. The mouth of the Thames — morning after a stormy night” and quoted the following
lines from James Thomson’s The Seasons:
The desert joys
Wildly, through all his melancholy bounds
Rude ruins glitter; and the briny deep,
Seen from some pointed promontory’s top,
Far to the dim horizon’s utmost verge
Restless, reflects a floating gleam.
In a similar vein, Constable appended lines (along with a bit of explanation) from Wordsworth’s Elegiac
Stanzas suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm, painted by Sir George Beaumont [a mentor
and influence of/on Constable] when he sent a mezzotint of another gloomy seaside scene, of Weymouth
Bay to a friend in 1830
. . . ‘That sea in anger
‘and that dismal shoar.’
I think of ‘Wordsworth’ for on that spot, perished his brother in the wreck of the Abergavenny.
The artist Constable recalls poetry inspired by an image by another painter — quite a complex set of
references, but one which helps to indicate how intertwined literature and art sometimes were (and are).
It is the fact of grief which creates a shared bond, in this case, between the two painters and the poet,
although each refers to a different grief or melancholy.
Caspar David Friedrich (plus Théodore Géricault):
Friedrich: Arctic Shipwreck, 1823-4
Géricault: The Raft of the “Medusa”, 1818-19
Friedrich: Blocks of Ice (two oil sketches of ice on the river Elbe which Friedrich later used in creating
Arctic Shipwreck), 1829-1
Friedrich: Arctic Shipwreck, detail
Friedrich: Self-Portrait, Head Resting on Hand, 1802
Géricault: Portrait of an Artist in His Studio (probably early 1820s)
Géricault: The Hangman, c.1820
Friedrich: The Romantic Reader, 1801 (ink and wash)
Anonymous: The Romantic, 1825
Friedrich: Woman Before the Rising Sun, 1818
Friedrich: The Wanderer Above a Sea of Mists, 1818
Friedrich: The Monk by the Sea, c.1809
Friedrich: The Monk by the Sea, c.1809 detail
Friedrich: The Abbey in the Oak Wood, c.1809
Friedrich: The Abbey in the Oak Wood, detail
Friedrich: Winter Landscape with Church 1811
Friedrich: The Stages of Life c.1835
Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840): Excerpts from his writings
I am always disgusted when I find a multitude of paintings hung or piled up in a room or hall; the viewer
can never see a picture by itself with portions of four other pictures impinging on his sight. Such a piling
up of art treasures must surely lower the value of individual works in the estimation of all who see them
thus, particularly when paintings which contradict one another are placed side by side (sometimes
intentionally, it seems) in such a way that they defeat, or at least hurt, one another and the effect of all is
diminished. . . .
Close your eye, so that your picture will first appear before your mind's eye. Then bring to the light of
day what you first saw in the inner darkness, and let it be reflected back into the minds of others.
Art is comparable to a child, science to a man.
The heart is the only true source of art, the language of a pure, child-like soul. Any creation not sprung
from this origin can only be artifice. Every true work of art is conceived in a hallowed hour and born in
a happy one, from an impulse in the artist's heart, often without his knowledge.
The artist's feeling is his law. Pure sensibility can never be Unnatural; it is always in harmony with
nature. But the feelings of another must never be imposed on us as our law. Spiritual relationship
produces artistic resemblance, but this relationship is very different from imitation. Whatever one may
say about X.'s paintings, and however much they may resemble Y. 's, they originated in him and are his
own.
This man is honored as a painter of great ability and skill, and also as a teacher who has produced many
clever pupils on whom he has put his unmistakable stamp. Whether this last is a reason for praise seems
questionable. I believe that it could be taken for a criticism, of the stamper as well as of the stamped. It
would have been praiseworthy, I think, if the master had not put his stamp on his pupils, but had
restrained his vanity and observed and respected, with wise moderation, the inborn individuality and
inclination of each of his students. For that which nature has given to each of us in particular is the talent
which we must cultivate, and I should like to call out to these students: "Respect the voice of nature in
yourselves!"
Does it not take immense obtuseness and conceit to believe that we can force our ideas and opinions on
the young? Is it not truly bestial, stupid, and intolerant to put down, or deny to others, whatever happens
to be contrary to our ideas? Let everybody express himself in his own way; back up your pupils with
advice, do not confront them with orders! For all of us can and should do only those things for which
God has equipped our bodies and minds. Heavy-handed instruction slows the mind's progress and
disturbs the student's growth and individuality. Lessons unwillingly learned may save us from crude
mistakes, but there is the danger that untimely meddling will discourage the quiet growth of true genius.
A painter should not merely paint what he sees in front of him, he ought to paint what he sees within
himself. If he sees nothing within, he should not paint what he sees before him, lest his paintings
resemble those screens behind which we expect to find the sick or the dead. Mr. X has seen only what
all but the blind can see; one should expect artists to see more than that.
We are fond of the pious simplicity in early paintings, but we do not want to become simple ourselves,
as has happened to some who aped only the faults of these paintings; we want to become pious, and
imitate their virtues.
. . . To be quite frank: isn't there something disgusting, not to say unappetizing, in the sight of those
dried-up Maries holding starved Infant Jesuses and wearing papery garments? They often look as if they
had been deliberately ill drawn and put intentionally in faulty foreshortening and perspective. Painters
copy all the defects of that period, but the good qualities in its art, the profound, devout, childlike
sentiment, cannot be imitated mechanically. This the hypocrites will never get right, even if they carry
deception to the extreme of turning themselves into Catholics. What our ancestors did in childlike
simplicity, we cannot do against our better knowledge. When grownups shit into the living room like
infants, to prove their innocence and lack of guile, people will neither be convinced nor pleased.
