1. Art in the Romantic Era

2. David, Napoleon Crossing the Alps, 1800

3. Aspects of Romanticism in music & art
The Engaged & Enraged Artist
Nature
Supernatural, demonic; dreams & madness
exoticism
“ancient” (Medieval –– not Greek) - rejection of Classicism & Renaissance

4. ARE WE NOT STILL IN THE ROMANTIC ERA?
Engaged and enraged
THE ARTIST APART FROM SOCIETY
THE ARTIST AS SOCIAL CRITIC/REVOLUTIONARY
THE ARTIST AS GENIUS
ARE WE NOT STILL IN THE ROMANTIC ERA?

5. Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 1830
text p. 334

6. Goya, Executions of the Third of May, 1808 1814-15
text p. 336

7. Goya, Disasters of War Brave Deeds Against the Dead
Etching
Political communication

8. Nature peaceful, restorative, an escape; The Picturesque
awesome, powerful, horrifying, overwhelming, indifferent to to the fate of humans; The Sublime
the language of God (edited)

9. John Constable, The Hay Wain, 1821
text p. 338
John Constable, The Hay Wain, 1821

10. Caspar David Friedrich, The Wanderer Above the Mists, c. 1817-18
text p. 337

11. FRIEDRICH, Caspar David The Sea of Ice, c. 1823-25, Oil on canvas, 96
FRIEDRICH, Caspar David The Sea of Ice, c , Oil on canvas, 96.7 x cm

12. J.M.W. Turner, The Slave Ship, 1842
text p. 340
J.M.W. Turner, The Slave Ship, 1842

13. detail, The Slave Ship

14. text p. 340
Turner, Joseph Mallord William, Rain, Steam and Speed 1844, Oil on canvas, 35 3/4 x 48 in.

15. detail

16. Constable
Turner

17. The Raft of the Medusa by Gericault 1819
Political appt of incompetent sea captain

18. ( )
Hudson River School
Frederic Edwin Church, born in Hartford, Connecticut,
Writing of Claude Lorrain, an artist against whom the Hudson River painters measured themselves on their excursions abroad, Roger Fry said, "Claude's view of landscape is false to nature in that it is entirely anthropocentric. His trees exist for pleasant shade; his peasants to give us the illusion of pastoral life, not to toil for a living. His world is not to be lived in, only to be looked at in a mood of pleasing melancholy or suave revery." But I wonder if there ever was a form of landscape painting that is not "false" in this sense. The landscapes we represent are in effect texts in which our feelings and beliefs about nature, and hence about ourselves as inside and outside nature, are inscribed. According to Wen Fong, Travelers in a Wintry Forest, a twelfth-century Chinese painting after Li Ch'eng, transmits the proposition that "recluse scholars living in the mountains have rediscovered in nature a moral order lost in the human world." No such contrast is pointed in the Hudson River paintings, of course, because the natural and the social order for them were one - two modalities of divine presence in American reality. Through the metaphysical window of an oil painting its owner could see the face of God and almost hear the voice of God in the cataracts and echoing precipices of Catskill Mountain scenery. In an odd way, the paintings, in bringing God into the living rooms of the land, have almost the sacred office of religious icons. It says a great deal about the American mind in the early mid-nineteenth century that religious art took the form of landscapes that were Edenic, majestic, gorgeous and bombastic, rather than historical scenes of biblical enactment. It says a great deal as well about the mirror function of landscape painting that the transfigurative vistas of the Hudson River painters gave way, after the Civil War, to something more intimate and less awesome - to farms, for example, where sunsets mean the end of the day's labor, as the workman trudges homeward through diffuse illumination, rather than extravagant timberlands above which God addresses the nation through spectacular cloud formations flamboyantly lit up with cadmium reds and oranges.
These were works of high Romanticism . . .
Still, one misses the point if one sees these paintings only or even chiefly as transcriptions after nature. They are, with qualification, incidentally that. It is not altogether wrong to say, as John K. Howat, the curator of the show does in an interview in The New York Times, that "you can practically smell the light." The illusion of transcriptional exactitude was only a means to an end. The end was to have been a work "imbued," according to Durand, "with that indefinable quality recognized as sentiment or expression which distinguishes the true landscape from the mere sensual and striking picture." That is a beautiful formulation of a distinction between a visual text and a mere picture, and it is my sense that the message that this is God's country must still come through to an audience still responsive to the sentimental assurances of "divine visual language." It is a message transmitted in the vocabulary of waterfalls and rushing streams, storm clouds and florid dawns, massed foliage and blasted tree trunks. It is this, I think, that must explain the popularity of the show rather than the message Howat believes the paintings communicate to us: "The natural environment is something we have to preserve."
DANTO
Church, Frederic Edwin Rainy Season in the Tropics 1866, Oil on canvas, 56 1/4 x 84 3/16 in. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

19. Church, Frederic Edwin, The Icebergs 1861, Oil on canvas, 64 1/4 x 112 1/4 in

20. Bierstadt, Albert Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California 1868, Oil on canvas, 183 x 305 cm
text p. 341

