The Enlightenment and Its Legacy: Art Of the Late 18th Century through the Mid-19th Century
    
       
  Rococo: The French Taste :: The Enlightenment: Philosophy and Society :: The Enlightenment: Science and Technology :: Voltaire Versus Rousseau: Science Versus the Taste For the "Natural" :: The Revival of Interest in Classicism :: From Neoclassicism to Romanticism :: The Rise of Romanticism :: Imagination and Mood in Landscape Painting :: Various Revivalist Styles in Architecture :: The Beginnings of Photography
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  THE RISE OF ROMANTICISM

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's concept of freedom contributed to the rise of Romanticism, which desired not only political freedom but also freedom of thought, feeling, action, worship, speech, and taste. Individuals claim their own freedom and with it a unique subjectivity. Romanticism believed that the path to freedom was through imagination and feeling rather than through reason and thinking.

Feeling is All: Romanticism believed in the value of sincere feeling and honest emotion. It emphasized feeling, imagination, intuition, and subjective emotion. Romantic artists explored the outer edges of consciousness and developed a taste for the "Gothick" (the Middle Ages), the fantastic, the occult, and the macabre, and for the sublime, which inspires feelings of awe mixed with terror.

A claustrophobic dungeon:

Giovanni Battista Piranesi's series of etched prints of imaginary dungeons, the Carceri (prisons), shows grim, infernal-looking architectural fantasies of massive arches, vaults, piers, and stairways. Within the gloomy, menacing spaces move small, insect-like human figures.

28-38: GIOVANNI BATTISTA PIRANESI, Carceri 14, ca. 1750. Etching, second state, approx. 1' 4" x 1' 9". Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. 
  1. Carceri 14 
  2. Carceri 14
A nightmarish vision:

Henry Fuseli 's The Nightmare illustrates the Romantic taste in night moods of horror, in Gothick fantasies, in the demonic, in the macabre, and in the sadistic.

28-39: HENRY FUSELI, The Nightmare, 1781. Oil on canvas, 3' 4" x 4' 2". The Detroit Institute of the Arts (Founders Society Purchase with funds from Mr. and Mrs. Bert L. Smokler and Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence A. Fleishman). 
  1. The Nightmare
  2. The Nightmare
  3. The Nightmare
  4. The Nightmare
  5. The Nightmare
Inspired by the Spirits:

The visionary English artist William Blake derived the compositions of many of his paintings and poems from spirits who visited him in dreams. He came to believe that rationalism's search for material explanations of the world stifled human nature's spiritual side. He also believed that orthodox religions killed the individual creative impulse. Blake's highly individual vision of the Almighty in Ancient of Days combines the concept of the Creator with that of wisdom as a part of God. The figure's ideal classical anatomy merges with the inner dark dreams of Gothick Romanticism.

28-40: WILLIAM BLAKE, Ancient of Days, frontispiece of Europe: A Prophecy, 1794. Metal relief etching, hand colored, approx. 9 1/2" x 6 3/4". The Whitworth Art Gallery, The University of Manchester.
  1. Ancient of Days
  2. Ancient of Days
Dramatic Action, Emotion, and Color

To their exploration of the exotic, erotic, fictional, or fantastic, Romantic artists such as Goya also incorporated dramatic action into their paintings.

Reconsidering reason:

Goya's etching and aquatint The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, from a series Los Caprichos (The Caprices), 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, but it can also be interpreted as Goya's commitment to the creative process and the Romantic spirit.

28-41: FRANCISCO GOYA, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, from Los Caprichos, ca. 1798. Etching and aquatint, 8 1/2" x 6". Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (gift of M. Knoedler & Co., 1918).
  1. Sleep of Reason
  2. The Sleep of Reason
  3. The Sleep of Reason
  4. The Sleep of Reason
  5. The Sleep of Reason
Portrait of Spanish royalty:

As Painter to the King of Spain, Goya painted a naturalistic portrait of The Family of Charles IV. Besides the King, Queen Maria Luisa, and their children, Goya also included himself (in imitation of Diego Velázquez's painting of Las Meninas).		    
       
  28-42: FRANCISCO GOYA, The Family of Charles IV, 1800. Oil on canvas, approx. 9' 2" x 11'. Museo del Prado, Madrid.
  1. Family of Charles IV
  2. The Family of Charles IV
  3. The Family of Charles IV
  4. The Family of Charles IV
  5. The Family of Charles IV
Turmoil in Spain:

In support of Ferdinand VII's claim to the throne, Napoleon Bonaparte sent French troops to Spain, but after ousting Charles IV and Maria Luisa, installed his brother Joseph Bonaparte on the Spanish throne.

The Massacre of May 3, 1808:

The French invasion was met with Spanish resistance. In retaliation for an attack on French troops by Spanish patriots on 2 May 1808, the French spent the next day, 3 May 1808, executing Spanish citizens. Goya painted an emotional record of the ruthless event in 1814.
  