It is the taste of our time to relish strong colors. Painters outdo one another in applying make-up to
cheeks and lips in their paintings; the landscape painters carry exaggeration even further and put makeup on trees, rocks, water and air. . . . By way of contrast, I remember the time when color was almost
completely neglected and when oil paintings looked like sepia drawings, because brown was their one,
dominant hue. Later, brown was replaced by blue, and this in turn by violet, and finally it was the turn of
green, a color which landscape painters had formerly suppressed almost entirely, despite its prominence
in nature. Just now, all the colors are being used together. It took about thirty years for men's minds to
run through this cycle, and we may be ready to go through another just like it. It is hard on those who
can't run along; their work is being overlooked and neglected, for the time being, at any rate.
Landscape painting these days no longer aims for a spiritual conception of its subject, not even if this
were to be combined with the most scrupulous and faithful imitation of nature. The modern demand is
for the exact aping of bodies, in other words of lengths, widths, heights, shapes, and colors. For these, in
the opinion of modern gentlemen, actually comprehend the spirit, since the spirit can express itself only
through them. This is called pure, humble, childlike submission, and sacrifice of personal will. In other
words, the painter ought not to have a will, he should simply paint. Even that which the inner eye
perceives through the physical eye is considered presumption and reckoned a sin.
I am far from wanting to resist the demands of my time, except when they are purely a matter of fashion.
Instead, I continue to hope that time itself will destroy its own offspring, perhaps quite soon. But I am
not so weak as to submit to the demands of the age when they go against my convictions. I spin a
cocoon around myself; let others do the same. I shall leave it up to time to show what will come of it: a
brilliant butterfly or a maggot.
Friedrich: The Monk by the Sea
Friedrich’s painting The Monk by the Sea triggered strong responses in his contemporaries. It present
us with the lone figure of a monk, back turned to us in a common Friedrich motif, in apparent
contemplation of the immensity of a sea which seems to stretch off indefinitely into and indeed to
become the mist hovering above it. The German writer Heinrich Kleist (whose output included plays,
novels, and stories) saw the influence of Ossian in the painting. Ossian was the invention of a Scottish
poet, James MacPherson, who presented his own cycle of fanciful and quasi-mythological poems about
the Celtic bard and hero Ossian (often represented in paintings of the period with a harp) as the work of
Ossian himself. This literary hoax won a huge following; Napoleon himself was reported to have held
Ossian’s epic as his favorite literature. The German poet Goethe translated some passage of Ossian,
including the following lines which seem to fit the mood of The Monk by the Sea: “It is night: I am
alone, forlorn on the hill of storms. The wind is heard in the mountain. The torrent pours down the
rock. No hut receives me from the rain; forlorn on the hill of winds!”
An important critical reaction to the painting follows.
“Various Impressions Experienced Before A Seascape with a Monk,
by Caspar David Friedrich, 1810, written by Heinrich von Kleist, Clemens Brentano, and Achim von
Arnim (The italicized section was added to the original essay by Brentano and Arnim.)
It is magnificent to stand in infinite solitude on the seashore, beneath an overcast sky, and to look out
on an endless waste of water. Part of this feeling is the fact that one has made one’s way there and
yet must go back, that one would like to cross over but cannot, that one sees nothing to support life
and yet senses the voice of life in the sigh of the waves, the murmur of the air, the passing clouds
and the lonely cry of birds. Part of this feeling is a claim made by the heart and a rejection, if I may
call it that, on the part of nature. But this is impossible in front of the picture, and what I should
have found in the picture itself I found only between myself and the picture, namely a claim my
heart made on the picture and the picture’s rejection of me; and so I myself became the monk, and
the picture became the dune, but the sea itself, on which I should have looked out with longing —
the sea was absent. There can be nothing sadder or more desolate in the world than this place: the
only spark of life in the broad domain of death, the lonely centre in the lonely circle. The picture,
with its two or three mysterious subjects, lies there like an apocalypse, as if it were thinking [Edwin]
Young’s Night Thoughts and since it has, in its uniformity and boundlessness, no foreground but the
frame, it is as if one’s eyelids had been cut off.
Yet the painter has undoubtedly broken an entirely new path in the field of his art, and I am
convinced that with his spirit, a square mile of the sand of Mark Brandenburg could be represented
with a barberry bush, on which a lone crow might sit preening itself, and that such a picture would
have an effect that rivalled Ossian or Kowegarten. Why, if the artist painted this landscape using its
own chalk and its own water, I believe he would make the foxes and wolves weep: the most powerful
praise, without doubt, that could be given to this kind of landscape painting.
“The Sublime”
“The sublime” is a key concept in the Romanticism of the late 1700s and early 1800s. It is a
concept which dates back to Longinus, but in the Romantics’ conception there was a new emphasis on
pure emotion divorced from reason and tradition. Along with this came the exaltation of pure
“aesthetic” experience. The supposed “purity” of this experience comes from its freedom and
spontaneity. Aesthetic experience flourishes only when the individual is free from any mundane
purpose. Schiller, one of the important German thinkers of Romanticism, asserted, for example, that the
aesthetic moment of a lion comes when he roars not with any definite design but purely for the pleasure
of roaring (Irving Babbitt: Rousseau and Romanticism).
