Art History: Realism in the 19th Century

Realism or Get Real



This page is devoted primarily to the artists who worked in the "realist style" of art and literature. According to the Brittanica,
 

"Realism" in the arts, the accurate, detailed, unembellished depiction of nature or of contemporary life. Realism rejects imaginative idealization in favour of a close observation of outward appearances. As such, realism in its broad sense has comprised many artistic currents in different civilizations. In the visual arts, for example, realism can be found in ancient Hellenistic Greek sculptures accurately portraying boxers and decrepit old women. The works of such 17th-century painters as Caravaggio, the Dutch genre painters, the Spanish painters José de Ribera, Diego Velázquez, and Francisco de Zurbarán, and the Le Nain brothers in France are realist in approach. The works of the 18th-century English novelists Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollett may also be called realistic. Realism was not consciously adopted as an aesthetic program until the mid-19th century in France, however. Indeed, realism may be viewed as a major trend in French novels and paintings between 1850 and 1880. One of the first appearances of the term realism was in the Mercure français du XIXe siècle in 1826, in which the word is used to describe a doctrine based not upon imitating past artistic achievements but upon the truthful and accurate depiction of the models that nature and contemporary life offer the artist. The French proponents of realism were agreed in their rejection of the artificiality of both the Classicism and Romanticism of the academies and on the necessity for contemporaneity in an effective work of art. They attempted to portray the lives, appearances, problems, customs, and mores of the middle and lower classes, of the unexceptional, the ordinary, the humble, and the unadorned. Indeed, they conscientiously set themselves to reproducing all the hitherto-ignored aspects of contemporary life and society--its mental attitudes, physical settings, and material conditions.
Realism was stimulated by several intellectual developments in the first half of the 19th century. Among these were the anti-Romantic movement in Germany, with its emphasis on the common man as an artistic subject; Auguste Comte's Positivist philosophy, in which sociology's importance as the scientific study of society was emphasized; the rise of professional journalism, with its accurate and dispassionate recording of current events; and the development of photography, with its capability of mechanically reproducing visual appearances with extreme accuracy. All these developments stimulated interest in accurately recording contemporary life and society.

 

Honore Daumier, Gargantua, 1831, lithograph In 1830, after learning the still fairly new process of lithography, Honore Daumier (1808-1879) began to contribute political cartoons to the anti-government weekly journal, Caricature.  He was an ardent Republican and was sentenced to six months' imprisonment in 1832 for his attacks on King Louis-Philippe, whom he represented as the archetypal glutton in the political cartoon Gargantua.  Daumier's scene shows the monumental king on a toilet with a huge plank descending from his mouth like an extended tongue.  A pathetic crowd pressed into the right foreground -- consisting of cripples, emaciated mothers, and tattered workers -- gather in front of the Parisian skyline (e.g., the towers of Notre Dame can be seen at right middle-ground), while government ministers dutifully march up the plank to feed Louis-Philippe the underprivileged's taxes which he excretes to another crowd of officials standing below.  King Louis-Philippe was also sensitive to this political cartoon because of the manner in which Daumier depicted the monarch's head: it is shaped like a pear, which in French also means "block head" or stupid. The above text is quoted from, http://www.smcm.edu/art/arth100/Expanding/Revolution/Daumier.htm (however this link is no longer working)

Context according to the Brittanica, Satirical lithographs In 1830 Daumier began his satirical work: his busts lampooning certain contemporary types and his many lithographs. He enjoyed the company of grandiloquent men and mainly associated with men of the left. It was at this time that Charles Philipon, a liberal journalist who had founded the opposition journal La Caricature, invited him to become a contributor. King Louis-Philippe generally tolerated jokes at his expense, but, when unduly provoked, rather than bring suit against a paper, he preferred to seize it, a procedure that meant ruin for its staff and financial backers. Only once during his reign did he deal severely with an offender--with Daumier in 1832, and then only after the second of the artist's most violent attacks. Sentenced to six months in prison, Daumier spent two of them in the state prison and four in a mental hospital, the king apparently wanting to show that one had to be mad to oppose and caricature him. After his release in February 1833, Daumier was never again indicted, even though in his cartoons he continued to attack a regime, a form of society, and a concept of life that he scorned, while at the same time creating unforgettable characters. Daumier's types were universal: businessmen, lawyers, doctors, professors, and petits bourgeois. His treatment of his lithographs was sculptural, leading Balzac to say about him that he had a bit of Michelangelo under his skin.

 

Realism  (the italicized portions, in outline form, are directly quoted from http://hills.ccsf.cc.ca.us/~jcarpent/artapout.htm) Chronology 1839           Daguerreotype presented 1848           Communist Manifesto 1848-52     Revolution in Europe 1859           Charles Darwin publishes Origin of Species 1861-65     American Civil War 1873            Clerk-Maxwell Theory of Electro-magnetic Radiation 1891           First movie camera patented 1884           1st Salon des Artistes Independants (Salon of Independents) 1886           8th and last Impressionist exhibition 1900           Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams 1903           First flight of the Wright brothers 1905-15     Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity 1914-18     World War I Painting of Modern Life: Realism subjects from everyday world factual, commonplace, not idealized Rail Road- import and export goods into cities  Creates a division on class- "upper middle class" who can afford to see art, also music, theatre, and literature machine made goods  1848 -1854 French Revolution  1861- 1865 U.S. Civil War 1871 Suez Canal open in Northern Africa. Germans and French establish trade Karl Marx- Socialism on the rise. According to the text "Karl Marx believed that the laws of human society could be discovered by science and used to construct what he called the golden age of humanity.

Excerpted from, Vitality's signature. by Robert Hughes, Time, 3/8/93, Vol. 141 Issue 10, p62, 2p, 3bw HTML Full Text The French artist Honore Daumier (1808-1879) is the cartoonist's god, though of course he is much more than that. It's impossible to think of an outstanding 20th century caricaturist, from David Low to Ronald Searle and David Levine, who doesn't owe something fundamental to him. Most people know him only through his prints, those distillations of vengeance in which, through a long career, Daumier impaled the dignitaries of bourgeois France on his lithographic crayon. No greater visual satirist ever lived; none, one may be fairly sure, ever will.  The diffusion of Daumier's satirical prints has been such that they tend to overshadow the rest of his work. Toiling against unrelenting deadlines, working sometimes on eight stones at a time, he made literally thousands of them for magazines like Le Charivari. In fact there were only two moments when he was able to give his time entirely to drawing and painting for their own sakes, producing images that were not designed for mass reproduction. The first was just after the 1848 revolution, when press censorship put him out of work. The second was after 1860, when he was fired for a time by Le Charivari. Nobody can guess how many watercolors and drawings he turned out during these interludes -- one of his writer friends, Theodore de Banville, remembered a studio full of ``cartons overflowing with drawings, so swollen that they could not be shut'' -- but only a tiny fraction of them has survived. Quite a lot of that fraction went on view last week at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, in ``Daumier Drawings,'' jointly organized by the Met and the Stadelsche Kunstinstitut of Frankfurt.  To see this exhibition is to see why Charles Baudelaire, reviewing the Paris Salon of 1845, placed Daumier, as a draftsman, in the company of Ingres and Delacroix. He was, of course, different from both. Unlike Ingres, Daumier wasn't interested in ideal form or perfect ``Greek'' contour, even though classical prototypes inform his work -- how far, one can easily judge from his scenes of refugees straggling across an open landscape, which bear a distinct relation to the friezes on Trajan's Column, known to him from engravings. He loved to guy the sacred Antique, but it was the kind of satire that could only be done by an artist fully intimate with his target. And although he got a lot from Delacroix, admiring the fluidity of his line and the power the older artist brought to painting the victims of barbaric force -- Delacroix's Massacre at Chios has a long resonance in Daumier's work -- Daumier didn't share his love of the exotic. For Daumier, everything worth drawing happened right under his nose, in the railway carriage, the estaminet, the cellar, the butcher's shop or the lawcourts. Like Balzac or Dickens, Daumier worked out of immersion in the muck and detail of life as it was lived.  In his hands, the act of drawing acquired an extraordinary power and range. It was, in one sense, sculptural: the dense shadows of ink wash convey the shape and width of a head or a body with such emphasis that you feel you could almost lift it off the page. Drawings like Two Men Conversing or The Drinkers are so vivid in their tonal structure, and at the same time so natural and unpretentious in their expression, that you feel included in the meetings they depict. Daumier's line is always in motion, and startlingly responsive to the perceived moment. It is rarely just an outline: it surrounds the form with the haze of energy, made up of scribbled marks, suggestions and hints. It is the record of a sensibility that continually probes and is always correcting itself in nuances. In other hands, such ambiguity would seem fluttering. In Daumier's, it is the signature of an explosive, unappeasable vitality. . . His repertoire of expression is immense. What artist ever did more with the smile, the shrug, the sneer of complicity, the lifted eyebrow -- the myriad signs of consciousness that lie outside the repertoire of classical art? Rapid movement is keyed into the very nature of Daumier's sketches. With their flicker of successive positions for a lawyer's hand, or a dog's legs, they burgeon in time as well as in space, thus seeming to predict Futurism. And indeed, just as Daumier's drawings contain his prehensile relation to the past, so they look forward to the more modern artists: the massive strong men and pathetic acrobats of Picasso's Rose Period are already in Daumier's carnival scenes. Giacometti was deeply influenced not only by Daumier's drawing but by his series of tiny, malignant caricature-sculptures in clay known as Les Celebrites du Juste Milieu.  If Daumier's appeal to other artists is inscribed on the art that came after him, his enduring popularity with a more general public comes from wider sources. Basically, Daumier lives because for more than a hundred years people have realized that he was on their side -- a tribune of the singly powerless against the collectively powerful. This is not an attitude an artist can simply adopt; he or she must feel it deep in the bones, as by instinct, which Daumier clearly did.

