Forward to 1.3.6.1 Romanticism B (1826 onwards)
Back to 1.3.5 Neoclassicism (1750-1830) – Back to 1.3 Renaissance to Romanticism Index
Forward to 1.3.7 African Art (800-1897)
At the end of the 18th century and well into the 19th, Romanticism quickly spread throughout Europe and the United States to challenge the rational ideal held so tightly during the Enlightenment.
The artists emphasized that sense and emotions – not simply reason and order – were equally important means of understanding and experiencing the world. Romanticism celebrated the individual imagination and intuition in the enduring search for individual rights and liberty. Its ideals of the creative, subjective powers of the artist fueled avant-garde movements well into the 20th century.
[Source: theartstory.org]
[1360-45]
 Image source: Wikimedia commons | Stubbs learned his skills independently from other great artists of the eighteenth century, he was self-trained. He is most famous for his animals, in particular for horses. Perhaps this was influenced by his love and study of anatomy. This painting of a thoroughbred racehorse rising on his hind legs, commissioned by the 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, is now in the National Gallery in London. (Source: Wikimedia commons) |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Whistlejacket | 1762 | Oil/Canvas | Animal Painting |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Stubbs, George | 1724 – 1806, aged 81 | English painter | Romanticism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1360-44] | |
| National Gallery, London UK | 292 x 246 |
| Stubbs produced a whole series of paintings on this subject. It was rumoured he had seen this happen in north Africa, but most suggest he was inspired by an Italian trip, seeing there a Roman copy of a Hellenistic original at the Palazzo dei Conservatori. |  Image source: Wikimedia commons |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Horse Attacked by a Lion | 1768-9 | Oil/Canvas | Animal Painting |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Stubbs, George | 1724 – 1806, aged 81 | English painter | Romanticism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1360-10] | |
| Yale Center for British Art | 26 x 30 |
 Image source: Wikimedia commons | An audience has gathered around a lecturer to watch an experiment. It is night, and the room is lit by a single candle that burns behind a large rounded glass containing a diseased human skull. A white cockatoo has been placed in a glass container from which the air is being pumped to create a vacuum. Will the lecturer expel the air completely and kill the bird, or allow the air back in and revive it? Wright focuses on the viewers‘ differing reactions – from the girl unable to watch to the lovers with eyes only for each other. This is the largest, most ambitious and dramatic of the series of ’candlelight’ pictures Wright painted during the 1760s. It captures the drama of a staged scientific experiment but it also functions as a vanitas – a painting concerning the passing of time, the limits of human knowledge and the frailty of life itself. [Source: nationalgallery.org.uk] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump, An | 1768 | Oil/Canvas | History Painting |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Wright, Joseph (of Derby) | 1734 – 1797, aged 62 | English painter | Romanticism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1360-11] | |
| National Gallery, London UK | 183 x 244 |
| Working during the height of the Enlightenment, the so-called Age of Reason, the Swiss-English painter Henry Fuseli (born Johann Heinrich Füssli) instead chose to depict darker, irrational forces in his famous painting The Nightmare. In Fuseli’s startling composition, a woman bathed in white light stretches across a bed, her arms, neck, and head hanging off the end of the mattress. An apelike figure crouches on her chest while a horse with glowing eyes and flared nostrils emerges from the shadowy background. [Source: khanacademy.org] |  Image source: Wikimedia commons |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Nightmare, The | 1781 | Oil/Canvas | Portrait |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Fuseli, John Henry (Johann Heinrich Fuessli) | 1741-1825, aged 83 | Anglo-Swiss painter | Romanticism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1360-12] | |
| Detroit Institute of Arts, 5202 Woodward Ave, Detroit, MI 48202, USA | 102 x 127 |
 Image source: Wikimedia commons | This serene skater is thought to be the Reverend Robert Walker, minister of the Canongate Kirk and a member of the Edinburgh Skating Society. The club – the oldest of its kind in Britain – usually met on the frozen lochs of Duddingston or Lochend on the outskirts of Edinburgh. Walker’s pose, as he glides across the ice, looks effortless, but would have been recognised by fellow skaters as a difficult and sophisticated manoeuvre. This small picture, showing a figure in action, is quite unlike other known portraits by Raeburn. [Source: nationalgalleries.org] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Rev Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch, The | 1784 | Oil/Canvas | Portrait |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Raeburn, Sir Henry | 1756-1823, aged 69 | Scottish painter | Romanticism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1360-13] | |
| National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh UK | 76 x 64 |