Romantic theories of the sublime begin with Edmund Burke’s essay of 1757, Philosophical
Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of The Sublime and the Beautiful, in which Burke explores the
dualism of these two categories, the sublime and the beautiful, which, together, comprise our aesthetic
experience. (Other, later theorists added another category, the picturesque, to cover subjects out of
which an artist could make interesting pictures, but which seemed neither sublime nor beautiful.) As
William Vaughan writes in Romanticism and Art:
. . . [It] had been recognized that aesthetic pleasure could be stimulated not only by the awareness of
beauty, but also by a more mysterious and elating experience known as the ‘Sublime’. . . . [Burke’s]
approach was psychological, for he was concerned with the roots of emotion. He reasoned that
man’s two most powerful feelings were love and hate, expressed as attraction and repulsion. While
a sense of beauty was aroused by those objects that seemed attractive, a sense of sublimity was
induced by those objects whose properties seemed repellent, such as excessive size, darkness, or
infinite extension.
Burke’s theory was vital to the Romantics both because it emphasized the suggestive quality of
art and because it gave a new importance to the disturbing. The artist who concentrated on this now
. . . had become an explorer. For Burke’s notion of the Sublime emphasized that man was
disconcerted primarily by that which lay beyond his control or comprehension. Ultimately repulsion
could become a new means of intimating the Ideal which, for the Romantics, was always
unknowable.
--pp.32-33
“‘The world must be romanticized, that the original meaning may be rediscovered,’ exclaimed the poet
Novalis in 1799, adding by way of explanation ‘in so far as I give to commonplace a lofty meaning, to
the ordinary an occult aspect, to the well-known the dignity of the unknown . . . I am romanticizing
them.’”
— from Romanticism and Art by William Vaughan
“By giving higher meaning to the mundane, a mysterious appearance to the ordinary, the distinction of
the unknown to what is known, the guise of infinity to the finite, I romanticize it. The operation is
reversed for those things that are higher, unknown, mystical and infinite: they are elucidated by the
association, gaining a colloquial means of expression.” — Novalis
“It [the sublime, or delightful horror] is a compound of unease, expressed in the highest degree as
terrror, and joy, capable of intensifying to delight, and although it is not really pleasure, it is much
preferred to any pleasure by fine souls. This compounding of two contradictory sensations in one single
emotion is an irrefutable proof of our moral independence.” — Schiller, “On the Sublime”
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828)
Goya: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters 1793-6 etching and aquatint
Goya: First Dream (pen and sepia ink) (first planned as frontispiece for Los Caprichos)
The inscription reads: “Universal language. Drawn and etched by Francisco de Goya. The Year 1797.
The Author Dreaming. His only intention is to banish those prejudicial vulgarities and to perpetuate
with this work of caprichos the sound testimony of truth.”
Goya: Francisco Goya y Lucientes, Pintor (used as frontispiece for Los Caprichos)
Goya: Self-portrait on a Sickbed with Dr. Arrieta, 1820 Goya’s dedication: “Painted in 1820 by Goya
for his friend Arrieta, in gratitude for his excellent care during a terrible and dangerous illness suffered
at the end of 1819 in his 73rd year.”
Goya: The Madhouse, c. 1816
Goya: The Madhouse, (detail of right side)
Goya: Witches’ Sabbath, 1789
Goya: The Incantation, c.1793
Goya: Saturn Devouring One of His Children 1819-23
Goya: A Knife Grinder c.1810
Goya: The Second of May, 1808, at Madrid, 1814
Goya: The Third of May, 1808, at Madrid: The Shootings on Principe Pio Mountain, 1814
Goya: The Carnivorous Vulture from “Disasters of War” begun 1808?
Goya: Why? from “Disasters of War” begun 1808?
Goya: Dream of Some Men Who Ate Us Up pen and sepia ink, 1797 from Los Caprichos
Goya: They’re Hot 1797-8 etching and aquatint from Los Caprichos
Goya: Saturn Devouring One of His Children, 1819-23 (plaster mounted on canvas)
Goya: Until Death, 1797-8 etching and aquatint from Los Caprichos
Goya: A Way to Fly Proverbs, No. 13 c.1819
Goya: They Spruce Themselves Up 1797-8 etching and aquatint from Los Caprichos
Goya: Neither More nor Less, 1797-8 etching and aquatint from Los Caprichos
Goya: Two of a kind 1797-8 (inscription for drawing: “The old women laugh themselves sick
because they know he hasn’t a penny.”) etching and aquatint from Los Caprichos
Goya: You who cannot 1797-8 etching and aquatint from Los Caprichos
Goya: The Colossus c.1808-12
Goya: Little Giants 1791-2
Goya: Portrait of Don Manuel Osorio de Zuñiga 1788 and detail slide
Goya: Andrés del Peral c1797-8 and detail slide
Goya: Family of Carlos IV 1800-1 and detail slide
An Overview of the Romantic Movement in Europe and
Eugène Delacroix as an Ambivalent Exemplar of Romanticism
. . . The classical aesthetic values of unity, simplicity, and the
natural and harmonious adaptation of parts to the whole are
founded upon a confidence in the truth and grandeur of
ordered generality. They may be said to stand opposed, for
example, to the romantic cherishing of the surprise in variety,
the wonder and mystery in contemplating the strange and
occasionally the grotesque, which attend upon an indiscriminate
amusement and transitory delight in the particular.
