Neoclassical and Romantic
Neoclassicism
Neoclassicism was a widespread and influential movement in painting and the other visual arts that began in the 1760s, reached its height in the 1780s and ’90s, and lasted until the 1840s and ’50s. In painting it generally took the form of an emphasis on austere linear design in the depiction of classical themes and subject matter, using archaeologically correct settings and costumes.
Neoclassicism arose partly as a reaction against the sensuous and frivolously decorative Rococo style that had dominated European art from the 1720s on. But an even more profound stimulus was the new and more scientific interest in classical antiquity that arose in the 18th century. Neoclassicism was given great impetus by new archaeological discoveries, particularly the exploration and excavation of the buried Roman cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii (the excavations of which began in 1738 and 1748, respectively). And from the second decade of the 18th century on, a number of influential publications by Bernard de Montfaucon, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the Comte de Caylus, and Robert Wood provided engraved views of Roman monuments and other antiquities and further quickened interest in the classical past. The new understanding distilled from these discoveries and publications in turn enabled European scholars for the first time to discern separate and distinct chronological periods in Greco-Roman art, and this new sense of a plurality of ancient styles replaced the older, unqualified veneration of Roman art and encouraged a dawning interest in purely Greek antiquities. The German scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s writings and sophisticated theorizings were especially influential in this regard. Winckelmann saw in Greek sculpture “a noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” and called for artists to imitate Greek art. He claimed that in doing so such artists would obtain idealized depictions of natural forms that had been stripped of all transitory and individualistic aspects, and their images would thus attain a universal and archetypal significance.
Neoclassicism as manifested in painting was initially not stylistically distinct from the French Rococo and other styles that had preceded it. This was partly because, whereas it was possible for architecture and sculpture to be modeled on prototypes in these media that had actually survived from classical antiquity, those few classical paintings that had survived were minor or merely ornamental works—until, that is, the discoveries made at Herculaneum and Pompeii. The earliest Neoclassical painters were Joseph-Marie Vien, Anton Raphael Mengs, Pompeo Batoni, Angelica Kauffmann, and Gavin Hamilton; these artists were active during the 1750s, ’60s, and ’70s. Each of these painters, though they may have used poses and figural arrangements from ancient sculptures and vase paintings, was strongly influenced by preceding stylistic trends. An important early Neoclassical work such as Mengs’s “Parnassus” (1761; Villa Albani, Rome) owes much of its inspiration to 17th-century classicism and to Raphael for both the poses of its figures and its general composition. Many of the early paintings of the Neoclassical artist Benjamin West derive their compositions from works by Nicolas Poussin, and Kauffmann’s sentimental subjects dressed in antique garb are basically Rococo in their softened, decorative prettiness. Mengs’s close association with Winckelmann led to his being influenced by the ideal beauty that the latter so ardently expounded, but the church and palace ceilings decorated by Mengs owe more to existing Italian Baroque traditions than to anything Greek or Roman.
A more rigorously Neoclassical painting style arose in France in the 1780s under the leadership of Jacques-Louis David. He and his contemporary Jean-François-Pierre Peyron were interested in narrative painting rather than the ideal grace that fascinated Mengs. Just before and during the French Revolution, these and other painters adopted stirring moral subject matter from Roman history and celebrated the values of simplicity, austerity, heroism, and stoic virtue that were traditionally associated with the Roman Republic, thus drawing parallels between that time and the contemporary struggle for liberty in France. David’s history paintings of the “Oath of the Horatii” (1784; Louvre, Paris [see ]) and “Lictors Bringing to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons” (1789; Louvre) display a gravity and decorum deriving from classical tragedy, a certain rhetorical quality of gesture, and patterns of drapery influenced by ancient sculpture. To some extent these elements were anticipated by British and American artists such as Hamilton and West, but in David’s works the dramatic confrontations of the figures are starker and in clearer profile on the same plane, the setting is more monumental, and the diagonal compositional movements, large groupings of figures, and turbulent draperies of the Baroque have been almost entirely repudiated (see ). This style was ruthlessly austere and uncompromising, and it is not surprising that it came to be associated with the French Revolution (in which David actively participated).
Oath of the Horatii, oil painting by Jacques-Louis David, 1784; in the Louvre, Paris.Giraudon/Art Resource, New York The Death of Marat, oil painting by Jacques-Louis David, 1793; in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium.World History Archive/age fotostock
Neoclassicism as generally manifested in European painting by the 1790s emphasized the qualities of outline and linear design over those of colour, atmosphere, and effects of light. Widely disseminated engravings of classical sculptures and Greek vase paintings helped determine this bias, which is clearly seen in the outline illustrations made by the British sculptor John Flaxman in the 1790s for editions of the works of Homer, Aeschylus, and Dante. These illustrations are notable for their drastic and powerful simplification of the human body, their denial of pictorial space, and their minimal stage setting. This austere linearity when depicting the human form was adopted by many other British figural artists, including the Swiss-born Henry Fuseli and William Blake, among others.
Neoclassical painters attached great importance to depicting the costumes, settings, and details of their classical subject matter with as much historical accuracy as possible. This worked well enough when illustrating an incident found in the pages of Homer, but it raised the question of whether a modern hero or famous person should be portrayed in classical or contemporary dress. This issue was never satisfactorily resolved, except perhaps in David’s brilliantly evocative portraits of sitters wearing the then-fashionable antique garb, as in his “Portrait of Madame Récamier” (1800; Louvre).