Honore Daumier,  Rue Transnonain, 1834 more on Daumier http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june00/daumier_4-25.html

Form:  Daumier's image incorporates dramatic shifts of chiaroscuro, tenebrism and radical foreshortening in an image which is at the same time photographic in its value structure yet somewhat cartoon like in its execution.  This image is a lithographic print that was originally published in the news paper.  According to the Brittanica,  lithography is a  planographic printing process that makes use of the immiscibility of grease and water. In the lithographic process, ink is applied to a grease-treated image on the flat printing surface; nonimage (blank) areas, which hold moisture, repel the lithographic ink. This inked surface is then printed--either directly on paper, by means of a special press (as in most fine-art printmaking), or onto a rubber cylinder (as in commercial printing). The process was discovered in 1798 by Alois Senefelder of Munich, who used a porous Bavarian limestone for his plate (hence lithography, from Greek lithos, "stone"). The secret of lithographic printing was closely held until 1818, when Senefelder published Vollständiges Lehrbuch der Steindruckerey (A Complete Course of Lithography).

Iconography: Overtly this print is an attack on the French government.  It documents the results of events surrounding the uprisings in Paris during the 1830's.  During a riot in which many of the streets were barricaded, some paving stones were hurled down at police marching through the streets.  The police retaliated by storming one of the building that they thought contained the rebels and they killed all the residents.  According to the general population all of the residents were fast asleep and the police attacked innocent people and murdered everyone including the children and old people in their sleep.  Notice that in this image they are wearing nightshirts.  Daumier documents what he believes was the unjust death of these occupants.  The figures in this image are lit in the religious manner of Caravaggio and the pose of the central figure is reminiscent of many images of Christ and of the image by David of Marat.  Daumier adds a particularly goulish touch to this image by placing the body of an infant beneath the central figure.  Both lay in a puddle of blood. I might have the specifics of the story a bit off.  Here's some info from another website,

Despite serving time in prison for the content of his political cartoons, Daumier continued to criticize the French government.  For instance, when twelve Parisians were killed in a raid by government infantrymen because they had shown support for an uprising in another important French city, Daumier represented the massacre in the illustration Rue Transnonain (1834).  Unlike Gargantua, there is a total absence of caricature.  Instead, the victims are portrayed with realism. Daumier's Rue Transnonain is also important because the central dead adult has been appropriated from Delacroix's earlier revolutionary image Liberty Leading the People (1830).  More than likely, a contemporary French audience would have noticed how the prostrate figure in Daumier's image is placed in a similar pose to that of Delacroix's dead man in the right foreground below the allegorical figure.
The above text is quoted from,
http://www.smcm.edu/art/arth100/Expanding/Revolution/Daumier.htm

Honore Daumier, Third Class Carriage, 1862 oil on canvas, 25"x35" Honore Daumier, Third Class Carriage, 1862. Drawing  Honore Daumier,  The Third-Class Carriage 1863-65 Oil on canvas 25 3/4 x 35 1/2 in. (65.4 x 90.2 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Form: These images all use reduced earthtoned palettes.  The compositions are symmetrical and stable.  The space is fairly shallow and arranged in bands with the focus of the image in the foreground. One of the most important aspects of these images is that Daumier has created multiple copies of the same image by using a process called grid and transfer or squaring.  According to the Brittanica, "Squaring" in painting, simple technique for transferring an image from one surface to another (and sometimes converting the image from one scale to another) by non mechanical means. The original work to be transferred is divided into a given number of squares; the same number of squares is then marked off-- with charcoal or some other easily removable medium--on the surface of the receiving area. The contents of each square of the original are then drawn in the corresponding square of the reproduction. The use of the grid ensures the accurate placement of images onto the reproduction. The Egyptians used squaring at least 5,000 years ago. It has been used to transfer cartoons onto murals, to transfer preparatory drawings onto canvas paintings, and to alter the scale of any work in the same media. This process is important because it demonstrates the influence of mechanical reproduction (photography and printmaking) on the practice of fine art.  Daumier is influenced by the technologies used to create his cartoons in the newspapers even when he makes fine art.  Daumier would have used the process of "squaring" to reproduce images like this on to lithographic stones and printmaking plates. This process was also used during the Renaissance.  Check this out: http://www.clevelandart.org/techniques/squaring.html Daumier's work is realistic but it is still stylized in a cartoon like manner.  His portraits of everyday people are more caricatures than attempts to capture a realistic or photographic realism. Iconography:  Daumier is a lot like Hogarth.  Even in his use of the technology of printmaking to communicate and sell his work.  The iconography of Daumier's work (like Hogarth) deals primarily with Parisian and or French culture and its social organization.  His work often deals with social injustice but often his work documents and is a commentary on the structure of French society. According to the Webmuseum, Honore Daumier, a French artist, was deeply interested in people, especially the underprivileged. In Third-Class Carriage he shows us, with great compassion, a group of people on a train journey. We are especially concerned with one family group, the young mother tenderly holding her small child, the weary grandmother lost in her own thoughts, and the young boy fast asleep. The painting is done with simple power and economy of line. The hands, for example, are reduced to mere outlines but beautifully drawn. The bodies are as solid as clay, their bulk indicated by stressing the essential and avoiding the nonessential. These are not portraits of particular people but of mankind. Hogarth's Third Class Carriage is also a commentary on the compressed and cramped existence of the French "third class" or lower class.  Even though they are doing the bulk of the work their carriage is decidedly less comfortable than the first class carriage below.  Notice also that the wealthy people in the first class carriage are not conversing or leaning against one another.  Their facial expressions are much more detached and aloof as well.  This in some ways demonstrates Daumier's empathy for the lower economic classes.  In some ways he is very Rousseau like in his egalitarianism.