--Walter Jackson Bate
From Classic to Romantic
In this brief statement, some of the primary distinctions between the classical and the romantic
temperaments are clearly drawn. In actual practice, it is not always so easy to classify a work of art:
many works exhibit contrasting tendencies, as we shall see in examining some of the paintings of
Eugène Delacroix. For, although Delacroix (1798-1863) is regarded as "the leading French Romantic
painter of the nineteenth century, . . . the champion of the Romantic movement against the entrenched
forces of academic Classicism", his pictures in many ways show his awareness and acceptance of the
need for some principles of order and harmony, principles embodied in the classical tradition. And in
many ways, Delacroix, like other artists of the Romantic movement , was as concerned with classical
antiquity as were the painters of the academy (the "neo-classicists"); the difference lay in their
interpretation of that past, in what they made of it. (Incidentally, Delacroix did not call himself a
Romantic painter, preferring to stand outside even of this movement of individualism!)
It is said that the Classicist has no need to distinguish the past from the present, as the same
underlying universal principles of human behavior, of proportion, of life organize and control things
equally at all times. The neo-classical painter (e.g., David and his Oath of the Horatii) takes examples of
virtuous action from the classical past and presents these to his contemporaries as still-relevant rules for
conduct. In contrast, the Romantic artist makes us aware of the past as a dim but powerful presence.
History, in Romantic art, is full of violent clashes, and forces of darkness and disorder threaten the calm
harmony achieved by civilization. (Example: Delacroix's murals in the Palais Bourbon Library, or
Thomas Cole's The Course of Empire series.) Many Romantics relished disorder, and even an artist like
Delacroix, in whose work there is, as noted above, much respect for the classic, finds in the turbulence
of human conflicts, as well as in the turbulence to be found in nature, a great source of energy which
they felt was missing from the art of the neo-classicists.
Wilhelm Heinse (1746-1803) was a contemporary of the German poet/dramatist/artist Goethe,
and a representative of the generation associated with the catchphrase Storm and Stress (Sturm und
Drang). (This phrase sums up their aesthetic ideals; it was borrowed from the title of a play by a
German dramatist of the period.) The following passages excerpted from Heinse's writings may provide
a sense of the general ideas which formed the foundation or background for much Romantic art of the
first half of the nineteenth century:
Every form is individual, there exists none which is abstract. It is impossible to imagine the purely
ideal figure of a man or woman, infant or old man. A young Aspasia, Phryne or Lais can. be raised
to a Venus, Diana or Athena . . . but an abstract, merely perfect woman, unaffected by climate or
culture, is no more than a phantom, worse even than the fictitious heroine of a novel who at least
must speak some particular language and use words which can be understood. And those unbearably
empty faces and figures are called high and true art by wretches who have learned their trade with
the aid of plaster casts and now look down with contempt on those more vigorous men who carry
their own century's beauty in their living hearts.
Among the Greeks and Romans, the temple was usually destined for only one of their many gods. It
was a dwelling, made to serve him when he came down from Olympus to visit the region, like a king
travelling from his residence to some provincial castle. The temple's dimensions, therefore, were not
large, and the columns were proportioned accordingly. Every citizen sacrificed indiviually, and on
feast days only the priests and priestesses entered, while the people stood outside . . . .
Our churches, by contrast, are places of assembly in which all the inhabitants of a town will
often stay for hours on end. A solemn Gothic cathedral, designed by intelligent barbarians, contains
immense open spaces in which the voice of the priest becomes thunder and the people's chant a seastorm, praising the Father of the Universe and shaking the boldest unbeliever, while the organ, the
tyrant of music, roars like a hurricane plowing deep seas. To a man of sound feeling, such a
cathedral will put the Greek temple, that mere enlargement of a petty dwelling, to shame -- yes, even
the loveliest Venus temple by the most tasteful Athenian.
Delacroix Castaways on a Ship's Boat 1847
Delacroix Jesus on the Sea of Galilee 1854
Delacroix Liberty Leading the People 1830
Delacroix Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi 1826
George Stubbs White Horse frightened by a Lion 1770
Delacroix Tiger Attacking a Horse 1825-28
James Ward Marengo 1824
Delacroix Lion Hunt 1858
Delacroix Combat of the Giaour and the Pasha 1835
Delacroix A Greek Warrior c.1820
Delacroix Moroccan Merchant 1832
Delacroix Orphan Girl in the Graveyard 1824
Delacroix The Massacre of Chios 1824
Delacroix page from Moroccan sketchbook 1832
Delacroix The Sultan of Morocco receiving Count de Mornay, Ambass. of
France (sketch, 1845?)
Delacroix Dante and Virgil in the Inferno 1822
Delacroix The Entombment 1847-48
Delacroix Ovid Among the Scythians 1856-9
Delacroix Portrait of Chopin (detail) 1838
Delacroix Mephistopheles 1828
Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851)
'T'is living Greece no more' 1822
Dido Building Carthage; or the Rise of the Carthaginian Empire 1815
The Burning of theHouses of Lords and Commons, 16th October, 1834 1835
The Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her last berth to be broken up 1838
Rain, Steam, and Speed — The Great Western Railway 1844
Snowstorm — Steamboat off a Harbour’s Mouth making signals in shallow water, and going by the
lead. The Author was in this storm on the night the Ariel left Harwich. 1856
The Slave Ship 1839
Shade and Darkness — the Evening of the Deluge 1843
Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) — the Morning after the Deluge 1843
Lines Composed Over Three Thousand Miles
from Tintern Abbey
I was here before, a long time ago,
and now I am here again
is an observation that occurs in poetry
as frequently as rain occurs in life.