Classical history and mythology provided a large part of the subject matter of Neoclassical works. The poetry of Homer, Virgil, and Ovid, the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and history recorded by Pliny, Plutarch, Tacitus, and Livy provided the bulk of classical sources, but the most important single source was Homer. To this general literary emphasis was added a growing interest in medieval sources, such as the pseudo-Celtic poetry of Ossian, as well as incidents from medieval history, the works of Dante, and an admiration for medieval art itself in the persons of Giotto, Fra Angelico, and others. Indeed, the Neoclassicists differed strikingly from their academic predecessors in their admiration of Gothic and Quattrocento art in general, and they contributed notably to the positive reevaluation of such art.
Finally, it should be noted that Neoclassicism coexisted throughout much of its later development with the seemingly obverse and opposite tendency of Romanticism. But far from being distinct and separate, these two styles intermingled with each other in complex ways; many ostensibly Neoclassical paintings show Romantic tendencies, and vice versa. This contradictory situation is strikingly evident in the works of the last great Neoclassical painter, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who painted sensuous Romantic female nudes while also turning out precisely linear and rather lifeless historical paintings in the approved Neoclassical mode.
Britain
Hamilton—Scottish painter, archaeologist, and dealer—spent most of his working life in Rome, and his paintings include two series of large and influential canvases of Homeric subjects. West and the Swiss-born Kauffmann were the most consistent exhibitors of history pieces in London during the 1760s. James Barry and Fuseli also were important. Blake, poet and painter, was a Neoclassicist to some extent.
France
As well as being a painter, Vien was a friend of the archaeologist Caylus and a director of the French Academy in Rome. This generation also included Jean-Baptiste Greuze, who painted a few classical history subjects as well as the scenes from contemporary life for which he is best known; Jean-Jacque Lagrenée the Elder, like Vien a director of the French Academy in Rome; and Nicolas-Guy Brenet.
The outstanding and most influential of all French Neoclassicists and one of the major artists in Europe was Vien’s pupil Jacques-Louis David. David’s early works are essentially Rococo, and his late works also revert to early 18th-century types; his fame as a Neoclassicist rests on paintings of the 1780s and ’90s. After winning the Prix de Rome of the French Academy in 1774 (important in the history of French painting because it awarded a stay in Rome, where winners studied Italian paintings firsthand), he was in that city in 1775–81, returning there in 1784 to paint “Oath of the Horatii” (see ). David’s contemporaries, or near-contemporaries, included Jean-Germain Drouais, whose history paintings almost equaled David’s own in severity and intensity.
The slightly younger generation of painters included Jean-Baptiste Regnault, Louis-Léopold Boilly, and Louis Gauffier. They were followed by a more important group that included Pierre-Paul Prud’hon. Prud’hon blended in his paintings a mild classicism and the lyrical mood and soft lights of Correggio; he was patronized by the empresses Josephine and Marie-Louise. Baron Pierre-Narcisse Guérin painted in a style close to the Neoclassicism of David, although he was not one of his pupils.
Of David’s pupils, three became well-known and one became very famous. Baron François-Pascal-Simon Gérard had a high reputation as a portraitist under both Napoleon and Louis XVIII. Antoine-Jean Gros executed many large Napoleonic canvases and after David’s death was the leading Neoclassicist in France. Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy, known as Girodet-Trioson, won a Prix de Rome but stopped painting after 1812 when he inherited a fortune and turned to writing. The famous pupil was Ingres, who was important as a Neoclassicist in his subject paintings but not in his portraits.
Germany and Austria
Mengs was born in Aussig in Bohemia (modern Ústí nad Labem, Czech Republic) in 1728, the son of the court painter there. He was himself appointed Dresden court painter in 1745. In 1755 he met Winckelmann, and subsequently he became a prominent figure in Roman Neoclassical circles. Mengs is important both as a painter and as a theorist. Apart from him, Germany’s and Austria’s main contribution to Neoclassicism was theoretical, not practical, however. The early Neoclassicists included Cristoph Unterberger; Anton von Maron, who married Mengs’s sister; and Friedrich Heinrich Füger. After Unterberger, the most interesting painter was Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, who executed both portraits and subject pieces. He was a director of the art academy in Naples and supervised the publication of engravings of the Greek vases in the collection of Sir William Hamilton, the British ambassador to Naples, who was a notable connoisseur.
The German painter Asmus Jacob Carstens worked in Berlin and was a professor at the Berlin Academy. Members of his artistic circle included the painters Karl Ludwig Fernow, Eberhard Wächter, Joseph Anton Koch (who was the most outstanding of this German group), and Gottlieb Schick.
Italy
One of the earliest Neoclassicists and one of the foremost painters of his generation in Italy was Batoni. His style blends Rococo with Neoclassical elements, and his work includes classical subject pieces as well as portraits in contemporary dress, the sitter posing with antique statues and urns and sometimes amid ruins. The painter Domenico Corvi was influenced by both Batoni and Mengs and was important as the teacher of three of the leading Neoclassicists of the next generation: Giuseppe Cades, Gaspare Landi, and Vincenzo Camuccini. These artists worked mostly in Rome, the first two making reputations as portraitists, Landi especially being noted for good contemporary groups.