 

Daumier, Honore 1808-1879 First-Class Carriage 1864 black chalk, wash, watercolor and  conte crayon on wove paper  Baltimore: Walters Art Gallery inv.37.1225

Daumier, Honore 1808-1879 French - Third Class Carriage  Berlin :Private Collection Gerstenberg Collection

Gustave Courbet, The Burial at Ornans, 1849 oil on canvas, 51x58"
Form: Courbet's paintings are rendered in a realist and a realistic/naturalistic manner.  His value structure, anatomy and color are all fairly well observed and true to life.  Nevertheless, Courbet also worked with some formal elements that were less naturalistic.  His color is made up of a palette of low key somber earth tones.  The composition of this image is traditional but a bit odd.  The grave is cropped in the center foreground and the figures stand in a frieze like band just behind the hole.  The background's sky and low flat mountains are almost surreal (dreamlike) in their appearance.  His paint quality is a bit unique in that he incorporates the use of impastos in his work.  He employed a heavy use of the palette knife to literally trowel the paint on to the surface of the canvas.  The figures in the image are realistic but they are also "types" of people and in some ways their rough and course features are almost caricaturish in how they are rendered.
Iconography:  The Burial at Ornans, depicts "real" people attending the funeral of a common or "real" person.  Courbet specialized in working class people and ordinary landscapes.  He took the idea of "History Painting" and expands on it by heroicizing the ugly common people of the country whom he had a great amount of sympathy for.  In some ways he is creating a monument for the common French peasant but the image also has some of the moralizing memento mori like warnings contained in Masaccio's "Trinity with Donors."  The hole in the foreground is very similar in its symbology to Masaccio's skeleton.
The strange truncated grave of the buried peasant demonstrates his anti heroic composition and an interest in the documentary and formal qualities of photography.  His memento mori is an attempt to illustrate the common fate of all humanity and for him his painting was and attempt to show this in an unedited truth to perceived fact - "the here and now."  Even the formal qualities of using earthy tones and the rough impastos are for Courbet symbolic of the rough and drab nature of reality.
Context:  Courbet was considered the father of Realist movement in 19th century art and accepted the term "realism" to describe his art.
According to the Brittanica,
Courbet (b. June 10, 1819, Ornans, Fr. d. Dec. 31, 1877, La Tour-de-Peilz, Switz. ) was a

French painter and leader of the realist movement. Courbet rebelled against the Romantic painting of his day, turning to everyday events for his subject matter. His huge shadowed canvases with their solid groups of figures ("The Artist's Studio," 1855) drew sharp criticism from the establishment. From the 1860s a more sensuous and colorful manner prevailed in his work. Courbet was born in eastern France, the son of Eléonor-Régis, a prosperous farmer, and Sylvie Courbet. After attending both the Collège Royal and the college of fine arts at Besançon, he went to Paris in 1841, ostensibly to study law. He devoted himself more seriously, however, to studying the paintings of the masters in the Louvre. Father and son had great mutual respect, and, when Courbet told his father he intended to become a painter rather than a provincial lawyer, his father consented, saying, "If anyone gives up, it will be you, not me," and adding that, if necessary, he would sell his land and vineyards and even his houses.
Freed from all financial worry, young Courbet was able to devote himself entirely to his art. He gained technical proficiency by copying the pictures of Diego Velázquez, Ribera, and other 17th-century Spanish painters. In 1844, when he was 25, after several unsuccessful attempts, his self-portrait "Courbet with a Black Dog," painted in 1842, was accepted by the Salon--the only annual public exhibition of art in France, sponsored by the Royal Academy. When in the following years the jury for the Salon thrice rejected his work because of its unconventional style and bold subject matter, he remained undaunted and continued to submit it.
The Revolution of 1848 ushered in the Second Republic and a new liberal spirit that greatly affected the arts. The Salon held its exhibition not in the Louvre itself but in the adjoining galleries of the Tuileries. Courbet exhibited there in 1849, and his early work was greeted with considerable critical and public acclaim.
In 1849 he visited his family at Ornans to recover from the hectic life in Paris and, inspired again by his native countryside, produced two of his greatest paintings: "The Stone-Breakers" and "Burial at Ornans." Painted in 1849, "The Stone-Breakers" is a realistic rendering of two figures doing menial labour in a barren, rural setting. The "Burial at Ornans," from the following year, is a huge representation of a peasant funeral, containing more than 40 life-size figures. Both works depart radically from the more controlled, idealized pictures of either the Neoclassic or Romantic schools; they portray the life and emotions not of aristocratic personages but of humble peasants, and they do so with a realistic urgency. The fact that Courbet did not glorify his peasants but presented them boldly and starkly created a violent reaction in the art world.

Gustave Courbet, Stonebreakers 1849  destroyed 1945  Dresden  French, Realism

Form: This painting is rendered in an even more frieze like manner than the his "Burial at Ornans."  Courbet's palette and paint quality remain consistent throughout the body of his work.  This work is earth toned and the brushwork is fairly rough and tangible. Iconography:  The Brittanica comments that ""The Stone-Breakers" is a realistic rendering of two figures doing menial labour in a barren, rural setting."  The subject matter of the painting demonstrates Courbet's sympathy for the plight of the rural poor; however, it is a plight he does nothing to remedy (his father was a wealthy farmer.)  Courbet heightens the pathos of the image by depicting two literally faceless workers.  As such one could imagine there own face on the workers or perhaps his message is that we don't really notice or acknowledge the individual identities of this faceless cast.  Nevertheless, he does identify their ages well enough.  The boy is too young to be doing the hard manual labour of breaking up stones and the straw hatted adult is too old.  The need for their hard work is evidenced in the worn and ragged clothing they wear.

Honore Daumier,  This Year Venuses again!. . .  Always Venuses!  c1864

Alexandre Cabanel, The Birth of Venus 1863  Oil on canvas (4’ 2.7" x 7’ 3.75") French Academic Painting or Neoclassic Stokstad points out that Daumier was a bit of an art critique as well and that he commented on the reality of practicality of continuing in the typical Neoclassical and Academic traditions of painting the nude female form in the guise or "disguise" of classical goddesses.  In some ways, Daumier was pointing out that images like this not only had no relationship to 19th century French culture but was also possibly an immoral excuse to satisfy the appetites of the "male gaze."  Other French "Realist" authors felt similarly and Emile Zola, who wrote similarly themed realist literature to Flaubert pointed out the "realities" of the image above. When Cabanel's Birth of Venus was presented at the salon of 1863, this painting was purchased by Napoleon III.  The novelist, Émile Zola (naturalism), rejected this painting calling it a "goddess drowning in a river of mud (who) looks like a very delectable tart, not in flesh and blood—that  would be indecent—but in a sort of pink and white marzipan." The paintings of Manet take on a similar argument.

 
 

Manet, Edouard. Olympia 1863 Oil on canvas 51 3/8 x 74 3/4 in.  French Realism

TIZIANO Vecellio (Titian) The Venus of Urbino 1538 Oil on canvas, 119 x 165 cm  Italian Renaissance

Form: Manet was a realist in the same way that Courbet was.  He uses a "real" kind of palette of earthtones and local unsaturated colors.  His composition is a very traditional borrowing from Titian's work and he renders textures, figures and objects convincingly.  His brushwork is also a bit rough in some areas however it is no more rough than the brushwork of Velázquez.  His skin tones and lighting however are a bit disturbing and he lacks a strong sense of chiaroscuro in this image. Iconography: This image is a kind of "answer" to the traditional art historical point of view concerning the female nude.  In this image, Manet, in a similar manner to Daumier's cartoon above, lampoons or parodies the tradition of painting Venuses.  In this case, he is directly commenting on Titian's painting.
For each element in Titian's painting, Manet reflects a similar one.  For example, the loyal sleeping dog in Titian's painting (which seems a bit sarcastic even there considering the context of the image) is echoed by the black cat arching it's back in Manet's image.  The dog in Titian's work is probably a reference to fidelity and constancy much as it is in Durer's print "The Knight, Death and The Devil" but Manet replaces this with a cat which is a symbol of feminine sexual power and witchcraft.  The tasteful textiles, surfaces and textures of Titian's work are replaced by a gaudy eclectic combination of textiles and wallpapers in Manet's work.  In fact, in 1850-51 the world's fair or exposition was hosted in Chatsworth, England by Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert.  One of the purposes of the exposition was to instruct the masses in the ways of good taste and design.  Victoria and Albert noticed that thanks to industrialization textiles were in great abundance and fairly cheaply priced.  Victoria and Albert believed that the uneducated masses of England were combing fabrics and wallpapers without regard to taste.  Manet's painting is a fairly good example of this willy nilly combination.  Manet may have meant it as a statement concerning the taste of Olympia.
Please read Contrapposto Magazine Bringing Olympia Into the Present
 
 

Manet, Dejeuner sur l'herbe 1863.  Oil on canvas 84" x 106" Raimondi detail of The Judgement of Paris 1520

Stokstad discusses this image and its context extensively in the text.

 

Edouard Manet. A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.  1882. Oil on canvas. 37"x51" Courtauld Institute Galleries, London, UK.