       
  28-43: FRANCISCO GOYA, The Third of May 1808, 1814. Oil on canvas, approx. 8' 8" x 11' 3". Museo del Prado, Madrid.
  1. Third of May
  2. The Third of May
  3. The Third of May
  4. The Third of May
  5. The Third of May
Paintings of dark emotions:

One of Goya's "Black Paintings," which reflect his disillusionment and pessimism later in life, shows a terrifying and disturbing vision of Saturn devouring one of his children.
  
       
 
 
       
       
  28-44: FRANCISCO GOYA, Saturn Devouring One of His Children, 1819–1823. Detail of a detached fresco on canvas, full size approx. 4' 9" x 2' 8". Museo del Prado, Madrid.
  1. Saturn
  2. Saturn
  3. Saturn
  4. Saturn
  5. Saturn
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.		  
       
  28-45: THÉODORE GÉRICAULT, Raft of the Medusa, 1818–1819. Oil on canvas, approx. 16' x 23'. Louvre, Paris. 
  1. Raft of the Medusa
  2. Raft of the Medusa
  3. Raft of the Medusa
  4. Raft of the Medusa
  5. Raft of the Medusa
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.

28-46: THÉODORE GÉRICAULT, Insane Woman (Envy), 1822–1823. Oil on canvas, approx. 2' 4" x 1' 9". Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon.
  1. Insane Woman
  2. Insane Woman
Line versus color:

In contrast to the Neoclassical artist Ingres, who claimed drawing (line) to be the probity of art, the Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix promoted the value of color.

Inspiring fiction and verse:

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.

Orgiastic destruction and death:

Delacroix's 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.
  
       
  28-47: EUGÈNE DELACROIX, Death of Sardanapalus, 1826. Oil on canvas, approx. 12' 1" x 16' 3". Louvre, Paris. 
  1. Sardanapalus
  2. Sardanapalus
  3. Sardanapalus
  4. Sketch Detail
  5. Sketch Detail
Leading the masses in uprising:

Delacroix also painted current events, particularly tragic or sensational ones. He captured the passion and energy of the Revolution of 1830 in his painting Liberty Leading the People. He balances contemporary historical fact (the 1830 Revolution) with poetic allegory (the figure of Liberty) and, through the title and his inclusion of the towers of Notre-Dame in Paris, also locates the scene in a specific time and place.
  

       
  28-48: EUGÈNE DELACROIX, Liberty Leading the People, 1830. Oil on canvas, approx. 8' 6" x 10' 8". Louvre, Paris. 
  1. Liberty
  2. Liberty
  3. Liberty
  4. Liberty
  5. Liberty
The allure of Morocco:

Delacroix's visit to North Africa in 1832 renewed his Romantic conviction that beauty exists in the fierceness of nature, natural processes, and natural beings, especially animals, which he painted in scenes of violent and exotic tiger hunts.		  
       
  28-49: EUGÈNE DELACROIX, Tiger Hunt, 1854. Oil on canvas, approx. 2' 5" x 3'. Louvre, Paris.
  1. Tiger Hunt
  2. Tiger Hunt
Delacroix's colorful legacy:

Delacroix's visit to North Africa also heightened his awareness of the expressive power of color and light, and made him aware that color appears in nature only in an infinitely varied scale of different tones, shadings, and reflections. In this regard, Delacroix anticipated the later development of Impressionist color science.

A furious imagination:

 Delacroix thoroughly and definitively explored the domain of Romantic subject and mood. His technique was impetuous, improvisational, and instinctive, and epitomized Romantic-colorist painting.

The Dramatic in Sculpture

An allegory of French triumph:

FranÁois Rude's colossal, densely packed relief sculpture of La Marseillaise on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris is an allegory of the national glories of revolutionary France. It shows the stirring departure of the volunteers of 1792 led by Bellona, the Roman goddess of war and personification of Liberty.
  
       
  28-50: FRANÇOIS RUDE, La Marseillaise, Arc de Triomphe, Paris, France, 1833–1836. Approx. 42' x 26'.
  1. La Marseillaise
The ferocity of animals:

Antoine-Louis Barye's bronze of a Jaguar Devouring a Hare shows the bestial violence and brute beauty of nature.

28-51: ANTOINE-LOUIS BARYE, Jaguar Devouring a Hare, 1850–1851. Bronze, approx. 1' 4" x 3' 1". Louvre, Paris. 
  1. Casting Jaguar Devouring a Hare
  
       
 
 
       
       
  Rococo: The French Taste :: The Enlightenment: Philosophy and Society :: The Enlightenment: Science and Technology :: Voltaire Versus Rousseau: Science Versus the Taste For the "Natural" :: The Revival of Interest in Classicism :: From Neoclassicism to Romanticism :: The Rise of Romanticism :: Imagination and Mood in Landscape Painting :: Various Revivalist Styles in Architecture :: The Beginnings of Photography