Rome was indeed the city where the principal Italian painters of this period were most active. One such was Felice Giani, whose many decorations include Napoleonic palaces there and elsewhere in Italy (especially Faenza) and in France.
Important painters outside Rome include Andrea Appiani the Elder in Milan, who became Napoleon’s official painter and executed some of the best frescoes in northern Italy. He was also a fine portraitist. One of his pupils was Giuseppe Bossi. Another leading Lombard painter was Giovanni Battista dell’Era, whose encaustic paintings were bought by Catherine the Great and others. Other good examples of Neoclassical decorative schemes outside Rome are in Florence (Pitti Palace) by the Florentine Luigi Sabatelli and by Pietro Benvenuti, who was born at Arezzo, and in Venice (Palazzo Reale) by Giuseppe Borsato, who was born in that city and was both painter and architect. Another painter of the time, though only given to a mildly Neoclassical style, was Domenico Pellegrini, born near Bassano, who traveled widely. The principal Neoclassicists in the south were the Sicilians Giuseppe Velasco, who did important frescoes in palaces in Palermo, and Giuseppe Errante.
Other countries
The main Danish painter who produced original Neoclassical works was Nicolai Abraham Abildgaard. Other Danish painters include Abildgaard’s and David’s pupil Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg. David was very influential in Brussels, where he retired late in life. The paintings of his Belgian pupil François-Joseph Navez, for example, are pure French Neoclassicism. The two main Neoclassical artists in The Netherlands were Humbert de Superville and Jan Willem Pieneman. The principal Neoclassicist in Spain was José de Madrazo y Agudo.
David Irwin The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaRomanticism
Romanticism is a term loosely used to designate numerous and diverse changes in the arts during a period of more than 100 years (roughly, 1760–1870), changes that were in reaction against Neoclassicism (but not necessarily the classicism of Greece and Rome) or against what is variously called the Age of Reason, the Augustan Age, the Enlightenment, or 18th-century materialism. In the sense of a personal temperament Romanticism had always existed, but in the sense of an aesthetic period it signified works of art whose prime impulse and effect derived from individual rather than collective reactions. Romanticism can generally be said to have emphasized the personal, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the spontaneous, the emotional, and even the visionary and transcendental in works of art. The Romantic movement first developed in northern Europe with a rejection of technical standards based on the classical ideal that perfection should be attained in art.
It was writers and poets who gave initial expression to Romantic ideas; painters, while subject to similar feelings, acquired fundamental inspiration from the literature of the period. There was an increasing awareness generally of the way the various arts interacted. The Frenchman Eugène Delacroix and the German Philipp Otto Runge explored the implications of musical analogies for painting, and everywhere writers, artists, and composers could be found in close association.
Romantic critics agreed that experience of profound inner emotion was the mainspring of creation and appreciation of art. Received ideas, and especially aesthetic values sanctioned by the authority of official institutions, were distrusted, and the individual was pitted against society. The artist asserted the right to evolve his own criteria of beauty and in so doing encouraged a new concept of artistic genius. The genius whom the Romantics celebrated was one who refused to conform, who remained defiantly independent of society, and whose chief virtues were novelty and sincerity. This sometimes led to bizarre and extravagant projects in which the intention to shock, excite, and involve struck a melodramatic, almost hysterical note that failed to convince by its very lack of restraint.
As in the literature of the period, tragic themes predominated in Romantic painting, and interest turned sharply from classical history and mythology to medieval subjects, although an interest in the primitive was sometimes common to both. The fascination with the Middle Ages combined with strong nationalist tendencies, disposing artists to a concern with the history and folklore of their own countries. At the same time they often sought themes or styles that were distant in place as well as time. Accounts of foreign travel and the literary works of Dante, Shakespeare, Byron, Goethe, Sir Walter Scott, and the supposed Celtic bard Ossian greatly influenced painters. Study of medieval culture imbued some painters with a Christian ideal of simplicity and moral integrity.
A salient feature of Romantic sensibility was awareness of the beauties of the natural world. Artists identified their personal feelings with nature’s changing aspects. An almost reverential affection, animated by the belief that the divine mind was immanent in nature, engendered at times a Christian or theistic naturalism. The artist was seen as the interpreter of hidden mysteries, to which end imaginative insight must combine with absolute fidelity and sincerity. In Britain and Germany especially, the moral implications inherent in the appreciation of natural or artistic beauty tended to outweigh aesthetic considerations. Interest in transitory phenomena led painters to devote themselves to an accurate study of light and atmosphere and their effects on the landscape. Concern to preserve the spontaneity of the immediate impression brought about a revolution in painterly technique, with the rapid notation of the sketch carried into the final conception. Whether emphasizing expressive or purely visual considerations, the landscape paintings of the period display dazzling colour.
Curiosity about the external world and a spirit of what might be called scientific inquiry led many painters to explore the minutiae of nature. Technological advance also excited artistic interest, though painting was affected less than architecture and the decorative arts; and the humanitarian sympathy and generosity so vital to the Romantic spirit gradually effected a reconciliation between art and life. The political and social upheavals of the 19th century involved many painters in revolutionary movements and stimulated a solicitude toward the helpless and downtrodden that found most passionate and powerful expression in the works executed during and immediately after the Revolutions of 1848.