Diego Velázquez Las Meninas 1656 Oil on canvas 10'5''x9'  Located in Museo del Prado,

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Art History: The Academic and Romantic Movements of the 19th Century

 

 
 

Academic Art, Orientalism and Romantic Art
"The École des Beaux-Arts, in full École Nationale Supérieure Des Beaux-arts, school of fine arts founded (as the Académie Royale d'Architecture) in Paris in 1671 by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, minister of Louis XIV; it merged with the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (founded in 1648) in 1793. The school offered instruction in drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture, and engraving to students selected by competitive examination; since 1968, architecture is no longer taught there." (http://www.britannica.com/)

 
In the 19th century the French Academy (École des Beaux-Arts) that David had taken over still flourished.  Artists who worked in David's style continued to dominate the French art world.  The style that they worked in was referred to as "Academic" however they didn't just paint Neoclassical scenes but also painted scenes depicting Arabia, Turkey and India and this subject matter was called "Orientalism."

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Apotheosis of Homer, 1827.  Oil on canvas, approx. 12' 8" x 16' 103/4". Louvre, Paris.  French Academic Painting Raphael School of Athens 1509-1510 Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican, Rome fresco

Form:  This painting is rendered in a very slick and detailed fashion.  No brushstrokes are visible in Ingre's paintings.  Although photography hadn't been invented yet, this painting recalls the photo realistic surfaces and textures of David and Jan Van Eyck's paintings.  The overall design of this image reflects a Neoclassical sense of composition and a Renaissance sense of perspective. The picture plane is arranged in a sculptural frieze like band that takes its cue from antique sculptural friezes such as those found on the Ara Pacis and the Parthenon.  Like its classical counterparts, the image is constructed so that most of the figures are placed in the foreground and even though there is the creation of deep space, the background is not as important as the figures.  It is also classic in that the composition is arranged symmetrically with the most important figure, proclaiming the oath, in the center.  The use of perspective also focusses on this figure. Iconography:  The vessel depicts the apotheosis of Homer which is a kind of crowning scene.   Homer is about to be crowned by a winged victory figure called a nike. To the right of the nike figure is a figure who hands Homer his harp. This painting contains some similar types of elements as Raphael's work.  The figures in the foreground represent important thinkers and paintings from the last three centuries.  In the lower right hand corner is Isaac Newton.  Above him and to the left is Rene Descartes.  In the lower left hand corner is an image of Poussin, the hero of the French school of painting who gestures up towards Homer on his throne.  Behind the figures is an ionic temple that serves as both a visual and conceptual frame with which to view the work. Context: Ingres was David's student and came to Paris because he was awarded a scholarship to study there.  Throughout his life he became one of the giants of the French academic style and he was instrumental in maintaining the Academy's integrity despite the competition it had with a style of art called Romanticism.

 

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres,  Jupiter and Thetis, 1811 oil on canvas, 130 X 101"

Annibale Carracci  The Farnese ceiling-1597-1601 depicting the Loves of the Gods,  ceiling frescoes in the Gallery,  Palazzo Farnese, Rome. Venus and Anchises  (detail)

Form:  This painting falls into all the major characteristics of the Academic style.  It is painted almost photographically, it is symmetrical and textures and the human forms are rendered extremely naturalistically and exactly by using glazes.  However, one of the qualities that begins to show up in Ingre's work is that he subtly distorts or stylizes the anatomy of the figures.  Usually the females have very thin sloping shoulders and slightly rubbery elongated torsos which was the ideal of female beauty at the time.  Iconography: one of the criticisms of the French 19th century academic style was that the uses of classical themes were no longer elevated as they had been in the earlier paintings of David.  Here we see an eroticized almost Mannerist looking interaction of two mythological figures that looks almost as if it might belong on the ceiling of the Farnese Palazzo rather than in a French 19th century drawing room.  Even the figures are stylized almost in a similar manner to Carracci's works.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Large Odalisque. 1814 oil on canvas, 35"x64" Louvre, Paris French Academic/Orientalist  TIZIANO Vecellio (Titian) Venus of Urbino 1538 Oil on canvas, 119 x 165 cm Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Italian Renaissance

Form:  This painting falls into all the major characteristics of the Academic style.  It is painted almost photographically, it is symmetrical and textures and the human forms are rendered extremely naturalistically and exactly by using glazes.  It is also very Ingres- like in his distortions of the figures.  Here is a perfect example of his thin sloping shoulders and slightly rubbery elongated torsos which was the ideal of female beauty at the time.  Iconography:  This painting is a European fantasy of what a Turkish harem girl might look like but if she is a Turkish woman why is her skin so pale? In many ways this painting refers almost exactly to the schema that Titian established in his Venus of Urbino and Boucher established in his Brown Odalisk.  These artists chose to juxtapose the eroticized female form with commodities or luxury items.  By playing the textures and body of the female against expensive fabrics, feathers, and jewels, the artist is also making the human female form another commodity which can be bought and sold.  In this way, the wealth of the patron is also eroticized.  A certain amount of moralizing is happening too.  The artist wants to paint naked pictures of beautiful French women to appease the "male gaze."  But cannot unless it is a classical goddess.  Here Ingres finds a new strategy to display the nude female form under the disguise of an ethnographic image very similar to a "National Geographic" magazine.  Since these women are foreign, exotic, and somewhat barbaric it's OK to look at them as long as it's for an anthropological type of study.  Even the photographic aspect of this image supports that this is a documentary type of image.  And, if they are barbaric, we as good Christian soldiers need to go to these places and "civilize" them. In this instance, the luxury items that Ingres plays her body against happen to be the silks and ostrich feathers of the so called orient are by products of our efforts to civilize these people.  In this way the style of Orientalism is a kind of advertisement that justifies the colonization of the east.

 

Jean-Leon-Gerome, The Moorish Bath, 1880 oil on canvas, approx. 3'x4' San Francisco, Legion of Honor French Academic/Orientalism

Context:  Gerome was the next generation of French Academic painters and in some ways the heir to Ingres.  More so than just about any other painter he follows the same schema as Ingres in both his Orientalist paintings and Neoclassical ones. Gerome and Ingres were both proponents of the Academic style but had to deal with two very powerful new movements in the arts, Romanticism and Impressionism.

According to the Brittanica, Romanticism
 

is an attitude or intellectual orientation that characterized many works of literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and historiography in Western civilization over a period from the late 18th to the mid-19th century. Romanticism can be seen as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality that typified Classicism in general and late 18th-century Neoclassicism in particular. It was also to some extent a reaction against the Enlightenment and against 18th-century rationalism and physical materialism in general. Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental. Among the characteristic attitudes of Romanticism were the following: a deepened appreciation of the beauties of nature; a general exaltation of emotion over reason and of the senses over intellect; a turning in upon the self and a heightened examination of human personality and its moods and mental potentialities; a preoccupation with the genius, the hero, and the exceptional figure in general, and a focus on his passions and inner struggles; a new view of the artist as a supremely individual creator, whose creative spirit is more important than strict adherence to formal rules and traditional procedures; an emphasis upon imagination as a gateway to transcendent experience and spiritual truth; an obsessive interest in folk culture, national and ethnic cultural origins, and the medieval era; and a predilection for the exotic, the remote, the mysterious, the weird, the occult, the monstrous, the diseased, and even the satanic.

One such Romantic figure was Niccolò Paganini,

These drawings of Paganini were created during the 19th century.  On the right is a photograph of him.

According to the Brittanica Niccolò Paganini was an, Italian composer and principal violin virtuoso of the 19th century. A popular idol, he inspired the Romantic mystique of the virtuoso and revolutionized violin technique. . . Paganini's romantic personality and adventures created in his own day the legend of a Mephistophelean figure. Stories circulated that he was in league with the devil and that he had been imprisoned for murder; his burial in consecrated ground was delayed for five years. . . His violin technique, based on that of his works, principally the Capricci, the violin concertos, and the sets of variations, demanded a wide use of harmonics and pizzicato effects, new methods of fingering and even of tuning. In performance he improvised brilliantly. He was also a flamboyant showman who used trick effects such as severing one or two violin strings and continuing the piece on the remaining strings.

 

Ingres, Portrait of Paganini 1819 Drawing Academic Style

Delacroix, Portrait of Paganini 1832 Painting Romantic

These two images of Paganini sum up the differences between the French Academic tradition and the newer Romantic ones.  Compare and contrast these two images and see if you can explain how these two images communicate these differences.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres,  Odalisque with Slave, 1842 French Academic/Orientalist

Eugene Delacroix, Women of Algiers in their Apartment. 1834  oil on canvas 5'10"x7'6". Louvre French Romantic/Orientalist

Both Delacroix and Ingres worked with "Orientalist" subject matter.  Using the ideas that you've read about in this page and in Linda Nochlin's article, try to explain how these two artists are similar and or different in their views of the "Orient."  Do they have the same goals?  Think about how the formal aspects of there work add to or detract from the subject matter.  You may want to read the article below to help you.

