Chapter Seventeen
Romanticism, Realism, and
Photography
Culture and Values, 8th Ed.
Cunningham and Reich and FichnerRathus
17.2 A panoramic view of London, ca. 1858
The Intellectual Background
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
Transcendental idealism
Critique of Judgment (1790)
Art reconciles opposites
Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)
Synthesis of thesis, antithesis
Optimistic “World Spirit”
The Intellectual Background
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
Dominating world power is evil
The World as Will and Idea (1819)
Despondency, pessimism, gloom
Karl Marx (1818-1883)
Communist Manifesto (1848)
Universal proletariat, revolution
Artistic realism: social and political
Anti-capitalism
Other Industrial Developments
Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882)
Theory of evolution, natural selection
“Social Darwinism”
Physics, chemistry
Louis Pasteur (1822-1895)
Railroads, factories
“a wilderness of human beings”
Art Under Napoleon
Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825)
Neo-Classical style
Conceptual vs. personal emotion
Ingres’ defense of Classicism
Inspired by Greek art
Waged a war against Romantic painting
Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson
Combines Neo-Classical and Romantic motifs
17.6 Jacques-Louis David, The Consecration of Emperor Napoleon
I and Coronation of Empress Josephine in the Cathedral of NotreDame de Paris, 2 December 1804, 1806-1807
17.7 Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson, The Entombment of Atala, 1808
Ingres's
Portrait of
Madame
Rivière
17.8 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, La Grande Odalisque, 1814
Apotheosis of Homer
Inges
The Concerns of Romanticism
Expression of personal feelings
Emotionality, subjectivity
Individual creative imagination
Mystical attachment to nature
Love of the fantastic and the exotic
17.12 Francisco de
Goya, The Sleep of
Reason Produces
Monsters, 1797-1798
Romantic Art in Spain and
France
Francisco de Goya (1746-1828)
Execution of the Madrileños (1814)
No idealization
Persuasive emotionality
Personal commitment, vision
17.12 Francisco de
Goya, The Sleep of
Reason Produces
Monsters, 1797-1798
Francisco de Goya, The Family of Charles IV, 1800. Oil on canvas,
110″ × 132″ (280 × 336 cm). Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain.
17.14 Francisco Goya, The Third of May, 1808, 1814
Goya's
Saturn
Devouring
One of His
Sons
Romantic Art in Spain and
France
Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1818)
Intended as a direct indictment of the
government
Romantic art of Delacroix (1798-1863)
Use of color to create form
Violent, emotional scenes
The Death of Sardanapalus (1826)
17.16 Jean Louis André-Théodore Géricault, Raft of the Medusa,
1818
Jean Louis André-Théodore Géricault, Portraits
of the Insane
Théodore Géricault, Portait of a Child Snatcher, 1822, oil on
canvas, 65 x 54 cm (Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield,
Massachusets)
17.18 Eugène Delacroix, The Death of Sardanapalus, 1826
Ferdinand-Eugène-Victor Delacroix, Liberty Leading
Her People
FerdinandEugène-Victor
Delacroix, The
Massacre at
Chios, 1824. Oil
on canvas, 13′7″
× 11′10″ (419 ×
354 cm). Musée
du Louvre, Paris,
France.
Romantic Art in the United
Kingdom and Germany
William Blake (1757-1827)
Landscape as Romantic device
Constable’s Hay Wain (1821)
Turner’s Slave Ship (1840)
Friedrich’s Wanderer Above a Sea of Mist
(1817-1818)
William
Blake, The
spiritual form of
Nelson guiding
Leviathan, in
whose wreathings
are infolded the
Nations of the
Earth, c. 1805-9,
tempera on
canvas 30" x 24"
(76.2 x 62.5cm),
Tate Britain,
London
William
Blake, Black Slave
on Gallows, 1796.
Copper engraving,
original coloring, 7
⅝″ × 10″ (19.5 ×
25.4 cm). British
Library, London,
United Kingdom.
17.20 John Constable, The Hay Wain, 1821
Constable's Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows
17.21 Joseph
Mallord William
Turner, The
Slave Ship,
1840
Turner's The Harbour of Dieppe
Joseph
Mallord
William
Turner, Transe
pt of Tintern
Abbey, 1794.