Britain
In the late 1760s and ’70s a circle of British painters in Rome had already begun to find academic precepts inadequate. James Barry, the brothers John and Alexander Runciman, John Brown, George Romney, and the Swiss-born Henry Fuseli favoured themes—whether literary, historical, or purely imaginary—determined by a taste for the pathetic, bizarre, and extravagantly heroic. Mutually influential and highly eclectic, they combined, especially in their drawings, the linear tensions of Italian Mannerism with bold contrasts of light and shade. Though never in Rome, John Hamilton Mortimer had much in common with this group, for all were participants in a move to found a national school of narrative painting. Fuseli’s affiliations with the German Romantic Sturm und Drang writers predisposed him, like Flaxman, toward the “primitive” heroic stories of Homer and Dante. Flaxman himself, in the two-dimensional linear abstraction of his drawings, a two-dimensionality implying rejection of Renaissance perspective and seen for instance in the expressive purity of “Penelope’s Dream” (1792–93), had important repercussions throughout Europe.
William Blake absorbed and outstripped the Fuseli circle, evolving new images for a unique private cosmology, rejecting oils in favour of tempera and watercolour, and depicting, as in “Pity” (1795; Tate Gallery, London [see ]), a shadowless world of soaring, supernatural beings. His passionate rejection of rationalism and materialism, his scorn for both Sir Joshua Reynolds and the Dutch Naturalists, stemmed from a conviction that “poetic genius” could alone perceive the infinite, so essential to the artist since “painting, as well as poetry and music, exists and exults in immortal thoughts.” The spiritual, symbolical expression of Blake’s complex sympathies, his ability to recognize God in a single blade of grass, inspired Samuel Palmer, who, with his friend Edward Calvert, extracted from nature a visionary world of exquisite, though short-lived, intensity.
Empiricism and acceptance of the irrational, however, were not mutually exclusive, and each profoundly affected attitudes toward nature. Susceptible to the ideas of Blake and other radical theorists and animated by a growing spirit of inquiry into natural phenomena, painters slowly abandoned the picturesque desire to compose and became willing to be moved, awestruck, and terrified by nature unadorned. Early artists of the sublime, such as Alexander Cozens or Francis Towne, worked largely in watercolours and solved the problem of scale by abstraction—use of broad areas of colour to suggest the vast scope of natural forces—an approach developed by Thomas Girtin and John Sell Cotman.
By the early 19th century, the watercolourist John Varley was echoing current practice when he told his pupils John Linnell, William Mulready, and William Henry Hunt: “Go to nature for everything.” But already two outstanding British landscape painters, John Constable and J.M.W. Turner, were going still further. Both men, while admiring the classical landscapes of Claude Lorrain and Poussin, believed that personal feeling was the mainspring of artistic activity and felt an almost mystical sympathy for the natural world. They made atmosphere almost palpable and painted everything from clouds to lichens with astonishing technical diversity. Constable considered himself before all else a “natural” painter and sought, in his own words, to capture “light—dews—breezes—bloom—and freshness” with scientific precision and deepest affection. For Constable, light clarified and enlivened, and his nostalgia for the Suffolk countryside is personal and explicit. With Turner, light increasingly diffused the objects illuminated, and only a more literary expression satisfied his concept of the sublime, drawing him to mountain grandeur, raging seas, storms, and conflagrations. The technical innovations of these two men were better understood in France than in Britain; even John Ruskin’s passionate defense of Turner, with its emphasis on absolute fidelity to nature, helped deflect Turner’s and Constable’s successors onto a very different course.
George Stubbs’s anatomical studies and accurate delineations of animals were echoed a generation later by Thomas Bewick’s bird studies, themselves harbingers of the drawings of Edwin Landseer and Ruskin’s closely observed renderings of naturalistic detail. Stubbs’s empathy for the animal world reemerged in the work of James Ward, together with an exultation in the power of nature, shared by Philip James de Loutherbourg. Demand for information about distant places partially superseded the taste for picturesque European scenes, and following William Hodges, who accompanied Captain James Cook’s second voyage (1772–75), such painters as Richard Parkes Bonington, Samuel Prout, John Frederick Lewis, and Edward Lear traveled widely, recording scenes of historic or exotic interest.
In portraiture an interest in extremes of mood found most eloquent expression in the work of Sir Thomas Lawrence, who combined in portraits such as those of Richard Payne Knight (1794; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester) and Pope Pius VII (1819; Royal Collection, Windsor Castle) brilliant freedom of handling, at times approaching exhibitionism, with dramatic expression and setting, at times almost melodramatic.