The fellow may be gazing
over and English landscape,
hillsides dotted with sheep,
a row of tall trees topping the downs,
or he could be moping through the shadows
of a dark Bavarian forest,
a wedge of cheese and a volume of fairy tales
tucked into his rucksack.
But the feeling is always the same.
It was better the first time.
This time is not nearly as good.
I’m not feeling as chipper as I did back then.
Something is always missing—
swans, a glint on the surface of a lake,
some minor but essential touch.
Or the quality of things has diminished.
The sky was deeper, more dimensional blue,
clouds were more cathedral-like,
and water rushed over rock
with greater effervescence.
From our chairs we have watched
the poor author in his waistcoat
as he recalls the dizzying icebergs of childhood
and mills around in a field of weeds.
We have heard the poets long dead
declaim their dying
from a promontory, a riverbank,
next to a haycock, within a copse.
We have listened to their dismay,
the kind that issues from poems
the way water issues forth from hoses,
the way the match always gives its little speech on fire.
And when we put down the book at last,
lean back, close our eyes,
stinging with print,
and slip in the bookmark of sleep,
we will be schooled enough to know
that when we wake up
a little before dinner
things will not be nearly as good as they once were.
Something will be missing
from this long, coffin-shaped room,
the walls and windows now
only two different shades of gray,
the glossy gardenia drooping
in its chipped terra-cotta pot.
And on the floor, shoes, socks,
the browning core of an apple.
Nothing will be as it was
a few hours ago, back in the glorious past
before our naps, back in that Golden Age
that drew to a close sometime shortly after lunch.
— Billy Collins
Some key concepts relating to Romanticism in visual art:
— the sublime, the picturesque, the beautiful
— conflict — violence
— Gothic revivalism
— Arcadian fantasies
— the subjectivity of vision: e.g., Friedrich’s use of hidden vistas/obstructed views
— dreams and nightmares
— the crisis of the artist (e.g., Goya’s illness and the subsequent “Black Paintings”)
— the artist as world traveller, collecting (extreme and exotic) experiences for the sake of art
— cycles of history: the rise and fall of civilizations — a tragic view of history?
— high value placed on spontaneity, virtuosity — e.g., the sketches of John Constable
— communion with/transcendence through “nature”
— nostalgia and melancholy
Thomas Cole: The Rise and Fall of Civilization: The Course of Empire (1834-36)
This series of paintings by Thomas Cole is an expression of a cyclical view of history:
civilizations are presented as having a life cycle. The rise and fall of civilizations was a growing theme
in the Romantic era, addressed by important historical and literary works. One of Cole’s inspirations,
for example, was Lord Byron’s epic (and somewhat autobiographical) poem Childe Harolde’s
Pilgrimage (see excerpts below).
Cole was the leading landscape painter of his era, but also had aspirations to “history painting.”
The Course of Empire series, commissioned by New York businessman Luman Reed, who was
sympathetic to Cole’s outlook and appreciative of his talent, gave Cole an opportunity to combine both
genres. The relationship of civilization to nature is a key element in the series. Cole includes a
particular mountain in each of the five paintings comprising the series as a landmark allowing us to
understand that we are looking at roughly the same place in all the images, but at different times in the
life cycle of a civilization. It is notable that in The Consummation of Empire the landscape element
nearly disappears; in a scene that other artists might have interpreted as purely positive, this
disconnection of society from nature is a signal of the society’s decadence, and a signal of the fall to
come. Likewise, the melancholy mood of the final scene, Desolation, is lightened by the re-emergence
of nature. One gets the sense, from both Cole’s art as a whole and from his writings, that his spirit was
most in tune with the pastoral or arcadian state, which symbolizes a balance between nature and culture.
1. The Savage State
2. The Pastoral or Arcadian State
4. Destruction
3. The Consummation of Empire
4. Destruction
5. Desolation
Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire Series: Supporting Materials
David Humphreys (an officer in the Revolutionary army):
All former empires rose, the work of guilt
On conquest, blood, or usurpation built:
But we, taught wisdom by their woes and crimes,
Fraught with their lore, and born to better time;
Our constitutions form’d on freedom’s base,
Which all the blessings of all lands embrace;
Embrace humanity’s extended cause,
A world of our empire, for a world of our laws.
selections from Thomas Cole’s “Essay on American Scenery”
I cannot but express my sorrow that . . . the ravages of the axe are daily increasing: most noble scenes
are made desolate, and oftentimes with a wantonness and barbarism scarcely credible in a civilised
nation.
. . .in civilized Europe the primitive features of scenery have long since been destroyed or modified. . . .
And to this cultivated state our western world is fast approaching; but nature is still predominant, and
there are those who regret that with the improvements of cultivation the sublimity of the wilderness
should pass away; for those scenes of solitude from which the hand of nature has never been lifted,
affect the mind with a more deep toned emotion than aught which the hand of man has touched. Amid
them the consequent associations are of God the creator — they are his undefiled works, and the mind is
cast into the contemplation of eternal things.
Art is in fact man’s lowly imitation of the creative power of the Almighty.