Watercolor, 12
⅝″ × 9 ⅞″
(32.2 × 25.1
cm). Victoria
and Albert
Museum,
London,
United
Kingdom.
John Martin, The Great Day of His Wrath, 1851-53, oil on canvas,
197 x 303 cm (Tate Britain)
17.22 Caspar David
Friedrich,
Wanderer Above a
Sea of Mist, 18171818
Monk by the Sea 1809
Cross on the Mountain
The polar sea
Romantic Poetry
William Blake (1757-1827)
Accomplished in both literature and the visual
arts; “The Tyger” (1794)
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
Founded Romantic movement
“Emotion recollected in tranquility”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Illustrates humankind’s powerlessness in the face
of the majesty of nature
William Blake 1757-1827
Engraver by trade
A Swedenborg—mysticism
Married but no children
Printshop
“I must create a system or be enslaved by
another Man’s”
Poetic Sketches, Songs of Innocence, The Book
of Thel, Songs of Heaven and Hell, Songs of
Experience, America: A Prophecy,
Wrote and engraved/illustrated own works
Blake
Aimed to be prophet and visionary—meant
work to be taken literally
Creates own mythic world but mixes real
historic figures
Vivid description, mood imagination
Making everyday events mythic inspires
people and raises awareness of social and
political issues.
Imagery and symbolism
Crazy?
Romantic Period 1798-1870
Rejects the imitation of classical work from
Neoclassical, rejects rationality
Freedom of individual self-expression: spontaneity,
originality, sincerity, emotional, personal experience
Emotional intensity: rapture, nostalgia, horror,
melancholy, sentimentality, exotic, dreams
Values of revolution, democracy, and nationalism
Nature primary inspiration and subject
Crosses all disciplines involves philosophy, political
revolutions, and lifestyle
Poetry: Romantic lyric: 3 stanzas with 8 lines each
Repetition, Sensory imagery
William Wordsworth 1770-1850
Parents died by 13
St. John’s College, Cambridge
Walking tour of France, Alps, Italy
Inspired by French revolution
Began publishing poetry
Settled down with his sister Dorothy
Lyrical Ballads, The Prelude,
1802 married, 5 children
Deaths of brother and 2 children & Coleridge’s illness
1813 Stamp distributor,
1843 Poet Laureate
Wordsworth
“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feeling as recollected in moments of tranquility”
Imagination fuses with memory and real life
situations—requires quiet reflection
Nature more real, pure, simple, noble, more
essentially human
Stresses importance of the feelings of the poet over
the subject matter
Preface to Lyrical Ballads—language of the common
man, rejects fancy language of preNature is the muse –shepherd, peasant, beggar
Return to true nature not picturesque
Samuel Taylor Coleridge 17721834
Jesus College, Cambridge
French revolutionary politics, drinking
Southey—Pantisocracy
1797 met Wordsworths lived and worked together-- blank verse
conversation poems
Left for Germany to study
1800 Lake District—unhappy marriage and love affair with
Wordsworth’s sister-in-law
Crippling opium addiction-notebooks dreams meditations
Travelled, separated from wife, Wordsworths, lectures—”organic
form”
Addiction and ending of friendships lead to suicide—rebirth/recovery
After poetry collections and a series of essays on criticism:
imagination, reason, symbolism, organic form…
Romantic Poetry
Lord Byron (1788-1824)
Tormented Romantic hero, Byronic
Commitment to struggles for liberty
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
Atheism, anarchy
Perfectability of humanity
Unification of extreme emotions
John Keats (1795-1821)
Tragedy of existence, peace of death
2nd Generation Romantics
Thought Wordsworth was simple and
dull and egotistical sublime
Importance of nature, feelings,
imagination and self-consciousness but
twisted
Take Wordsworth and then branch out
Lord George Gordon Byron
1788-1824
Aristocrats w/ money issues, father died young
10 years old title and estates of 5th Baron Byron
Trinity College, Cambridge—debt & affair w/
young man
Travelled & published
Seat in House of Lords—Grand Tour-publishing
Weight issues/clubfoot
1816 Run out of English due to affairs, legal
separation from his wife and alleged incest