History painting, too, was transformed: Bonington’s “Henri III and the English Ambassador” (1827–28; Wallace Collection, London), while testifying to a sustained delight in the medieval world, already betrays commensurate interest in period detail and the finer points of human insight. The authentic, domestic treatment of biblical themes at the hands of William Dyce and the Pre-Raphaelites (see below) contrasts sharply with the earlier apocalyptic fantasies of John Martin and Francis Danby. Inspired by David Wilkie’s mellow, unassuming representation of country life subject matter, William Mulready turned to contemporary scenes of daily life, adopting the brilliant palette that distinguished British painting for the next half-century. The high Victorian Age saw much narrative painting, a genre that was practiced with accurate and sympathetic observation, from the panoramic activity of William Powell Frith’s “Derby Day” (1858; Tate Gallery) to such intimate glimpses of reality as “The Travelling Companions” (1862; City Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham), by Augustus Egg. Painting as a vehicle for social or moral comment was provided by Sir Luke Fildes and Frank Holl, in whose work a tendency to sentimentality is redeemed by a genuine regard for the sufferings of the poor. In the 1850s the Pre-Raphaelites gave expression to the painting of contemporary life with such memorable images as “The Blind Girl” (1856; City Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham), by John Everett Millais, or “The Stonebreaker” (1857–58; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), by John Brett.
The Pre-Raphaelite movement, echoing that of the Nazarenes (a group of religiously minded painters who sought to revive medieval workshop practices; see below), reiterated many earlier Romantic ideals. Literary inspiration and a passion for the Middle Ages were tempered for the Pre-Raphaelites by a moral outlook that recoiled from sophistication and virtuosity and demanded rigorous studies from natural life. These painters handled literary, historical, biblical, and contemporary themes with the same sincerity and fidelity that yielded the sparkling precision of Pre-Raphaelite landscape. Their earnest pursuit of truth, whether in depicting painful social realities or concentrating on the foreground blades of grass in a landscape, entailed a denial of many orthodox artistic pleasures. Together with Ford Madox Brown, the Pre-Raphaelites sustained the devotion to colour and light in painting that underlies the finest endeavours of English Romanticism.
Germany
In Germany also there was a reaction against classicism and the academies, and, as elsewhere, it involved all aspects of the arts. Again, as elsewhere, theory preceded practice: Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (“Effusions of an Art-Loving Monk”), by Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, had an immediate and widespread influence upon its publication in 1797. Wackenroder advocated a Christian art closely related to the art of the early German masters and provided the artist with a new role as interpreter of divine inspiration through his own feelings.
The painter Philipp Otto Runge had been reared on 17th-century German mysticism, and he proved susceptible to the ideas of writers such as Wackenroder when introduced to them in Dresden at the very end of the 18th century. In Dresden he formed a close association with the leading German landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich. Like Friedrich he was fascinated by the potential symbolic and allegorical power of landscape, which he used as a vehicle for religious expression. His vision of nature was pantheistic (as was Friedrich’s), and in his portraits his aim was to capture the soul of the individual as part of the universal soul of nature. “The Artist’s Parents and Children” (1806; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg) reflects not only his constant search for truth but also his admiration for the early German masters, through whose work he was made aware of the expressive power of line and colour. His interest in the German past, including folklore and fairy tales, was reflected in a bizarre fairylike quality in much of his work (e.g., “Night,” 1803), and it was this quality that was taken up and popularized by his two most important followers, Moritz von Schwind and Adrian Ludwig Richter, in whose hand the intensity of the first generation declined into popular genre paintings (usually small pictures depicting everyday life, as opposed to some idealized existence) and the comfortable Romanticism of the Biedermeier period (1815–48).
Friedrich was a deeply religious man whose vision demanded complete subjection to the spirit of God in nature; in suggesting through landscape the eternal presence of the Creator, he intended to induce in the beholder a state of religious awe. Among his pupils was Carl Gustav Carus, a physician, philosopher, and self-taught painter whose chief contribution was as a theorist; Neun Briefe über Landschaftsmalerei (1831; “Nine Letters on Landscape Painting”) elucidates and expands the ideas of Friedrich, adding Carus’ own more-scientific approach to natural phenomena. Other important painters influenced by Friedrich were Ernst Ferdinand Oehme, a landscape painter, and Georg Friedrich Kersting, who captured in his stark interiors something of the master’s atmosphere of silent worship. However, two other pupils of Friedrich subsequently abandoned tragic landscapes; one, the Norwegian Johan Christian Dahl, reverted to naturalism; the other, Karl Blechen, joined the Romantic realists.
Whereas Runge, Friedrich, and their followers interpreted Wackenroder in a highly personal way, others were inspired to communal activity. A number of young painters in Vienna founded in 1809 a group they called the Guild of St. Luke. The founding members were Johann Friedrich Overbeck (their leader), Franz Pforr, Joseph Wintergerst, Joseph Sutter, and Georg Ludwig Vogel. In 1810 they moved to Rome, where they were soon joined by Peter von Cornelius, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Friedrich Olivier, the brothers Philipp and Johannes Veit, Wilhelm von Schadow, Johann Evangelist Scheffer von Leonhartshoff, and Josef von Führich. Their semimonastic existence occasioned the nickname Nazarenes.