21. The Supernatural ghosts, fairies, witches, demons, etc.
the shadows of the mind – dreams & madness
reaction to Rationalism? (1st witch scare during the Renaissance) – the escape from Reason

22. Delacroix Méphistophélès dans les airs, 1828 No
Delacroix Méphistophélès dans les airs, No. 2 from the set of 18 lithographs of Goethe's Faust

23. Goya, The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters 1796-8 etching
text p. 345
Goya, The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters etching

24. Kronos devouring his children
Goya
Kronos devouring his children

25. Goya, Witches’ Sabbath, c. 1819-23
text p. 345

26. Theodore Gericault
Mad Woman with a Mania of Envy
Study of the insane

27. Goya
The Lunatics

28. Exoticism the sexy Other
psychological/moral justification of imperialism?
England is exotic to the Italians, Italy exotic to the English!
a sense of escape?

29. Delacroix, The Death of Sardanapalus, 1826

30. detail, Sardanapalus

31. Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique La Grand Odalisque 1814 Oil on canvas

32. Jean Auguste Ingres, The Turkish Bath, c1852-63
text p. 344

33. Portrait of a Negress Marie Guillemine Benoist, 1800
Political comment on the rights of women?
p. 327

34. John Nash Royal Pavilion at Brighton 1815-1823
text p. 343
John Nash remodeled the Royal Pavilion at Brighton between 1815 and 1823 for the then Prince of Wales, the future George IV. You can see the array of elements taken from various types of Indian and Islamic architecture. The domes, filigree screens, and archways echo the most elaborate stonework which the British would have seen in India and elsewhere, for example in the northern African colonized area or in places like Persia (present day Iran and Iraq).

35. Revival of past styles Gothic & Romanesque revival
free mixture of stylistic elements
Gothic verticality & asymmetry

36. Fonthill Abbey 1823 The most influential collapsed building?
aka “Beckford’s folly”
mentioned in text p. 342

37. Fonthill, painting of the interior by the architect, James Wyatt

38. Cole, The Architect’s Dream, 1840)
"Thomas Cole, born in Lancashire, England, was trained as an engraver of woodblocks used for printing calico. Because he did not have any formal education in art, his aesthetic ideas derived from poetry and literature, influences that were strongly to mark his paintings. The Cole family emigrated to America in 1818, but Thomas spent a year alone in Philadelphia before going on to Steubenville, Ohio, where his family had settled. He spent several years in Steubenville designing patterns and probably also engraving woodblocks for his father's wallpaper manufactory. He made his first attempts at landscape painting after learning the essentials of oil painting from a nebulous itinerant portraitist named Stein. In 1823, Cole followed his family to Pittsburgh and began to make detailed and systematic studies of that city's highly picturesque scenery, establishing a procedure of painstakingly detailed drawing that was to become the foundation of his landscape painting.
"During another stay in Philadelphia, from 1823 to 1824, Cole determined to become a painter and closely studied the landscapes of Thomas Doughty and Thomas Birch exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy, His technique improved greatly and his thinking on the special qualities of American scenery began to crystallize. Cole next moved to New York, where the series of works he produced following a sketching trip up the Hudson River in the summer of 1825 brought him to the attention of the city's most important artists and patrons. From then on, his future as a landscape painter was assured. By 1829, when he decided to go to Europe to study firsthand the great works of the past, he had become one of the founding members of the National Academy of Design and was generally recognized as America's leading landscape painter.
"In Europe, Cole's visits to the great galleries of London and Paris and, more important, his stay in Italy from 1831 to 1832, filled his imagination with high-minded themes and ideas. A true Romantic spirit, he sought to express in his painting the elevated moral tone and concern with lofty themes previously the province of history painting.

39. Houses of Parliament, London, 1840-65
text p. 343
Houses of Parliament, London,

40. An English building in India

41. Aspects of Romanticism in music & art
The Engaged & Enraged Artist
Nature
Supernatural, demonic
exoticism
“ancient” (Medieval or folk –– not Greek) - rejection of Classicism & Renaissance

42. Goya, Executions of the Third of May, 1808 1814-15
Engaged & enraged: political critique
text p. 336

43. John Constable, The Hay Wain, 1821
text p. 338
John Constable, The Hay Wain, 1821
NATURE: The Picturesque

44. Caspar David Friedrich, The Wanderer Above the Mists, c. 1817-18
NATURE: The Sublime
text p. 337

45. Goya, The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters 1796-8 etching
text p. 345
The escape from REASON
Goya, The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters etching

46. John Nash Royal Pavilion at Brighton 1815-1823
EXOTICISM: another escape from Reason
text p. 343
John Nash Royal Pavilion at Brighton
John Nash remodeled the Royal Pavilion at Brighton between 1815 and 1823 for the then Prince of Wales, the future George IV. You can see the array of elements taken from various types of Indian and Islamic architecture. The domes, filigree screens, and archways echo the most elaborate stonework which the British would have seen in India and elsewhere, for example in the northern African colonized area or in places like Persia (present day Iran and Iraq).

47. Houses of Parliament, London, 1840-65
text p. 342
Houses of Parliament, London,
The escape from Reason, Part 3:
REVIVAL OF THE PRE-RENAISSANCE PAST