w/sister other sexual exploits--Italy
1824 Died defending the Greeks from Ottoman
empire
Byron
—”Byronic hero” Villainous heroes, satiric barbs,
melancholy, reclusive, seductive, rakish behavor
Favored classical forms-Spenserian stanzas,
ottava rima (8 lines stanzas), satire
Radical politics, orientalism, critical of earlier
Romanantics
Celebrity poet
Fugitive Pieces Hours of Idleness English Bards
and Scotch Reviewers, Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage, Beppo, The Vision of Judgment, Don
Juan
Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792-1822
A real Romantic-life and death: born rich,
died young, sexual exploration, died in storm
in the Don Juan with Keat’s poetry in his
pocket
Aristocrat, expelled from Oxford
Married 16 yr old ag. father’s wishes, 3 yrs
left wife and child for 16 yr old Mary
Wollstonecraft Godwin
Grand Tour w/ her sister—later met the
Byrons stayed in Lake Geneva
Deaths 4 of his children & 1 of Byron’s
Italy: desired a literary community (Byron,
Keats)
Shelley
Fluent in Latin, Greek, Italian, Spanish, French
Translated Goethe, Caldeon, Plato, Spinoza
Educated in science and politics: for Irish indpdnc
Challenged Neoclassical ideas and conventions
Humanitarian values, conversion, nature, philosophy,
challenges existing mores, values, individual morality
“A Poet therefore would do ill to embody his own
conceptions of right wrong which are usually those of his
place and time in his poetical creations, which participate
in neither.”
Mont Blanc, To a Sky-lark (lyric), A Defense of Poetry,
Queen Mab, Prometheus Unbound, Adonais, Hymn to
Intellectual Beauty,
Sex, freedom, gothic, ethics and morality
John Keats 1795-1821
Apothecary apprentice
1816 began publishing poetry
Met Shelley 1817 and Wordsworth
Lakes, Scotland and Northern Ireland
1818 the great year
1819 tuberculosis
1820 Italy…died in Rome
The Eve of St. Agnes, Ode to Psyche, Ode to
a Nightingale, Hyperion
Keats
Explores the physical, sensual world
Sonnet
Negative capability “that is when a man
is capable of being in uncertainties
mysteries, doubts, without any irritable
reaching after fact and reason”
The sympathetic imagination—
becoming something else or loosing
oneself in..
The Romantic Novel
Jane Austen
Superficially about manners and dress
More deeply, they satirize the British evolution of
mating strategies
Mary Wollstonecraft
Argued in favor of free love
Ghost story competition resulted in Frankenstein or
The Modern Prometheus
Victor Hugo
Les Miserables
Combined the Romantic style with a social conscience
Romantic Music
Ludwig van Beethoven
(1770-1827)
Pioneer of musical Romanticism
Pathétique
Rooted in classical principles
Autobiographical emotionality
Eroica
“… the memory of a great man”
Classical structure + Romantic elements
Romantic Music
Ludwig van Beethoven
(1770-1827)
Fidelo
Love of liberty, hatred of oppression
Triumph over fate
Pastoral
“Ode to Joy”
Universality of individual emotion
Emotional intensity: No. 5 in C
Romantic Music
Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)
Fantastic Symphony
Franz Schubert
Personal emotion
More than six hundred Lieder (songs)
Unfinished Symphony
Romantic Music
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Conservative Romanticism
Symphony No. 1, intermezzo
Anton Bruckner (1824-1896)
Catholicism, mystical vision
Symphony No. 8, adagio
Romantic Music
Instrumental Virtuosos
Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849)
Mazurkas, polonaises
“the soul of the piano”
Franz Liszt (1811-1886)
Hungarian folk tunes
Faust, Dante
Nicolò Paganini
Violin virtuoso, Romantic exaggeration
17.25 Eugène
Delacroix,
Frédéric
Chopin, 1838
Romantic Music
Music and Nationalism
Emphasis on native musical traditions
Modest Moussorgsky (1839-1881)
Boris Godunov (1874)
Russian folksongs, religious music
Bedrich Smetana (1824-1884)
Antonin Dvorák (1841-1904)
Romantic Music
Opera
Bel canto
Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848)
Vincenzo Bellini (1801-1835)
Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901)
Dramatic, psychological truth
Contemporary life issues
Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, La Traviata