In general, their highest aspirations—toward monumental history painting—produced the least successful results, and they came closest to realizing their intentions on a small scale in highly finished watercolours and drawings, as in Overbeck’s “The Raising of Jairus’ Daughter” (1814). Only Joseph Anton Koch and Cornelius, who were both older and more experienced, achieved great vigour in their history paintings, combining medievalizing tendencies with the powerful classicism of Carstens (see above Neoclassicism: Germany and Austria), as seen in Cornelius’ “The Recognition of Joseph by His Brethren” (1815–16; National Gallery, Berlin). Even Overbeck, an articulate leader and a lucid draftsman, could not escape, in his “Joseph Being Sold by His Brethren” (1816–17; National Gallery, Berlin), the self-conscious naïveté common to many of the Nazarenes. This naïveté is also noticeable in Pforr’s “The Entry of the Emperor Rudolf of Habsburg into Basel in 1273” (c. 1809; Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt am Main) and Schnorr’s “The Procession of the Three Magi” (1819; Museum of Fine Art, Leipzig). Alfred Rethel, a late arrival, however, manages to avoid such an effect in his haunting “King David with His Harp” (c. 1831; Museum of Art, Düsseldorf). Not long afterward there was a move toward the more dramatic, though no less nostalgic, approach of von Schadow and his pupil Karl Friedrich Lessing.
Portraiture required less self-consciousness than history painting, and there are a number of highly sensitive portraits, mainly of their friends, by Overbeck, Schnorr, Scheffer von Leonardshoff, and Carl Philipp Fohr (“Portrait of Wilhelm von Schadow” [1818; Museum of the Palatinate, Heidelberg]). The Nazarenes’ greatest contribution, however, was to landscape painting: inspired by the heroic landscapes of Koch (e.g., “Bernese Oberland” [1816; Gallery of Modern Paintings, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden]), by the German “primitives,” and by their own concept of truth to nature, they renounced the conventional Italianate solution and turned instead to the countryside around them and to memories of Germany and German painting. As the movement gathered momentum, the possibilities for development expanded, and the Nazarene landscape was valuable to later painters of the Biedermeier period and to painters of naturalistic landscape, Romantic realism, and secular historical subjects.
France
The French Revolution greatly stimulated interest in the depiction of contemporary events, although richly documented and highly detailed paintings of topical patriotic events were being painted in London by West and John Singleton Copley even before the Revolution. Encouraged by David’s example, however, painters in France sought to represent authentically the crucial moments of their own time. Napoleon I enthusiastically endorsed this awareness of modern heroism and demanded pictorial celebration of the glorious achievements of the empire. David recorded the ceremonies of the imperial court with scrupulous precision. Napoleon’s potent hold on the artistic imagination is well illustrated by Gros’s “Napoleon Visiting the Pesthouse at Jaffa” (1804; Louvre), where he is endowed with godlike authority and the humanitarian sensibility of the true Romantic hero. At the same time, other artists—such as Gérard, Girodet-Trioson, and Ingres—readily responded to the Emperor’s admiration for the stories of Ossian. After the fall of Napoleon few were disposed to depict contemporary subjects. Théodore Géricault was something of an exception, but he was separated from his immediate predecessors both by temperament and by the sincerity of his approach. Individual suffering rather than collective drama is vividly portrayed in “The Raft of the Medusa” (c. 1819; Louvre). This, Géricault’s masterpiece, echoes in its strenuous forms the school of Caravaggio in the 17th century. His studies of the poor, aged, and insane are realistically observed and have a sympathetic intensity unmatched before the generation of Honoré Daumier and Gustave Courbet.
The paintings of Delacroix frequently disrupted the salons of the 1820s and ’30s with their tumultuous colour and emotive energy. To many young men after 1815, France appeared to settle into a bourgeois respectability that implicitly disparaged the exhilarating years of the republic and the empire. In consequence, the art of the period often seems melancholic and introverted, the discontent expressing itself in historical and exotic themes or in a passionate concern with the humble and rejected members of society. Delacroix has justly been acclaimed the leader of the Romantic school in France. His fertile imagination, embracing a novel range of literary and historical themes and fastening with a characteristic sense of the sadness of life on moments of death, defeat, and suffering, together with his prodigious technical resources exemplify Romanticism in its most obvious aspects. His vigorous handling of paint and expert use of colour values for both description and expression were important for the later development of French painting. “The Massacre at Chios” (1824; Louvre) transposes contemporary events into a realm of tragic fiction soon established unrestrainedly with such melodramatic works as “The Death of Sardanapalus” (1827; Louvre), a riot of brilliant colour and ebullient forms.
Delacroix’s Moroccan paintings released a flood of North African subjects, although, in the hands of lesser artists—such as Eugène Fromentin, Ary Scheffer, and Eugène Devéria—the treatment is less effective. Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, whose small canvases have a delicate, jewellike quality, provided the most refreshing variations on the theme. But Delacroix was not the first to handle Oriental subjects; Ingres had already done so with a reticence that belies the sensuous delight in “Valpinçon Bather” (1808; Louvre) and in “La Grande Odalisque” (1814; Louvre [see ]). Early in his career Ingres made notable contributions to the historical genre with episodes from medieval French history painted in a style of linear purity that parallels the methods of Flaxman and Blake in Britain and the Nazarenes in Germany. Under the spell of Raphael he returned to the academic fold, but his portraits always retained that trenchant simplicity and lucid insight that make him such a memorable exponent of lyric realism. The career of Ingres and in a converse sense that of Paul Delaroche well illustrate the imprudence of too readily distinguishing between academic and Romantic artists. Delaroche, perhaps the most popular representative of the Romantic school, specialized in highly charged narratives with royal and child characters, of which “The Children of Edward” (c. 1830; Louvre) is a typical example, being executed with a flatness that lacks either linear or colouristic inspiration. In comparison, the work of Théodore Chassériau is animated by powerful emotional overtones reminiscent of Delacroix. “The Cossack Girl Finding the Body of Mazeppa” (1851; Museum of Fine Art, Strasbourg) shows a similarly expressive use of paint, together with poignant imagery, both characteristic of his regrettably slender oeuvre. At the end of the century, Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon transformed these features, along with others in Louis Boulanger’s work, into whimsical, haunting fantasies that delighted the Symbolist poets.