We are still in Eden; the wall that shuts us out of the garden is our ignorance and folly.
from a contemporary review of Course of Empire: Consummation of Empire in the New York
Mirror:
This splendid picture represents man’s attainment of a high state of comparative perfection: but we see
the causes of decline and fall upon the face of it. Mingled with the triumph of art is the triumph of the
conqueror, and with the emblems of peace and religion we see the signs of war and display of pride and
vanity. The ostentatious display of riches has succeeded to the efforts of virtuous industry, and the study
of nature and truth. We see that man has attained power without the knowledge of its true use: and has
already abused it. . . . The climax in the course of man’s progress, which Mr. Cole has here represented,
is that which has been and was founded on the usurpation of the strong over the weak; the perfection
which man is hereafter to attain, will be based upon a more stable foundation: political equality; the
rights of man; the democratick [sic] principle; the sovereignty of the people.
from ‘Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America’ by George Bekeley,
Bishop of Cloyne in Ireland:
Westward the Course of Empire takes its Way;
The first four Acts already past
A fifthe shall close the Drama with the Day:
Time’s noblest Offspring is the last.
notes by Thomas Cole on the Course of Empire series:
on The Savage State: “. . . we have the first rudiments of society. Men are banded together for mutual
aid in the chase &c.”
on The Arcadian State: “The simple or Arcadian State, represents the scene after ages have passed.
The gradual advancement of society has wrought a change on its aspect. The ‘untracked and rude’ has
been tamed and softened. Shepherds are tending their flocks, the plughman with his oxen is upturning
the soil, and commerce begins to stretch her wings.”
on The Consummation of Empire: The scene represents the “summit of human glory”, where “wealth,
power, knowledge and taste have worked together, and accomplished the highest meed of human
achievement and empire.”
on Destruction: “Luxury has weakened and debased. A savage enemy has entered the city. A fierce
tempest is raging. Walls and colonnades have been thrown down. Temples and palaces are burning.
An arch of the bridge over which the triumphal procession was passing in the former scene has been
battered down, and the broken pillars, and ruins of war engines, and the temporary bridge that has been
thrown over, indicate that this has been a scene of fierce contention . . . Along the battlements among the
ruined Caryatids, the contention is fierce, and the combattants fight amid the smoke and flame of
prostrate edifices.”
on Desolation: “Violence and time have crumbled the works of man, and art is again resolving into
elemental nature. The gorgeous pageant has passed, the roar of battle has ceased — the multitude has
sunk into the dust — the empire is extinct.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Nature:
. . . The noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God. It is the organ through which the
universal spirit speaks to the individual, and strives to lead back the individual to it.
Frederick Jackson Turner, from Frontier and Section:
The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the
colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and though. It takes him
from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays
him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. . . . Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the
outcome is not the old Europe. . . . The fact is, that here is a new product that is American. . . . Moving
westward, the frontier became more and more American . . . the advance of the frontier has meant a
steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American
lines.
from Asher Durand’s Letters on Landscape Painting:
I refer you to Nature early, that you may receive your first imressions of beauty and sublimity,
unmingled with the superstitions of Art. . . . There is yet another motive for referring you to the study of
Nature early — its influence on the mind and heart. The external appearance of this our dwelling-place,
apart from its wondrous structure and functions that minister to our well-being, is fraught with lessons of
high and holy meaning, only surpassed by the light of Revelation.
from Canto IV of Lord Byron’s long poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:
CVII
Cypress and ivy, weed and wallflower grown,
Matted and mass'd together, hillocks heap'd
On what were chambers, arch crush'd, column strown
In fragments, choked up vaults, and frescos steep'd
In subterranean damps, where the owl peep'd,
Deeming it midnight: -- Temples, baths, or halls?
Pronounce who can; for all that Learning reap'd
From her research hath been, that these are walls -Behold thee Imperial Mount! 'tis thus the mighty falls.
CVIII
There is the moral of all human tales;
'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past,
First Freedom, and then Glory -- when that fails,
Wealth, vice , corruption, -- barbarism at last.
And History, with all her volumes vast,
Hath but one page, -- 'tis better written here
Where gorgeous Tyranny hath thus amass'd
All treasures, all delights, that eye or ear,
Heart, soul, could seek, tongue ask -- Away with words! draw near,
CIX
Admire, exult, despise, laugh, weep, -- for here
There is such matter for all feeling: -- Man!
Thou pendulum betwixt a smile and tear,
Ages and realms are crowded in this span,
This mountain, whose obliterated plan
The pyramid of empires pinnacled,
Of Glory's gewgaws shining in the van
Till the sun's rays with added flame were fill'd!
Where are its golden roofs? where those who dared to build?