Eugene Delacroix The Massacre at Chios 1824 Oil on canvas; Louvre Delacroix, Death of Sardanapalus, 1827 Eugene Delacroix, Women of Algiers in their Apartment. 1834  oil on canvas 5'10"x7'6". Louvre French Romantic/Orientalist

Drinking the color. by Robert Hughes. Time, 1/9/95, Vol. 145 Issue 1, p68, 2p, 3c At the end of 1831, the French artist Eugene Delacroix did something that would change the course of his own art, and to no small degree that of French painting itself. He left Paris and went to Morocco -- an arduous journey in those days, on winter roads to Marseilles and then by naval frigate to Tangier. It was made easier by his connections. The 34-year-old painter was traveling with his friend, a French diplomat named Charles de Mornay, sent to conclude a treaty with Moulay Abd-er-Rahman, the Sultan of Morocco. (France had conquered neighboring Algeria the year before and did not want any Moroccan interventions in its new colony.) The mission, including Delacroix, arrived in Morocco in January 1832 and stayed six months.  Morocco would change Delacroix profoundly. For the next 30 years, the last half of his life, images from ``the land of lions and leather,'' as he called it in a letter from Meknes, would recur in his work, meeting and dictating its needs; the innumerable drawings and watercolors he made there, along with the dense and (to a modern eye) almost cinematic impressions he jotted down in his journal, were a permanent resource he could draw from. Delacroix had already made a brilliant name for himself with ``Oriental'' subjects, including his Byronic denunciation of Turkish barbarity in Greece, The Massacres at Chios (1824), and that enormous Romantic panorama of sex, death and animal vitality, The Death of Sardanapalus (1827).  But these were fictions. He had never been to Greece, let alone ancient Asia. Morocco was real, and it bowled Delacroix over. There, he wrote to a friend in Paris, he was confronted ``at every step'' with ``ready-made paintings which would make the fame and fortune of 20 generations of painters.'' And in a sense he was right. From Delacroix on, Oriental exoticism would bulk ever larger in the offerings of the Paris salon: slave markets, dim fretted courtyards, hawk-nosed Arabs and their Barbary mounts, recumbent houris.  More important, Delacroix's journey south to the Near East would become a model for avant-garde painters looking for purer and more intense experiences of light, locale and color than Northern Europe could offer. Van Gogh went south to Arles; Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and above all Henri Matisse would reach North Africa. ``I have found landscapes in Morocco,'' Matisse claimed, ``exactly as they are described in Delacroix's paintings.'' Morocco satisfied something in the early modernist quest for explicit, fresh, formal experience. And it was Delacroix who pointed the artists there.  The results of his own journey are set forth in a compelling show of some 100 paintings and sketches on view through Jan. 15 at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, ``Delacroix: The Voyage to Morocco,'' curated by Brahim Alaoui.  What did he find there? Basically confirmation, in the real world, of the shape of his own temperament. The leader of the Romantic movement in French painting, Delacroix was both fervid and exceptionally contained. He adored energy -- the fury of stallions rearing and biting one another in a stable, ignoring the efforts of their Arab grooms; the flash in a fighter's eye; the tensed muscles of a lion. He drank color: sonorous reds and browns, flashes of green, veils of cold blue -- a palette he had learned from Rubens. But at the same time he knew, as his idols Rubens and Titian had known, that all the passion in the world is aesthetically useless unless it has the container of form: it was his classical heritage that gave measure, shape and intensity to experience.  Morocco meant both these things. ``This people is wholly antique,'' he wrote in Tangier; its Arab men and Jewish women -- Arab women were not paintable, since they would not remove their veils for a Western stranger -- possessed, in his eyes, ``the majesty which is lacking among ourselves in the gravest circumstances.'' Years later he confided in a letter to a friend that ``it was among these people that I really discovered for myself the beauty of antiquity.'' And not only of antiquity, either. De Mornay was amused to see that when Delacroix was finally admitted to a harem, he became so overexcited that he had to be calmed down with sorbets.  For Delacroix, this antiquity involved color, as for Ingres -- his opposite -- it did not. David and Ingres had given France a colorless antiquity, an abstracted classicism of white marble. What Delacroix got from the arts of Morocco -- woven and dyed fabrics, leather, tiles and pots -- was a sense of extraordinarily vibrant and free color, ``barbaric'' in French eyes but wholly natural (or so he now realized) to him.  You see it announcing itself in his watercolor drawing of a Jewish bride in Tangier, whose costume, in all its fantastic profusion of embroidery, overlays and gold jewelry, is suggested in a few washes of pink, vermilion, blue and yellow. He developed it to full pitch in the oil paintings he did later in his Paris studio. It would lead to the packed density of pattern-on-pattern in Women of Algiers (1834) and receive its homages from both Matisse and Picasso.  For them, it pointed to abstraction. But in Delacroix's case it was supported by an intimate sense of detail. Nowhere does Delacroix's curiosity about what he saw reveal itself more fully than in the Moroccan drawings. He was determined to get everything right, to bring back exact memory in an age before photography: the weave of a coarse djellaba conveyed in thin licks of wash; the violent white light on a wall; a chaotic still life of saddles, blankets and flintlocks piled in the corner of a guardhouse behind a pair of sleeping soldiers, whose robes give them the monumental air of tomb sculptures. The drawings, individually but even more so as a series, express an immense excitement about the world's variety. They underwrote the authenticity of his later paintings, reinforcing their fictions.  After Morocco, Delacroix lost whatever interest he might once have felt in the mandatory artist's trip to Italy. ``Rome is no longer in Rome,'' he would say. ``The Romans and Greeks are here at my door, and I know them face-on; the marbles are truth itself, but you have to know how to read them, and we poor moderns have only seen hieroglyphs in them.'' Morocco saved him from the abstraction that had weakened French responses to the classic. A painting like his Military Exercises of the Moroccans (1832) shows Delacroix using real life -- the ceremonial charge and fusillade of Arab warriors, rearing on their explosively energetic mounts like showoff bikers doing wheelies -- to recall the truth of energy and immediacy that people must have seen in marble battles 2,000 years before.  ~~~~~~~~ BY ROBERT HUGHES

Romanticism: Art transported to exotic, strange places. 1780-1820
 

ro.man.ti.cism n (1823) 1 often cap a (1): a literary, artistic, and philosophical movement originating in the 18th century, characterized chiefly by a reaction against neoclassicism and an emphasis on the imagination and emotions, and marked esp. in English literature by sensibility and the use of autobiographical material, an exaltation of the primitive and the common man, an appreciation of external nature, an interest in the remote, a predilection for melancholy, and the use in poetry of older verse forms (2): an aspect of romanticism b: adherence to a romantic attitude or style 2: the quality or state of being romantic -- ro.man.ti.cist n, often cap

Caspar David Friederich,  Cloister Cemetery in the Snow 1817-19 Oil on canvas 121 x 170 cm Destroyed 1945,  formerly in the National Gallery, Berlin only black and white and poor color images survived

Form:  This painting only exists in black and white and poor color reproductions from before WW II however, you can still get a sense of it from these two images. Friederich (also sometimes spelled Friederich) uses intense contrasts of color and value structure. Color was quite important to Friederich and he has a tendency to use intense and saturated hues.  Often the colors he used are the ones associated with sunset effects in the atmosphere and he plays these colors against his use of dark, earth toned silhouetted forms such as the trees and the gravestones.  Friederich also often used a symmetrical and centrally oriented composition.  The symmetrical composition serves to draw the eye and he uses linear perspective and atmospheric perspective to create a sense of deep continuous space.  He also does this with the size scale relationships of the human figures to the buildings and the relationship if the building's size to the trees in the foreground. All of these formal elements are linked to his iconography. Iconography:  Many of the themes of the Romantic movement revolve around images in which the unseen forces of death, decay, time and the power of the spiritual world are made palpable. The intense colors and value shifts that occur at dusk and dawn are part of the iconography of this image.  The light that bursts through the missing window frames might be representative of the light of heaven or God which is in sharp contrast to the outlines of the building, trees and figures in the mysterious processional in the snow.  The time of day is also symbolic.  Dusk is a sleepy and mysterious time of the day.  For some, sunsets are symbolic of decline and decay.  Decay and nostalgia are echoed in the architectonic trees and the decaying monastery or Gothic style church.  The themes of death and decay are further taken up by the tombstones and the snow which highlights them.  In fact the reference to the decaying Gothic style building may be a reference to the Gothic Revival style that was advocated by Sir John Ruskin who according to the Brittanica was an "English writer, critic, and artist who championed the Gothic Revival movement in architecture and had a large influence upon public taste in art in Victorian England." Context:  This image utilizes many of the standard kinds of images that we are used to seeing in film and specifically films dealing with horror, but for Friederich, these images didn't exist and he is the source of this kind of imagery for cinematographers today. Three great movies that "quote" Friederich's paintings are "Bram Stoker's Dracula" starring Gary Oldman and Winona Rider, "Frankenstein" starring Robert Deniro, and "Gothic" directed by Ken Russell.