Otello
Romantic Music
Opera in Germany: Wagner
(1813-1883)
Gesamtkunstwerk
Wagnerian characteristics
Musical flow
Elimination of virtuosity
Emphasis on orchestra
Leitmotiv
Universal drama, universal emotion
The Ring of the Nibelung (1851-1874)
Tristan and Isolde (1865)
Realism
Realist Art
Gustave Courbet (1819-1877)
Champion of the working class
“Pavilion of Realism”
Honore Daumier (1808-1879)
Used everyday events to express views
17.27 Gustave Courbet, The Artist’s Studio: A Real Allegory of the
Last Seven Years of My Life, 1855
Gustave Courbet, The Stonebreakers, 1849, Oil on canvas, 165 x
257 cm (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden (destroyed))
Gustave Courbet, The Meeting or, Bonjour M. Courbet, oil on
canvas, 1854
(Musée Fabre de Montpellier)
Honoré Daumier, Le Ventre Legislatif (The Legislative Belly),
1834. Lithograph, 11″ × 17″ (28.1 × 43.2 cm). Bibliothèque
Nationale, Paris, France.
Realist Literature
A more naturalistic style; describe
characters’ lives in realistic terms
Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)
Madam Bovary (1856)
Honore de Balzac (1779-1850)
`The Human Comedy
Realist Literature:
The Novel
George Sand (1804-1876)
Issues of gender, moral equality
Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1863-9)
“Natural person” vs. civilization
Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
Social justice, evil institutions
The Humanities in the United States
United States Literature
European influences+individuality
Transcendentalists
Unity of humans with nature
Emerson, Thoreau
Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849)
The death of a beautiful woman is
“unquestionably the most poetic topic in the
world”
Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
Importance of the individual, freedom
Humanity united with the universe
The Humanities in the United States
United States Literature
Emily Dickinson (1830-1881)
Balance of passion, reason
Psychology, faith, skepticism
Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850)
Evil in society
Melville’s Moby Dick (1851)
Profound moral issues
Search for truth, self-discovery
Short Fiction
Fiction has to do with prose which is as opposed to
poetry
By definition short fiction (stories) are shorter prose
shorter than novels—too short to be published on
their own
Similar to other forms: fables (moral lesson), folktales
(oral tradition), parables (allegory)
Flourished in the 19th century magazines as
publishing became more common as did literacy
A developed theme
Involve fewer characters
A single plot—such as one or two events
Unlike the less sustained social background of a
novel
Short Fiction
The short story intensifies the narrative
process
It draws the reader’s attention to a moment
A genre that invites experimentation
So the fictional elements of time, place, voice,
point of view, and structure are often
manipulated
Developed with publishing and literacy
(middle class emergence)
The Development of the Short
Story
The short story really thrived in American and
American writers really made it there own.
Though some argue the first short story is thought to
be Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” 1819
Irving’s short stories are generally made up of
summarized narratives, episodic plots, and portraits
of magical events
In the mid19th century American romantic writers
moved from a tale to a story with a unified plot, a
protagonist, and a single effect.
We’re talking about Edgar Allen Poe (gothic),
Nathaniel Hawthorne (allegories), and Herman
Melville (more essaylike and realistic).
Late 19th to early 20th century
American
Short
Stories
Move even more toward use of formal elements such as plot,
character, and dialogue found in later short fiction.
After the Civil War, American literature moved from
romanticism to realism, and as the name “realism” suggests,
the stories were told more realistically. Henry James and
Stephen Crane
“shows one action, in one place, on one day. A Short-story
deals with a single character, a single event, a single emotion,
or the series of emotions called forth by a single situation.”