Romanticism: Slides for Day 1
[David: Oath of the Horatii, 1784]
Goya: The Third of May, 1808, at Madrid: The Shootings on Principe Pio Mountain, 1814
Goya: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters 1793-6 etching and aquatint
Goya: Self-portrait on a Sickbed with Dr. Arrieta, 1820
Constable: Stonehenge, c.1836
Constable: Stour Valley and Dedham Church, 1814
Constable: Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, 1831-3
[David: Oath of the Horatii, 1784]
Géricault: The Raft of the “Medusa”, 1818-19
Friedrich: Arctic Shipwreck, 1823-4
Friedrich: The Wanderer Above a Sea of Mists, 1818
Friedrich: Woman at the Window, 1822
Delacroix: Tiger Attacking a Horse 1825-28
Delacroix: Combat of the Giaour and the Pasha 1835
George Stubbs: White Horse frightened by a Lion 1770
James Ward: Marengo 1824
Turner: Shade and Darkness — the Evening of the Deluge 1843
Turner: Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) — the Morning after the Deluge 1843
Thomas Cole: The Subsiding of the Waters of the Deluge 1829
The Wreck of the Medusa (1816):
The Context of Theodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1819)
Theodore Géricault: left: The Sighting of the Argus; right: Scene of Shipwreck (The Raft of the Medusa)
Background: the ship, the shipwreck, and the historical context
The Medusa was the largest and main vessel of several ships comprising a French convey headed to
Senegal in the early summer of 1816. This area of Africa, which was a center of the slave trade, had
been dominated by the French in the late 1700s, but the British had more recently gained control. As
part of a general realigning of many different colonial interests between the French and the British,
France was just at this time set to retake control of the area surrounding the Senegal River. This French
naval excursion, then, represented the first step in recolonialization by the French, and many of the
passengers on board the Medusa were colonists. These included the intended new governor of the
territory, carpenters, bakers, teachers, surgeons, naturalists, administrators, tradesmen, explorers,
geographical engineers, and settlers. With a crew totaling 166 officers and crew, 61 passengers, and
various soldiers (including members of the Africa Battalion and members of the frigate’s artillery), there
four hundred people were on board the Medusa when it sailed from France.
One passenger who became very important in terms of our later knowledge of events was Alexandre
Corréard. He had been a supporter of Napoleon, and was disillusioned by Napoleon’s defeat in 1813
and his replacement by Louis XVIII (to be followed by a brief “Hundred Days” return to power of
Napoleon, and then followed by Napoleon’s final defeat and exit from France in 1815). Corréard was
one of a number of passengers on the ship who, disgusted by the return to monarchy, and recruited by
the “republican” Philanthropic Society, hoped to make a sort of fresh start as colonists in Africa.
Corréard’s job was to help survey the area around Cap Vert to find suitable land for a settlement.
The captain of the Medusa, Hugo de Chaumarays, had not served on board a ship for many decades, and
his appointment to the post was controversial. He had been in the navy in the last days of ancien
regime, under Louis XVI. But, being on the wrong side of the revolution, he had lost his position and
had retreated to his estate. The appointment of a man whose fitness for his duties had been rendered
highly questionable by the passage of so long a period of time away from the sea, was a case of politics
and patronage: Chaumarays was a monarchist. This might have gone more or less unnoticed and
unnoted by history, if not for the events that unfolded on his command. Note that Chaumarays and
Corréard were, in political terms, polar opposites, with the survey engineer a republican – in favor of
representative government.
On July 2, 1816, the Medusa ran aground on shoals off the coast of Senegal (part of Africa’s Ivory
Coast). By this time, many passengers and members of the crew had lost whatever confidence they had
had in the captain, who made numerous navigational blundes and failed to take advantage of important
maps to the tricky waters off these coastlands. (The grounding occurred because the captain was
mistaken about the position of his ship in relation to shoals that had been charted.) After numerous
attempts to float the ship free, using leverage from anchors during high tides, rising winds and powerful
waves threatened to break the ship up. Most of the passengers and crew left the ship. However, there
were far too few boats to accommodate everyone. During the period of the failed attempts to free the
ship, crew members built a raft from various spars and other available wood on board, and one hundred
and forty-eight passengers and crew members, including Corréard and the ship’s second surgeon, Henri
Savigny, crowded onto this raft when the time came to abandon ship.
The plan was for an orderly procession of boats, headed by the captain’s boat (the best provisioned of all
the auxiliary craft of the frigate) to tow the raft behind. However, the situation was chaotic right from
the start. For one thing, sixty-three men had been abandoned on the Medusa itself, with no room for the
men on either any of the boats or on the raft. The fact that the captain, Chaumarays, abandoned ship
with these men still on board would later form an important part of charges against him. Some officers
and others seem to have acted bravely and nobly, with the officer in charge of one of the boats
attempting to take on some of the abandoned men once he realized their plight. One can imagine the
confusion. An officer on the governor’s barge, perhaps taking advantage of this confusion, and realizing
the difficulty of towing the barge, took an axe to the tow line connecting that barge to the raft, and
declared that he was abandoning the raft. After a brief exchange with the questioning captain, it seems
that this was accepted as an accomplished fact, and all the boats proceeded without the raft.
The men on the raft had been assured that it was properly provisioned, but they soon discovered that
such was not the case. Rations of food and water were extremely thin indeed, and didn’t last long. A
combination of extreme overcrowding on board the raft, combined with intense heat and the existence of
various factions that may have mistrusted each other, probably helped lead to a mutiny. Because so few
survived the ordeal on the raft, and because those few survivors may have had reasons to slant their
narratives, it is impossible to know with certainty precisely how events unfolded. But it seems that there
were some scuffles between some, such as Savigny and Corréard, who had positions of significant
responsibility in terms of the whole colonial venture, and members of the Africa battalion. (Savigny,
like Corréard, was a republican.) Here is how Jonathan Miles tells part of the story in his recent book
The Wreck of the Medusa:
The raft was now running before the wind, easing the force and frequency of the waves drenching those
on board. This meant, however, that the vulnerable stern was taking the full force of the gale, sending men
surging forward. As the prow was likewise fragile, the overcrowding in the middle of the raft resulted in the
crushing or trampling to death of several people in the stampede from port to starboard as the mass attempted to
counterbalance the lateral pitch of the craft. When the sea calmed, a group of terrified soldiers, thinking their end
was upon them, decided to drwon their last moments in drink. They broke open the wine cask lashed near the
center of the raft and gorged themselves on a liquid swiftly mixing with the saltwater that sloshed in through the
hole they had gouged. Soon oblivious to the increasing undesirability of the mix, these famished men became
easily intoxicated. Already crazed by the onslaughts of the angry sea, they became hell-bent on slaughtering
everybody and smashing the raft in an orgy of destruction. [Miles earlier pointed out that all were outraged and
furious at their abandonment by the captain, and that anger certainly would have fueled the fury that he describes
here.] (pp. 98-99)
The situation deteriorated to a point one might well characterize as beyond the ultimate. That is to say,
not only did survivors begin to eat the flesh of those who had died, but as the situation grew ever more
desperate, a number of those remaining decided to cull those who were weakest, throwing them
overboard to save whatever precious rations remained. (It also seems that some were killed to then be
eaten.) Enough said!
