Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Romanticism
Romanticism
Romanticism
Thobaben 2009 1
From Neoclassicism to Romanticism
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From Neoclassicism to Romanticism
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Napoleon Among the Sick and Dying
Antoine-Jean
Gros's painting of
Napoleon at the
Pesthouse at Jaffa
presents a public
image of Napoleon
as a
compassionate,
fearless leader by
showing him
touching, as if
capable of
miraculously
healing, the sores
of a plague victim.
Gros, Napoleon at the Pesthouse at Jaffa, 1804.
Oil on canvas, approx. 17' 5" x 23' 7”Louvre, Paris.
The mosque courtyard with its Moorish arcades in the background reveals
Gros's fascination with the exoticism of the Near East 4
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Baron Antoine-Jean Gros
(1771-1835)
Based on Chateaubriand's
novel, The Genius of
Christianity, Girodet-
Trioson's The Burial of
Atala is the tragic love
story of two Native
Americans in the
wilderness of Louisiana.
The exotic locale and the
erotic passion of the story
appealed to the public's
fascination with what it
perceived as the
primitivism of Native
American tribal life.
Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson, The Burial of Atala, 1808. Oil on canvas, approx. 6' 11" x 8' 9". Louvre, Paris.
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Combining the Ideal with the Exotic
Examine how the artist Ingres combined classical form with Romantic
themes. Ingres also departed from Neoclassicism. A Romantic taste for
the exotic and erotic is seen in his Grande Odalisque, which shows a
languidly reclining, nude odalisque.
Ingres, Grande Odalisque, 1814. Oil on canvas, approx. 2' 11" x 5' 4". Louvre, Paris. 9
Ingres's paintings of
female nudes
continued through
this period to
culminate in The
Turkish Bath, on
which he worked on
from about 1852
until 1863, when he
was 83.
Some critics have
seen in these
sensual and
voyeuristically
conceived nudes the
only full expression
of Ingres's artistic
imagination.
Ingres: Turkish Bath, oil on canvas affixed to panel, diam. 1.08 m, 1863, Paris, Musée du Louvre 10
Drawn to the Music
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The Rise of Romanticism
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Claustrophobic Dungeon
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A Nightmarish Vision
Henry Fuseli 's The Nightmare illustrates the Romantic taste in night
moods of horror, in Gothick fantasies, in the demonic, macabre, and
sadistic.
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Fuseli, The Nightmare, 1781. Oil on canvas, 3' 4" x 4' 2”,Detroit Institute of the Arts
Inspired by the Spirits
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Drama, Action, and Color in Spanish Romanticism
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Goya's "breakthrough" portrait was of
the minister of state, the second most
powerful man in Spain, The Count of
Floridablanca, 1783.
…Perhaps, in
imitation of Diego
Velázquez's
painting of Las
Meninas.
Goya, The Family of Charles IV, 1800. Oil on canvas, approx. 9' 2" x 11'. Museo del Prado, Madrid. 18
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Romance or Fiction?
Goya, The Nude Maja, 1800, Oil on canvas, 97 x 190 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid
The "evidence" of their intimacy, the so-called Naked Maja, isn't evidence at all,
because there is nothing to suggest that either it or its clothed double in the Prado
actually represents the duchess of Alba. It's a spicy bit of gossip but it got into
circulation well after Goya's death . 21
Reconsidering Reason
Goya first welcomed the revolution’s
promise of political enlightenment
but he became disillusioned when
the hoped for reforms were short
lived. This is reflected in his etching
The Sleep of Reason Produces
Monsters, from a series Los
Caprichos (The Caprices).
It shows the artist asleep while
threatening creatures symbolizing
folly and ignorance converge on him.
The image may be interpreted as
showing what emerges when reason
is suppressed.
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Paintings of Dark Emotions
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The French Debate: Color vs. Line
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Death and Despair on a Raft
•Théodore Géricault's ambitious painting of the Raft of the Medusa shows
the handful of survivors of the frigate Medusa, which, due to the
incompetence of the captain, a political appointee, had run aground on a
reef.
•This grandly conceived, large-scale painting combines a realistic attempt
to record the event accurately with a Romantic taste for the drama and
horror.
Gericault, Raft of the Medusa, oil on canvas, 4.91×7.16 m, exhibited 1819, Paris, Musée du Louvre 27
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Picturing Insanity
Géricault's portrait of an
Insane Woman (Envy) is
an examination of the
influence of mental states
on the human face,
which, it was believed,
accurately revealed
character.
It reflects the Romantic
interest in mental
aberration and the
irrational states of the
mind.
Gericault: Manic Envy, oil on canvas, 711×533 mm, c. 1822, Lyon, Musée des Beaux-Arts 29
A Portrait of Music
Compare to Ingres’s
drawing.
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Inspiring Fiction and Verse
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Orgiastic Destruction and Death
• Delacroix's works were products of his view that the artist's powers
of imagination would in turn capture and inflame viewers' imagination.
• Literature of imaginative power served Delacroix as a useful source of
subject matter.
• The Death of
Sardanapalus, inspired
by Lord Byron's 1821
narrative poem
"Sardanapalus," is an
erotic and exotic orgy
of death and
destruction conceived
as grand drama.