Brander Matthews in 1901
Local Color- part of the realism movement realistic images of
lifestyles in specific regions of the United States. They portray
commonplace scenes and characteristics of their chosen
locales, representing character types, speech patterns, and
social customs and beliefs. Bret Harte, Edith Wharton, Kate
Chopin, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mark Twain
Nathaniel Hawthorne
1805, July 4 Salem, Mass. Died 1864
Father died age 4, family moved to Maine, extended family cared for
him, saw him educated
1825 graduated from Bowdoin College-writer
Struggled early on as a writer—works he would not acknowledge
Published in small magazines—wake of Amer. Publishing and literature
Worked government jobs—Boston Custom House
Mix of historic and symbolic, history and nightmare, psychological
trauma, Gothic, human emotion and experience
1837 Twice-Told Tales,
1841 Brook Farm, transcendentalist communal living and cooperative
labor
1842 Concord, Mass.-Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott,
Ellery Channing, and Margaret Fuller
1840s science fiction
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Allegories of the Heart, 1843 The Birth-mark
1844 Rappaccini's Daughter
1846 Mosses from an Old Manse
1845 back to Salem, Mass. Salem Custom House
1850 The Scarlet Letter
1850 Lenox, Mass. The House of the Seven Gables and A
Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys,
Europe
Awareness of American history: Family history English,
American Revolution, and Salem witch trails
Political conservative, moralist, private man, Christian, skeptic,
doubted transcendentalism but gave money to political and
social causes
Edgar Allen Poe 1809-1849
Boston both parents died
Raised by John Allan, merchant
1815-20 England
Allan receives inheritance stops support
1826 U. VA broke
1827 Army – 1830 West Point
1831-35 Baltimore short stories
1835 license to marry 13 yr. old cousin-VA
1837-8 NYC-Philadelphia
Nearly starved Virginia died of TB
Love affair between two women suicide attempt
Poe
Died Baltimore after drunken binge
1827 Tamerlane
1831 Israfel, To Helen
1841-2 literary editor of Graham's Magazine “
The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “ A Descent
into the Maelström,” “ The Masque of the Red
Death,”
1845 Broadway Journal: “ The Pit and the
Pendulum,” “ Eleonora,” The Premature
Burial,
“The Philosophy of Composition,” “The
Rationale of Verse,” and “The Poetic
Principle,”
U.S. Civil War
Realism
Reflect real life
Multifaceted people/experience
Grows pessimistic
Local color
Realistic portrayal of regional U.S. dialects,
Harsh realities
Romanticism’ pre-industrial ideals
Naturalism
Environment shapes behaviors and lives
Lower classes moved by animal passions
Individual has little control
United States Art and
Architecture
Significance of landscape painting
Natural beauty=moral beauty
Hudson River School, Luminists
Thomas Cole (1801-1848)
Asher B. Durand
United States Genre Painting
Featured narrative scenes and portraits of
ordinary people at work and play
George Caleb Bingham (1811-1879)
17.29 Thomas Cole, View from Mount Holyoake, Northhampton,
Massachusetts--after a Thunderstorm, The Oxbow, 1836
17.30 Asher B.
Durand,
Kindred
Spirits, 1849
17.31 George Caleb Bingham, The Jolly Flatboatman, 1846
United States Art and
Architecture
United States architecture spanned
Neo-Classicism and Gothic Revival
United States Capitol (1793)
Saint Patrick’s Cathedral (1858-1878)
17.32 United States Capitol, Washington, D.C.
17.33 Saint Patrick’s
Cathedral, New York
City, New York, 18581878
United States Art and
Architecture
Photography
Principles of photography
Camera obscura
Heliography
Daguerrotype
Photography became the democratic
equalizer
Photography revolutionized the news
media
17.35 Nadar,
Sarah
Bernhardt, 1869
17.36 Alexander Gardner, Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter,
Gettysburg, July 1863
Chapter Seventeen: Discussion Questions
In what ways did Romantic art alienate the artist? How
did it serve to create a more national artistic identity?
Explain.
Explain how the industrial, technological, and scientific
developments of the nineteenth century functioned as
catalysts for the Romantic movement. Cite specific
examples that illustrate your answer.
Consider the role of the landscape in nineteenthcentury painting. What psychological and philosophical
statements are prevalent during this period with regard
to humanity and nature? How is this relationship
different from earlier centuries? Explain the this change
in perspective.