With virtually no hope left, a sail on the horizon was spotted: this was the Argus, another ship from the
original convoy. One of Captain Chaumarays’ apparently numerous and cumulatively disastrous
missteps was to break up the convoy. This meant that no help was at hand or within sight at the initial
moment of the Medusa’s wreck, nor anytime soon after. The Argus had been searching for the Medusa,
but had given up and was heading back to Saint-Louis (on the coast) when the men on the raft first
spotted them. But those on the ship didn’t see the raft at this time. Later, the commander of the Argus,
due to a change of wind, decided to continue to search for the Medusa, and it was at this time that the
ship encountered the raft again, and this time spotted it and rescued the survivors, who then had further
adventures and ordeals in the colonized regions of coastal Senegal. Only fifteen people were alive for
this rescue, and more died later, on land. (In an ironic twist, many of the survivors, both those from the
raft and those from some of the other boats, received better treatment from the British who remained in
the area than they did from the leaders of their own expedition.)
After a very long period of convalescence, both Henri Savigny and Alexandre Corréard made their
eventual ways back to Paris, Savigny preceding Corréard. By the time of his return to France, Savigny
had written a narrative of the events of the shipwreck. He wished to get his story to the Ministry of the
Navy. Unbeknownst to him, a copy of his story that he had given to Cornette de Vénancourt, the officer
who commanded the ship on which he returned from Senegal to France, was passed along to Councillor
Forestier. In a case of naval mismanagement so serious, which led to such disastrous consequences, and
in the context of serious political rifts in France itself, various actors in this real-life drama had all sorts
of motivations to get various versions of stories out. Savigny seems to have been motivated in the
drafting of his account, which he worked on during the trip back to France, in part by the awareness that
some of those responsible for the disaster were working hard to construct what he considered a highly
distorted and false version of events. Various officers pressed survivors, including Alexandre Corréard,
to sign their names to accounts that were not true, doing so while these men were still disoriented and
not in full command of their senses. (Some signed, others did not.) Another motive for Savigny was
probably to try simply to come to terms with what he himself had done and seen on board the raft.
In France, not only was there a rift between those with republican leanings, who wished to see some of
the democratic promise of the revolution of ’89 fulfilled; there was also a serious split between those
willing to forge a compromise in the nature of a constitutional monarch with real power for
representatives, and those who wished to bring about a return to absolute power for the king. Louis
XVIII was in the former camp, while his brother, the duc d’Artois, was in the latter, and was the focal
point for the group known as the ultra-royalists, or simply “ultras.” It was these ultras with whom
Captain Chaumarays of the Medusa was associated, and it was to their discredit that a full account of
his incompetence would redound. That is, the ultras would lose credibility as a governing force if and
when it became known that their influence in appointing one of their own, without regard to
qualifications, had led to the shipwreck of the Medusa and to the subsequent tragic events. Thus,
Councillor Forestier, who had Savigny’s account in hand because Vénancourt had his own somewhat
personal reasons to make sure that Captain Chaumarays’s incompetence became known, in turn had
reasons, because of his political leanings, to pass the report along to the powerful Minister of Police of
France, Elie Decazes. At this time, Decazes had just helped to push for the dissolution of an assembly
that was dominated by ultras, and he saw the developing scandal of the shipwreck and its handling by a
man given his post by ultras as a way of showing the public just how little these men could be trusted.
Decazes, therefore, leaked Savigny’s account to the press. It was first published in a newspaper on
September 13, 1816. At this point, Corréard was still recuperating in Africa, but when he had recovered
somewhat more fully (although he was still so ill that a fellow passenger on board ship on the return
voyage had looked at him and, as Corréard overheard him say, “There’s someone who won’t reach
France.”), he eventually worked with Savigny on expanded editions of the account. In the fall of 1816,
the story was just beginning to get out, while the painter Géricault was preparing to leave France for a
trip to Italy, motivated in part by a desire to study abroad, but in part by a need to flee from very messy
personal entaglements: Géricault, at this point, probably only heard the main outlines of the story. But
by 1817, when Géricault had returned, The Shipwreck of the frigate, Medusa, the account now expanded
to book length and credited to both Savigny and to Alexandre Corréard (who had more intense political
feelings than did Savigny, and even more anger towards Captain Chaumarays) had become a sensation.
It was at this time that Géricault became better acquainted with the story, and eventually befriended
Corréard himself, who was in Paris and in the process of becoming a bookseller. Géricault also got to
know some other survivors, whom he talked with and drew from, for what was developing into the most
significant painting of his brief but intense life.