ROMANTICISM ART





ROMANTICISM  : ART MOVEMENT

  • Romanticism was an artistic, literary, musical and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at itspeak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850. 
  • Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism as well as glorification of all the past and nature, preferring the medieval rather than the classical. 
  • All components of modernity. It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography, education, and the natural sciences. 


ROMANTICISM ARTIST



Artist: Henry Fuseli
  •  Fuseli's strange and macabre painting depicts a ravished woman, draped across a divan with a small, hairy incubus sitting on top of her, staring out menacingly at the viewer. 
  • A mysterious black mare with white eyes and flaring nostrils appears behind her, entering the scene through lush, red curtains. 
  • We seem to be looking at the effects and the contents of the woman's dream at the same time.
  • Fuseli's ghastly scene was the first of its kind in the midst of The Age of Reason, and Fuseli became something of a transitional figure.
  • This new subject matter would have wide-ranging repercussions in the art world. 
  • Even though the woman is bathed in a bright light, Fuseli's composition suggests that light is unable to penetrate the darker realms of the human mind.


Artist: Antoine Jean Gros
  • This painting depicts Napoleon I, not yet the Emperor, visiting his ailing soldiers in 1799 in Jaffa, Syria, at the end of his Egyptian Campaign. 
  • His troops had violently sacked the city but were subsequently stricken in an outbreak of plague. Gros creates a dramatic tableau of light and shade with Napoleon in the center, as if on a stage. 
  • He stands in front of a Moorish arcade and touches the sores of one of his soldiers, while his staff officer holds his nose from the stench. 
  • In the foreground, sick and dying men, many naked, suffer on the ground in the shadows. A Syrian man on the left, along with his servant who carries a breadbasket, gives bread to the ill, and two men behind them carry a man out on a stretcher.
  • The use of color and light highlights Napoleon's gesture, meant to convey his noble character in addition to likening him to Christ, who healed the sick.
  •  Napoleon commissioned the painting, hoping to silence the rumors that he had ordered fifty plague victims poisoned. 


Artist: Caspar David Friedrich

  •  An aristocratic man steps out upon a rocky crag as he surveys the landscape before him, with his back turned toward the viewer. Out of swirling clouds of fog, tall pinnacles of rocks loom, and a majestic peak on the left and a rock formation on the right fill the horizon. 
  • Many of Friedrich's landscapes depict a solitary figure in an overwhelming landscape that stands in for a Byronic hero, overlooking and dominating the view.
  • While Friedrich made plain air sketches in the mountains of Saxony and Bohemia in preparation for this painting, the landscape is essentially an imaginary one, a composite of specific views. 
  • The place of the individual in the natural world was an abiding theme of the Romantic painters. 
  • The individual wanderer atop a precipice contemplating the world before him seems to suggest mastery over the landscape, but at the same time, the figure seems small and insignificant compared the sublime vista of mountains and sky that stretch out before him. 
  • Friedrich was a master of presenting the sublimity of nature in its infinite boundlessness and tempestuousness. Upon contemplation, the world, in its fog, ultimately remains unknowable.

 Characteristics of Romantic literature

  •  Focus on the writer or narrator’s emotions and inner world; 
  • celebration of nature, beauty, and imagination; 
  • rejection of industrialization, 
  • organized religion, rationalism, and social convention;
  •  idealization of women, children, and rural life; 
  • inclusion of supernatural or mythological elements; 
  • interest in the past; 
  • frequent use of personification; 
  • experimental use of language and verse forms, 
  • including blank verse; and emphasis on individual experience of the "sublime."


ROMANTICISM PERIOD
  • The period typically called Romantic varies greatly between different countries and different artistic media or areas of thought. 
  • Margaret Drabble described it in literature as taking place "roughly between 1770 and 1848",and few dates much earlier than 1770 will be found. 
  • In English literature, M. H. Abrams placed it between 1789, or 1798, this latter a very typical view, and about 1830, perhaps a little later than some other critics .
  •  In other fields and other countries the period denominated as Romantic can be considerably different; musical Romanticism.
  • The early period of the Romantic Era was a time of war, with the French Revolution (1789–1799) followed by the Napoleonic Wars until 1815. 
  • These wars, along with the political and social.
  • The key generation of French Romantics born between 1795–1805 had, in the words of one of their number, Alfred de Vigny, been "conceived between battles, attended school to the rolling of drums". 



“Pity,” colour print finished in pen and watercolour by William Blake, 1795; in the Tate Gallery, London

“Pity,” colour print finished in pen and watercolour by William Blake, 1795; in the …
Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, New York




The Lady of Shalott (1888) Tate Collection, London

      By John William Waterhouse






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