 

William Blake Frontispiece from  "Europe a Prophecy" God as the Divine Geometer c1790 God as the Divine Geometer c1220 from a French Moralizing Bible

Form: In a way William Blake was like a Gothic manuscript illustrator.  Each one of Blake's prints was a print that he hand colored and sometimes even annotated.  According to the Brittanica, Blake's invention of what he called "illuminated printing," in which, by a special technique of relief etching, each page of the book was printed in monochrome from an engraved plate containing both text and illustration: an invention foreshadowed by his friend, George Cumberland. The pages were then usually coloured with watercolour or printed in colour by Blake and his wife, bound together in paper covers, and sold for prices ranging from a few shillings to 10 guineas. In this way, Blake's work is both an original painting and a print. The forms that Blake works with are almost naive.  In some ways, his rendering of the human anatomy is awkward and his depiction of chiaroscuro and color are almost unsophisticated.  Nevertheless, the composition of many of Blake's images and the interaction of the texts with the illustration is very similar in design to Gothic manuscripts from the 13th century. "God as the Divine Geometer" is a symmetrically placed image.  Surrounding the well muscled figure is a kind of nimbus or he could be placed within the sun.  In his left hand he holds a compass used for geometry and measurement.  Blake would have drawn this as God's right but it would have been reversed.  The figure is surrounded by clouds and a black void. Iconography:  Everything about this image is designed to create a humanistic, intelligent, and wise image of God as a philosopher and scientific creator.  God is represented in the uncreated black void, he is surrounded by an aura of light and he is using an enlightened and scientific instrument to design the world.  Blake has modeled his image of God as the creator from a similar source as the Gothic manuscript shown here with a similar device.  God is then a scientific and logical designer but God is also a humanistic "superman/philospher" in his appearance.  He is bearded and well muscled as in  Michelangelo's depictions of God from the Sistine Chapel. Context: Look in Stokstad for more context on Blake.

The Tyger Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry In what distant deeps or skies. Burnt the fire of thine eyes! On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand, dare sieze the fire! And what shoulder, & what art. Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand! & what dread feet! What the hammer! what the chain, In what furnace was thy brain What the anvil, what dread grasp, Dare its deadly terrors clasp! When the stars threw down their spear And water'd heaven with their tears: Did he smile his work to see Did he who made the Lamb make thee! Tyger Tyger burning bright, In the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye, Dare frame thy fearful symmetry!

Songs of Innocence and Experience. According to the Brittanica,   Songs of Innocence is Blake's first masterpiece of "illuminated printing." In it the fragile and flower like beauty of the lyrics harmonizes with the delicacy and rhythmical subtlety of the designs. Songs of Innocence differs radically from the rather derivative pastoral mode of the Poetical Sketches; in the Songs, Blake took as his models the popular street ballads and rhymes for children of his own time, transmuting these forms by his genius into some of the purest lyric poetry in the English language. In 1794 he finished a slightly rearranged version of Songs of Innocence with the addition of Songs of Experience; the double collection, in Blake's own words in the subtitle, "shewing the two contrary states of the human soul." The "two contrary states" are innocence, when the child's imagination has simply the function of completing its own growth; and experience, when it is faced with the world of law, morality, and repression. Songs of Experience provides a kind of ironic answer to Songs of Innocence. The earlier collection's celebration of a beneficent God is countered by the image of him in Experience, in which he becomes the tyrannous God of repression. The key symbol of Innocence is the Lamb; the corresponding image in Experience is the Tyger, the subject of the famous poem that stands at the peak of Blake's lyrical achievement: Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? The Tyger in this poem is the incarnation of energy, strength, lust, and cruelty, and the tragic dilemma of mankind is poignantly summarized in the final question, "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" Blake also viewed the larger society, in the form of contemporary London, with agonized doubt in Experience, in contrast to his happy visions of the city in Innocence. The great poem "London" in Experience is an especially powerful indictment of the new "acquisitive society" then coming into being, and the poem's naked simplicity of language is the perfect medium for conveying Blake's anguished vision of a society dominated by money. Copyright © 1994-2001 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

for more on Blake go to http://members.aa.net/~urizen/blake2.html
 
 
 

Henry Fuseli  The Nightmare (Incubus) 1781-82 located in Detroit Fuseli was born Swiss and then moved and worked in England FUSELI,Henry 1741-1825 The Nightmare (Incubus) 1781-82 located in Freies Deutsches Hochstift,Frankfurt-am-Main. English, Romanticism,

Form:  Theses two paintings seem to use the chiaroscuro that Caravaggio advocates, however, if you look closely at how the light moves across the figures you should notice that the values transitions across the figures are not as well rendered as some of the earlier images we have looked at.  The anatomy and the realism of the figures is sacrificed in favor of the drama and gesture of the figures. Just like Caravaggio and some of the Neoclassic artists, Fuseli creates a stage like setting in which the figures are pushed up to the front of the picture plane.  Tenebrism is used to highlight the nightmarish creatures that emerge out of the darkness. Iconography:  The titles of the painting express quite a bit about the spiritual system of beliefs and social beliefs that Fuseli and many individuals held about women, sexuality, and spirituality.  Here is an image of the "weaker sex" being preyed on by the incubus which really symbolizes the weakness of the female and her inability to control her sexual nature. These paintings are literally rebuses.  The painting takes place at night and in the background is a horse.  A female horse is referred to as a "mare."  The combination of the two terms adds up to the title of the painting. In the foreground of each painting is a table with a small bottle on it which contains a drug called laudanum.  According to the Brittanica, "laudanum, for example, was an alcoholic tincture (dilute solution) of opium that was used in European medical practice as an analgesic and sedative."  This drug was widely prescribed for females during this era because of the widely held belief that women were prone to attacks of nerves and that it was necessary to sedate women because they often became hysterical. Opium drugs can cause hallucinations and often when women would fall asleep they were prone to nightmares caused by the drugs in their systems. Context: Stokstad discusses the link between Fuseli and his own desires that are expressed in this painting. The Brittanica provides some biographical information you may find useful.

Henry Fuseli
b. Feb. 7, 1741, Zürich, Switz.
d. April 16, 1825, Putney Hill, London, Eng.
original name JOHANN HEINRICH FÜSSLI , Swiss-born painter whose works are among the most exotic, original, and sensual pieces of his time.
Fuseli was reared in an intellectual and artistic milieu and initially studied theology. Obliged to flee Zürich because of political entanglements, he went first to Berlin, and then settled in London in 1764. He was encouraged to become a painter by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and he left England in 1768 to study in Italy until 1778. During his stay in Rome he studied the works of Michelangelo and classical art, which became his major stylistic influences; his subject matter was chiefly literary. Fuseli is famous for his paintings and drawings of nude figures caught in strained and violent poses suggestive of intense emotion. He also had a penchant for inventing macabre fantasies, such as that in "The Nightmare" (1781). He had a noticeable influence on the style of his younger contemporary, William Blake. In 1788 Fuseli was elected an associate of the Royal Academy, becoming a full academician two years later. During 1799-1805 and again from 1810 he was professor of painting at the Royal Academy. He was appointed keeper of the Academy in 1804.