Eugène Delacroix, Death of Sardanapalus, 1826. Oil on canvas, approx. 12' 1" x 16' 3". Louvre, Paris
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Delacroix's Colorful Legacy
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The Allure of Morocco
Delacroix, Tiger Hunt, 1854. Oil on canvas, approx. 2' 5" x 3'. Louvre, Paris.
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Romanticism in Sculpture
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The Dramatic in Sculpture
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Antoine Louis Barye
This bronze of a Jaguar Devouring a Hare shows the bestial violence and
brute beauty of nature.
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Jean Baptiste Carpeaux
(1827–1875)
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American Sculptors in the late 19th century
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William Rimmer
(c.1816–20-1879)
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Daniel Chester French (1850-1931)
French was an American
sculptor.
His best-known work is
the sculpture of a seated
Abraham Lincoln at the
Lincoln Memorial in
Washington, D.C.
This less famous work,
The Angel of Death and
the Sculptor, was
commissioned in 1889 to
create a memorial for the
Milmore Family, to be
located in Forest Hill
Cemetery in Jamaica
Milmore had been a sculptor himself, French decided to depict the artist
at work, with the Angel of Death interrupting his work.
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Augustus St. Gaudens (1848-1907)
Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Adams Memorial, modeled 1886-1891, cast 1969, Roman Bronze Works (Founder) 69 52
7/8 x 39 7/8 x 44 1/2 in. (177.4 x 101.4 x 112.9 cm.) Smithsonian American Art Museum
Romantic Landscape Painting
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Caspar David Freidrich
(1774 –1840)
•Friedrich
painted
landscapes
as sacred
places filled
with a divine
presence.
•His solemn
and deeply
reverent
Cloister
Graveyard in
the Snow is
filled with
emblems of
death.
Caspar David Friedrich, Cloister Graveyard in the Snow, 1810. Oil on canvas, approx. 3'
11" x 5' 10" (painting destroyed during World War II).
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Landscape Painting in England
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John Constable, Salisbury Cathedral ca. 1825
Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851)
In contrast to the
calm Romantic
yearnings of
Constable’s
landscapes, his
contemporary
J.M.W.Turner strove
to portray the
uncontrollable and
frightening power of
nature.
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J.M.W.Turner, The shipwreck of the Minotaur, oil on canvas., Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon 61
The Horrors of the Slave Trade
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Landscape Painting in the United States
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Thomas Cole (1801-1848)
•Cole, a member of
the Hudson River
School, painted his
expansive, panoramic
view of The Oxbow
(the Connecticut
River near
Northampton,
Massachusetts) with
a dark stormy
wilderness on the left
and a sunlit and more
civilized landscape on
the right.
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Cole was primarily a painter of landscapes, but he also painted allegorical works.
The most famous of these are the five-part series, The Course of Empire.
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Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902)
Bierstadt was not held in high esteem by critics of his day. His use of
uncommonly large canvases was thought to be an egotistical indulgence,
as his paintings would invariably dwarf those of his contemporaries when
they were displayed together.
The romanticism evident in his choices of subject and in his use of light
was felt to be
excessive by contemporary
critics.
His paintings emphasized
atmospheric elements like
fog, clouds and mist to
accentuate and
complement
the feel of his work.
Bierstadt sometimes
changed details of the
landscape to inspire awe.
Albert Bierstadt, Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California, 1865. Oil on
canvas, 641⁄2 x 961⁄2 in. (163.83 x 245.11 cm.).Birmingham Museum of Art,
Birmingham, Ala. 68
Albert Bierstadt, Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California, 1865. Oil on canvas, 641⁄2 x 961⁄2 in. (163.83 x
245.11 cm.).Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Ala. 69
Wild, Wild West
Albert Bierstadt's large painting Among the Sierra Nevada
Mountains, California presents a panoramic view of breathtaking
scenery and natural beauty.
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Reaffirming America's Righteousness
Church's Twilight in the Wilderness, shows a panoramic view of the sun
setting over a majestic landscape, is firmly entrenched in the idiom of the
Romantic sublime. Church's idealistic and comforting view contributed
to the national mythology of righteousness and divine providence.
Frederic Edwin Church, Twilight In the Wilderness, 1860. Oil on canvas, 101.6 cm. x 162.6 cm.
The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio 76
The Aftermath of Civil War
Winslow Homer's The Veteran in a New Field is a simple and direct
commentary on the effects and aftermath of the American Civil War.
The painting also comments symbolically about death, both the
deaths of the soldiers and of Abraham Lincoln. It also contributed to
the continuing myth making about national conditions.
Homer, The Veteran in a New Field, 1865. Oil on canvas, 2' 1/8" x 3' 2 1/8". The Metropolitan Museum of Art 76
Winslow Homer, The Veteran in a New Field, 1865, Oil on canvas; 24 1/8 x 38 1/8 in. (61.3
x 96.8 cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art 76
Romantic Revivalist Styles in Architecture
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Restoring the Artisanship of the Middle Age
When the Houses of Parliament were rebuilt following the fire in 1834, the
architect A. W. N. Pugin designed a
Neo-Gothic building because of the moral purity and spiritual authenticity
he associated with religious architecture of the Middle Ages.
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