In the 1830s and ’40s it was Honoré Daumier, more than any other artist, who portrayed relatively lowly members of society, expressing in numerous drawings and paintings their patient resignation. In contrast, his truly excoriating depiction of the weaknesses and vices of the privileged classes, particularly officialdom, often displeased authority, which had long identified Romanticism with liberalism—and with good reason. A strain of poetic realism in the 1840s, essentially Romantic in approach, gathered sudden momentum with the Revolution and short-lived republic of 1848. Jean-François Millet and Gustave Courbet depicted peasant life, investing it with a certain timeless quality. Courbet’s “Stone-Breakers” (1849; destroyed during World War II) and Millet’s harrowing “Quarriers” (c. 1847; Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio) powerfully express their creators’ concern for the poor. Courbet created a sombre monument to his own village in “Burial at Ornans” (1849; Louvre), and Millet succeeded in conferring an epic grandeur on scenes of rural life.
A new approach to the familiar and unsophisticated occurs in the landscape painting of the 1830s and ’40s; for, although French Romanticism produced no Turner, it did give rise to the Barbizon school, a group of naturalist painters who were particularly active in the forest of Fontainebleau. In this period the charm of the spontaneous sketch as opposed to the finished study was recognized: painters readily set up their easels in the open air and scrutinized the scene before them. A direct approach to nature and an interest in transitory moments, especially the changing effects of light, were features common to Romantic landscape painters throughout Europe and the United States. Paul Huet, a friend of Delacroix and Bonington and a painter closely associated with the Romantic school, represented dramatic, stormy scenes of solitude; yet, though scarcely a naturalist, he was deeply impressed by the works of Constable, several of which he copied and which inspired him to adopt a broken style of brushwork with dabs of bright pigment. The changed attitude to landscape is aptly expressed in the words of Théodore Rousseau, the most controversial representative of the new school: “Our art can only attain pathos through sincerity.” Rousseau attempted to render nature as he found it, though his melancholic temperament is inevitably reflected in the desolate panoramas and gloomy sunsets in which he expressed an almost pantheistic feeling for the natural world. At the same time, his close attention to detail and painstaking accuracy in the delineation of plants and grasses betray the scientific concern shared by many Romantic artists. A similar penetration informed his studies of light, and both he and Charles-François Daubigny repeated virtually the same subjects under different weather conditions in order to capture the ephemeral effects of light and atmosphere. The freedom and freshness of Constable’s handling is echoed in Daubigny’s flickering treatment of sunset and light over water. A particularly poetic insight into nature was that of Narcisse-Virgile Diaz de La Peña and Constant Troyon. The work of Camille Corot, despite the restrained classicism of his style, is similarly enlivened by an instinctive feeling for naturalistic landscape. For, while they laid the foundation for the painterly revolution of the Impressionists, the Barbizon painters always retained the generous appreciation of natural beauty and emotional involvement with their subject that everywhere distinguish the Romantic temperament.
United States
American Romantic painters were largely influenced by trends in late 18th-century Europe, especially Britain, but the absence of an indigenous artistic tradition permitted a much more intuitive development. At the same time, their work, like that of the early French Romantics, is closely associated with the new spirit fostered by a national revolution. The American Revolution, by reinforcing the democratic ideal, inspired a unique brand of Romantic realism that was a strong force in American painting from the late 18th century onward and that anticipated the emergence in Europe by a whole generation. Benjamin West, in addition to his contribution to Neoclassicism, developed a style of narrative painting with dramatic subjects taken from contemporary life; while he painted his most significant work in Britain, it was on American rather than English artists that it made the most impact. John Trumbull undertook a series of 12 scenes from the American Revolution, in which careful studies of the principal participants were incorporated into colourful, baroque compositions. At their best, these works, for example “Sortie from Gibraltar” (1789; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), carry great conviction, even if they tend to be somewhat theatrical. In 1784 one of the most candid portraitists of the period, Charles Willson Peale, completed a similarly ambitious project in his paintings of the leading figures of the Revolution. A more limited enthusiasm for precise naturalistic study informs the work of Alexander Wilson, whose devoted love of birds emerges in the freshness and simplicity of the plates to his American Ornithology (9 volumes; 1808–14). His achievement has been overshadowed by his greater successor, John James Audubon, who combined scientific precision with a delight in his specimens that transforms his watercolour drawings of birds into works of rare and delicate beauty.
At the beginning of the Romantic period, artists were still influenced by British painting, but this influence grew less and less perceptible as the 19th century progressed. For instance, the portrait of “Colonel Thomas Handasyd Perkins” (1831–32; Boston Athenaeum), by Thomas Sully, the leading exponent of a new portraiture supposedly expressive of mood, has touches of Sir Thomas Lawrence in the delicately brushed surface, strong contrasts of light and dark, and exquisite elegance of pose. But, though Samuel F.B. Morse, Samuel Waldo, William Page, and others also practiced an emotive style, portraits of the 19th century increasingly tended to endorse the native tradition of solid characterization.