FRIEDRICH, Caspar David Wanderer above the Sea of Fog 1817-1818

Form:  Color was quite important to Friederich and he has a tendency to use intense and saturated hues.  Often the colors he used are the ones associated with sunset effects in the atmosphere and he plays these colors against his use of dark, earth toned silhouetted forms such as the trees and the gravestones.  Friederich also often used a symmetrical and centrally oriented composition.  The symmetrical composition serves to draw the eye and he uses linear perspective and atmospheric perspective to create a sense of deep continuous space.  He also does this with the size scale relationships of the human figures to the mountains. All of these formal elements are linked to his iconography. Iconography:  Many of the themes of the Romantic movement revolve around images in which the unseen forces of death, decay, time and the power of the spiritual world are made palpable.  The intense colors and value shifts that occur at dusk and dawn are part of the iconography of this image.  In this image Friederich is depicting a spiritual ascension.  Here a so called "wanderer" symbolizes all men's wanderings through life and the possibility of enlightenment through a spiritual journey through the a metaphysical landscape.  The mountain this wanderer has ascended is a metaphor for man's spiritual journey.

 
 
 

Strawberry Hill, located in Twickenham Horace Walpole and others Strawberry Hill, located in Twickenham, was bought in 1747 by Horace Walpole and over the next 30 years developed into the first conscious translation of Picturesque principles of gardening and landscape into architecture. The building was worked on by five architects; William Robinson and Richard Bentley designed the exterior in the mid-1750's, Robert Adam built the central round tower in 1759, and John Chute of the Vyne and Thomas Pitt constructed interior rooms such as the Library, Great Parlor, and Gallery. While the exterior is the first example of a resurgence of Gothic style, the interior designers drew from models of old tombs in Canterbury and Westminster Abbey and an aisle in Henry VII's chapel. Strawberry Hill, because of its use of many different revived styles, is considered to have begun the Picturesque style.

According to the Brittanica, Strawberry Hill is the, earliest documented example of the revived use of Gothic architectural elements is Strawberry Hill, the home of the English writer Horace Walpole. As in many of the early Gothic Revival buildings, the Gothic was used here for its picturesque and romantic qualities without regard for its structural possibilities or original function. Context: According to the Brittanica Walpole was an, English writer, connoisseur, and collector who was famous in his day for his medieval horror tale The Castle of Otranto, which initiated the vogue for Gothic romances. He is remembered today as perhaps the most assiduous letter writer in the English language. The youngest son of the prime minister Sir Robert Walpole, he was educated at Eton and at King's College, Cambridge. In 1739 he embarked with his Eton schoolmate, the poet Thomas Gray (later to write "An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard"), on a grand tour of France and Italy, in the midst of which they quarrelled and separated. They were later reconciled, and Walpole remained throughout his life an enthusiastic admirer of Gray's poetry. On his return to England in 1741, Walpole entered Parliament, where his career was undistinguished, although he attended debates regularly until 1768. In 1791 he inherited the peerage from a nephew, a grandson of Robert Walpole. He remained unmarried, and on his death the earldom became extinct. The most absorbing interests of his life were his friendships and a small villa that he acquired at Twickenham in 1747 and transformed into a pseudo-Gothic showplace known as Strawberry Hill. Over the years he added cloisters, turrets, and battlements, filled the interior with pictures and curios, and amassed a valuable library. He established a private press on the grounds, where he printed his own works and those of his friends, notably Gray's Odes of 1757. Strawberry Hill was the stimulus for the Gothic revival in English domestic architecture. Walpole's literary output was extremely varied. The Castle of Otranto (1765) succeeded in restoring the element of free invention to contemporary fiction. In it he furnished the machinery for a genre of fiction wherein the wildest fancies found refuge. He also wrote The Mysterious Mother (1768), a tragedy with the theme of incest; amateur historical speculations such as Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third (1768); and a genuine contribution to art history, Anecdotes of Painting in England, 4 vol. (1762-71). His most important works were intended for posthumous publication. His private correspondence of more than 3,000 letters constitutes a survey of the history, manners, and taste of his age. Walpole revered the letters of Mme de Sévigné (1626-96) and, following her example, consciously cultivated letter writing as an art. Most of his letters are addressed to Horace Mann, a British diplomat whom Walpole met on his grand tour and with whom he maintained a correspondence that lasted for 45 years, although the two never met again. Walpole's correspondence, edited by W.S. Lewis and others, was published in 42 volumes (1937-80). Walpole also left Memoirs (first published 1822-59) of the reigns of George II and III, a record of political events of his time.

 

Strawberry Hill,  Twickenham, Middlesex,  Thomas Pitt (1737-1793) 1759-62

 
 
 
 
 
 

TURNER, J.M.W.  Burning of Houses of Parliament  October 16,1834 (painted in 1835) Houses of Parliament (1837-67)  Sir Charles Barry and Augustus Welby Pugin

Iconography:  The buildings of Parliament represented the stability and power of the English government.  When the building burned, for some, as in the case of Turner, the power of nature (fire) represented a spiritual one which scrubbed clean the past of the structure. When Pugin and Barry began the reconstruction of the buildings, for them the use of the Gothic Revival style was a return to England's noble and feudal past.  According to Ruskin (a popular critic and scholar) and the architects, the Gothic style was a representation of history and a less complex more spiritually clear time.     According to the Brittanica, The earliest manifestations of an interest in the medieval era were in the private domain, but by the 1820s public buildings in England were also being designed in the Gothic mode. Perhaps no example is more familiar than the new Houses of Parliament (1840), designed by Sir Charles Barry and A.W.N. Pugin. In that large cluster of buildings, the haphazard picturesque quality of the early revival was replaced by a more conscientious adaptation of the medieval English style. Other structures built around mid-century were within this basic pattern. Later, the desire for more elegant and sumptuous landmarks created the last flowering of the style. A fire in 1834 destroyed the whole palace except the historic Westminster Hall, the Jewel Tower, the cloisters, and the crypt of St. Stephen's Chapel. Sir Charles Barry, assisted by Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, designed the present buildings in the Gothic Revival style. Construction was begun in 1837, the cornerstone was laid in 1840, and work was finished in 1860. The Commons Chamber was burned out in one of the numerous air raids that targeted London during World War II, but it was restored and reopened in 1950. The House of Lords is an ornate chamber 97 feet (29.5 metres) in length; the Commons is 70 feet (21 metres) long. The southwestern Victoria Tower is 336 feet (102 metres) high. St. Stephen's Tower, 320 feet (97.5 metres) in height, contains the famous tower clock Big Ben. Along with Westminster Abbey and St. Margaret's Church, the Houses of Parliament were designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1987.

 

FRIEDRICH, Caspar David Arctic Shipwreck or Sea of Ice1823 JMW Turner The Slave Ship 1840 35"x48"     GERICAULT,Theodore 1791-1824  Raft of the Medusa 1819  Paris,Louvre French, Romanticism

Iconography:  Man vs Nature. The theme these three paintings seem to share deals with men and the sea.  Overtly all three paintings show the attempt of men to navigate their way through the oceans and the natural forces they may encounter in doing so.  Turner and Friederich do this by also using electric saturated hues and shifts of color to demonstrate how man is in his twilight.  Both deal with the destruction of ships and man's attempt to navigate through the natural world.  In both cases it seams that "Mother Nature" is winning the battle. Both images deal with death as an unalterable fact.  In the case of Friederich, he is showing you a failure of man to get to the forbidden arctic poles but it may represent a kind of journey to the forbidden underworld.  The arctic circle is then a symbol of Hades.  This may be further fleshed out by the suggestion that this painting may also be inspired in some way by the death of the artist's brother. Turner and Gericault are showing man's battle with nature but may also be showing the eventual judgment of man.  The men in Turner's painting in particular were slave traders.   In Gericault's painting the men are merchant marines who are "wage slaves."  In Turner's image perhaps they are being delivered to a different sort of "Last Judgment" again delivered by Nature herself.   Turner's painting in part represents nature about to punish guilty human beings. The full title of the picture is Slavers Overthrowing the Dead and Dying-­ Typho[on]n Coming On, and in the left distance the beholder observes the guilty vessel about to meet its deserved end, while in the right and central foreground he encounters thrust upon him slaves being devoured by the sea and its creatures. Although Turner's painting presents images of fanciful ocean predators, his image of Gothic [196/197] horror is not the product of his imagination. In fact, he was portraying what had become sound business practice: since insurance on slave-cargoes covered only those drowned at sea and not slaves who perished from brutality, disease, and the dreadful conditions on board, profit-minded captains cast the dead and dying into the ocean. As John McCoubrey has demonstrated the artist painted his picture specifically for an anti-slavery campaign, and one may add that he has succeeded in creating a particularly effective image of these horrors. Works as different as Heinrich Heine's 'Das Sklavenschiff', Robert Hayden's 'Middle Passage', and Norman Mailer's Of A Fire on the Moon have elaborated upon the situation and paradigm of the slave-ship, but few, if any, have done so more powerfully than this painting. The closing lines of Turner's epigraph -- 'Hope, Hope, fanacious Hope!/Where is thy market now?' -- further suggest that he was attacking not only the specific horror s of the slave-trade but also the situation of an men in a society whose basic bond had become the cash nexus. [On Turner's politico-economic beliefs, see See Jack Lindsay's edition of Turner's poems. The Sunset Ship (London, I966), pp. 46-9; http://65.107.211.206/victorian/art/crisis/crisis4e.html

Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes  The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters  (El Sueño de la Razon Produce Monstros),1803  Plate 43 of Los Caprichos, second edition Etching and aquatint a web site with Los Caprichos http://images.library.smu.edu/ISC2

Form: This print is one of many in a series of prints published as a folio.  (A collection of prints sold as a single work or book.) The depiction of human anatomy and light and shadow in this work, as in others by Goya tends to look a bit cartoonish caricaturish and even at times the anatomy and light are so contrived that they look inaccurate. The process used to create this print is called aquatint.  According to the Brittanica, aquatint is, a variety of etching widely used by printmakers to achieve a broad range of tonal values. The process is called aquatint because finished prints often resemble watercolour drawings or wash drawings. The technique consists of exposing a copperplate to acid through a layer of granulated resin or sugar. The acid bites away the plate only in the interstices between the resin or sugar grains, leaving an evenly pitted surface that yields broad areas of tone when the grains are removed and the plate is printed. An infinite number of tones can be achieved by exposing various parts of the plate to acid baths of different strengths for different periods of time. Etched or engraved lines are often used with aquatint to achieve greater definition of form. In the 17th century a number of attempts were made at producing what later became known as aquatint prints. None of the efforts was successful, however, until 1768, when the French printmaker Jean-Baptiste Le Prince discovered that granulated resin gave satisfactory results. Aquatint became the most popular method of producing toned prints in the late 18th century, especially among illustrators. Its textural subtleties, however, remained largely unexplored by well-known artists except for Francisco de Goya. Most of his prints are aquatints, and he is considered the greatest master of the technique.

Iconography: Stokstad points out that this work was meant originally as the frontispiece and remarks that the idea of the image is that of unbridled imagination.  The print was accompanied with the text, "Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the source of their wonders," but Stokstad also points out how angry and satirical this image and the rest of the images in the series "Los Caprichos" is. The image depicts a man asleep assailed by phantoms.  The image of an owl is often a symbol of sleep, death and knowledge.  In fact Michelangelo had used the image of the owl as death in one of the Medici tombs.  The bats are almost universally icons of death and night, but in Spanish folk tales their is a vampiric creature called los chusas (the sucker which is similar to the modern Mexican myth of the chupa cabra)which is a kind of blood sucking or incubus like entity.  The forces that descend on the sleeping figure are really representitive of nightmares rather than wondrous positive creatures.  The overall interpretation of the image could be that the Spanish intellect is asleep and because of this the monsters of the superstitious mind seem to have too much power.

Context: According to the Brittanica Encyclopedia,

Francisco de Goya is hard to place in the historical development of the comedy of manners. His "Caprichos" (1796-98), etchings prepared by some of the most simple and trenchant brush drawings ever made, appeared in the last years of the 18th century and can be called comedies of manners only insofar as they are related to folk sayings and the bittersweet Spanish folk wisdom. Thus, they stand in the line of Bosch and Bruegel, so many of whose paintings were in Habsburg collections in Madrid. The "Proverbios" of 1813-19 are even more monumental transfigurations of various states of the human condition. Like the "Caprichos," they used the caricaturist's means for irony and satire, but there was little of the comic left in them and none at all in the "Desastres de la guerra" (1810-14, "Disasters of War"), which used the Peninsular phase of the Napoleonic Wars as a point of departure. They are closer to universality than even Callot's similarly inspired series and are searching comments on more stages of cruelty than Hogarth covered. In them, Goya was really a political cartoonist using no names; yet he was hardly a public cartoonist in the normal sense because censorship and other factors allowed only a very small circulation of his later work until a sizable edition was printed a generation after his death. The earlier work, which contains elements of comedy, did get abroad and had influence in France and England probably before Goya's death. Artistically, if not politically, his work would have had the same powerful effect whenever "discovered" or circulated.

Francisco Goya: The Third of May, 1808 painted 1814  Oil on canvas, 8'9" x 13'4" Collection Museo del Prado, Madrid

Form:  The chiaroscuro and cartoon like anatomy of this image is very similar to the print above.  Goya's color is local but his brushwork is quick and gestural.  The composition is divided into a series of receding bands, the highly lit and spotlighted victims creates the first band or frieze and the back of the soldiers the second. Iconography: The formal elements are also iconographic.  The local colors are drab and dark as is the subject.  The tenebristic flair of the soldiers spot light focuses on the central figure whose pose is reminiscent of a crucifixion.  This literally highlights the role of the rebels as martyrs.  The arrangement of the soldiers with their backs to the viewers creates a symbolic representation as faceless soldiers who are inhuman. Context: According to the Brittanica, On the restoration of Ferdinand VII in 1814, after the expulsion of the invaders, Goya was pardoned for having served the French king and reinstated as first court painter. "The 2nd of May 1808: The Charge of the Mamelukes" and "The 3rd of May 1808: The Execution of the Defenders of Madrid" were painted to commemorate the popular insurrection in Madrid. Like "Los desastres," they are compositions of dramatic realism, and their monumental scale makes them even more moving. The impressionistic style in which they are painted foreshadowed and influenced later 19th-century French artists, particularly Manet, who was also inspired by the composition of "The 3rd of May." In several portraits of Ferdinand VII, painted after his restoration, Goya evoked--more forcefully than any description--the personality of the cruel tyrant, whose oppressive rule drove most of his friends and eventually Goya himself into exile.

---

ar.chi.tec.ton.ic adj [L architectonicus, fr. Gk architektonikos, fr. architekton] (1645) 1: of, relating to, or according with the principles of architecture: architectural 2: having an organized and unified structure that suggests an architectural design -- ar.chi.tec.ton.i.cal.ly adv fron.tis.piece n [MF frontispice, fr. LL frontispicium facade, fr. L front-, frons + -i- + specere to look at--more at spy] (ca. 1598) 1 a: the principal front of a building b: a decorated pediment over a portico or window 2: an illustration preceding and usu. facing the title page of a book or magazine
Gothic Revival Style, architectural style that drew its inspiration from medieval architecture and competed with the Neoclassical revivals in the United States and Great Britain. Only isolated examples of the style are to be found on the Continent.
The earliest documented example of the revived use of Gothic architectural elements is Strawberry Hill, the home of the English writer Horace Walpole. As in many of the early Gothic Revival buildings, the Gothic was used here for its picturesque and romantic qualities without regard for its structural possibilities or original function.
(Brittanica)
in.cu.bus n, pl -bi also -bus.es [ME, fr. LL, fr. L incubare] (13c) 1: an evil spirit that lies on persons in their sleep; esp: one that has sexual intercourse with women while they are sleeping--compare succubus 2: nightmare 2 3: one that oppresses or burdens like a nightmare
meta.phys.i.cal adj (15c) 1: of or relating to metaphysics 2 a: of or relating to the transcendent or to a reality beyond what is perceptible to the senses b: supernatural 3: highly abstract or abstruse; also: theoretical 4 often cap: of or relating to poetry esp. of the early 17th century that is highly intellectual and philosophical and marked by unconventional imagery -- meta.phys.i.cal.ly adv Metaphysical n (1898): a metaphysical poet of the 17th century
re.bus n [L, by things, abl. pl. of res thing--more at real] (1605): a representation of words or syllables by pictures of objects or by symbols whose names resemble the intended words or syllables in sound; also: a riddle made up of such pictures or symbols
sil.hou.ette n [F, fr. Etienne de Silhouette d. 1767 Fr. controller general of finances; perh. fr. his ephemeral tenure] (1783) 1: a likeness cut from dark material and mounted on a light ground or one sketched in outline and solidly colored in 2: the outline of a body viewed as circumscribing a mass syn see outline ²silhouette vt -ett.ed ; -ett.ing (1876): to represent by a silhouette; also: to project on a background like a silhouette -- sil.hou.et.tist n