The career of the landscape painter Washington Allston reflects the development of American painting in his lifetime. Absorbed by German and English Romantic poetry, he began on a note of high drama, moving in cosmopolitan artistic circles in Rome and producing a number of early landscapes that seem to have played a part in winning the friendship of the English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. At this point, what was obviously an impetuous and brooding strain in Allston’s temperament found expression by depicting nature in the darker, more destructive moods dear to Turner. “The Deluge” (1804; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City) is a typical macabre invention, with bodies in a raging tempest swept ashore to where wolves and serpents lurk. On his return to the United States, however, his work assumed a quieter, more pensive aspect. “The Flight of Florimell” (1819; Detroit Institute of Arts) illustrates this later style.
An uncomplicated love for their own natural scenery emerges in the work of a succession of landscape painters who frequently strike a contemplative, lyrical note. Thomas Cole reverently recorded scenes in the valley of the Hudson River that echo the loneliness and mystery of the North American forests. With his generous humanitarian sympathies, Asher B. Durand gave a serene and artless account of nature. His feeling for space and finely diffused light renders “Kindred Spirits” (1849; New York Public Library) a touching tribute to the friendship of Cole with the American Romantic poet William Cullen Bryant. An interest in light and atmosphere was shared by George Loring Brown, FitzHugh Lane, Frederic Edwin Church, and George Harvey; all followed Durand and painted in the open. Simplicity and reticence distinguish the landscapes of Thomas Doughty, who concentrated on painting the Hudson River valley as he knew and loved it. The details of country life that fill the stories of Washington Irving are portrayed with affection by William Sidney Mount, who in “Eel Spearing at Setanket” (1845; New York State Historical Association, New York City) transcends the merely anecdotal. George Caleb Bingham approached the life of the frontier without the passionate concern that motivated many contemporary French artists. Solemn and severe in style and glowing with colour, his “Fur Traders Descending the Missouri” (c. 1845; Metropolitan Museum of Art) captures the silence and solitary grandeur of frontier life. The wildness of the frontier caught the imagination of many 19th-century artists: George Catlin, Seth Eastman, John M. Stanley, Alfred Jacob Miller, and Karl Bodmer all discovered a picturesque drama and excitement in Indian life. The Romantic period witnessed the emergence of a truly national school of painting in the United States, where events and scenery provided a constant source of stimulation for artists content to distill their own poetry from the world around them.
Susan Elizabeth Benenson The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaRussia
Napoleon’s invasion of Russia (1812) had far-reaching consequences. It marked the revival of national consciousness and the beginning of a widespread cult of Russian separateness from Europe, thus precipitating the long controversy between “Westerners” and “Slavophiles” that ran through so much of Russian 19th-century literature and thought. At the same time, Russia shared in the Romanticism—cultivated by France and Germany—that gripped Europe during the era of the Napoleonic Wars. This is reflected in the paintings of Orest Kiprensky and Vasily Tropinin. The most notable contribution to the Romantic spirit, however, was made by Karl Pavlovich Bryullov, with his monumental painting “The Last Days of Pompeii” (1830–33; State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg). A completely different trend appears in the work of Aleksandr Ivanov, the first Russian painter to express religious emotions in a western European manner. Other outstanding artists of that period were Aleksey Venetsianov and Pavel Fedotov, the forerunners of Realist painting in Russia.
The second half of the 19th century saw the maturing of Realism in Russia. A sympathetic attitude toward the hard life of the people is reflected in the works of most of the painters and sculptors of that time. The new trend in art had as its basis the populist revolutionary ferment prevalent toward the end of the 1850s and the beginning of the 1860s, much of it inspired by the writers Nikolay Dobrolyubov and Nikolay Chernyshevsky. Chernyshevsky’s dissertation Esteticheskiye otnosheniya iskusstva k deystvitelnosti (1855; “The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality”), the main thesis of which was that art must not only reflect reality but also explain and judge it, provided a starting point for contemporary artists.
From the last third of the 19th century onward, the history of Russian art is the history of a series of school struggles: the Slavophiles against the Westerners; the Academy against the Peredvizhniki (“Wanderers”); and later the joint effort of the last two against a new movement, born in the 1890s and directed by the art review Mir Iskusstva (“The World of Art”).
The Peredvizhniki was a society formed in 1870 by a group of essentially Romantic artists who, however, regarded themselves as Realists. They seceded from the Academy in 1863 in protest against alien dogmatic formulas and the constricting programs of the Academy’s annual competitions. Most prominent among the Peredvizhniki were Ivan Kramskoy, Ilya Repin, Vasily Ivanovich Surikov (see ), Vasily Perov, and Vasily Vereshchagin. The society attached far more importance to the moral and literary aspects of art than to aesthetics. Its artistic creed was realism, national feeling, and social consciousness. Art was to be placed at the service of humanitarian and social ideals; it was to be brought to the people. Accordingly the society organized mobile (peredvizheniye) exhibitions—hence the name. The influence of the Peredvizhniki spread throughout Russia and was dominant for nearly 30 years, but by the end of the century it had greatly declined.