| In the mythology of William Blake, Albion is the primeval man whose fall and division results in the ‘Four Zoas’: Urizen, Tharmas, Luvah/Orc and Urthona/Los. The name derives from the ancient and mythological name of Britain, Albion. Albion was a Giant son of Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea. He was a contemporary of Heracles, who killed him. Albion founded a country on the island and ruled there. Britain, then called Albion after its founder, was inhabited by his Giant descendants until about 1100 years before Julius Cæsar’s invasion of Britain, when Brutus of Troy came and defeated the small number of Giants that remained (as a group of the Giants had killed all the others). [Source: Wikimedia commons] |  Image source: Wikimedia commons |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Albion Rose | 1794-6 | Print/Ppr | Portrait |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Blake, William | 1757-1827 | English graphic artist | Romanticism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1360-14] | |
| British Museum, Great Russell St, Bloomsbury, London WC1B 3DG UK | 272 x 200 |
 Image source: Wikimedia commons | The Little Girl Found is a poem written by the English poet William Blake. It was published as part of his collection Songs of Experience in 1794. In the poem, the parents of a seven-year-old girl, called Lyca, are looking desperately for their young daughter who is lost in the desert. During days and nights they go on looking for the girl up to the moment they find a lion which tells them where the child lies. [Source: Wikimedia commons] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Little Girl Found, The | 1794 | Plate/Ill poem | Illustration |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Blake, William | 1757-1827 | English graphic artist | Romanticism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1360-15] | |
| From his collection “Songs of Innocence and Experience” | 0 |
| In this work Blake portrays a young and muscular Isaac Newton, rather than the older figure of popular imagination. He is crouched naked on a rock covered with algae, apparently at the bottom of the sea. His attention is focused on a diagram which he draws with a compass. Blake was critical of Newton’s reductive, scientific approach and so shows him merely following the rules of his compass, blind to the colourful rocks behind him. [Source: tate.org.uk] |  Image source: Wikimedia commons |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Isaac Newton | 1795 | Monotype/Ink, wtrclr | Portrait |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Blake, William | 1757-1827 | English graphic artist | Romanticism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1360-16] | |
| Tate Galleries, Millbank, Westminster, London SW1P 4RG UK | 46 x 60 |
 Image source: Wikimedia commons | In the prospectus for his book, Varley announced his intention to include an engraving of Blake’s Nebuchadnezzar. This was never completed but, as with Ghost of a Flea, Varley may have been interested in the transformation of man into beast. The Bible describes how King Nebuchadnezzar was driven mad and forced to live like a wild animal as punishment for excessive pride. The association between moral corruption and bestial appearance is also suggested by Lavater, who traces a scale of perfection from the head of a frog to the face of Apollo. [Source: tate.org.uk] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Nebuchadnezzar | 1795-1805 | Tmp/Ink | Portrait |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Blake, William | 1757-1827 | English graphic artist | Romanticism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1360-17] | |
| Tate Galleries, Millbank, Westminster, London SW1P 4RG UK | 0 |
| An image of Venus in the nude, lying on a green velvet divan with pillows and a spread. Legend would have it that this was the Duchess of Alba, but the sitter has also been identified as Pepita Tudó, who became Godoy´s mistress in 1797. It is listed for the first time in 1800 as hanging over a door in Manuel Godoy´s palace, but without its companion, The Clothed Maja. In 1808 it is mentioned again, along with The Clothed Maja, in the inventory which Frédéric Quillet, José Bonaparte´s agent, made of the property of Manuel Godoy, who may have commissioned it. Then, in 1813, the two ladies are described as Gypsies in the inventory of Godoy´s property confiscated by King Fernando VII. This work entered the Prado Museum in 1901 by way of the Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, where it had been from 1808 to 1813, and again from 1836 to 1901. In the hiatus between those two periods, it was sequestered by the Inquisition. [Source: museodelprado.es] |  Image source: Wikimedia commons  Clothed Maja |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Naked Maja (La Maja Desnuda) | 1797-1800 | Oil | Portrait |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Goya, Francisco (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes) | 1746-1828, aged 82 | Spanish painter | Romanticism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1360-18] | |
| Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid Spain | 97 x 190 |
 Image source: Wikimedia commons | The present watercolour is a typical picturesque view of a ruined castle with historic association situated on the brow of a steep hill above the Gatcombe Brook. The castle was built by Ralph de Pomeroy, who accompanied William the Conqueror on his invasion of England in 1066. His descendant the Duke of Somerset, brother of Henry VIII’s wife Jane Seymour, built a Tudor house within the walls. Damaged in the Civil War, the house was abandoned in the mid 17th Century. [Source: christies.com] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Berry Pomeroy Castle, Devon | 1798 | Pncl/WtrC | Landscape |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Girtin, Thomas | 1775-1802, aged 26 years | English artist | Romanticism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1360-19] | |
| unknown | 28 x 39 |
| ‘The King says that as soon as Goya is done with your wife’s portrait he is to come here and do one of all of us together’, wrote Queen Maria Luisa in a letter dated 22 April 1800 and sent from Aranjuez to Manuel Godoy, it was wife, the future countess of Chinchon, that Goya was painting at the time. The newly appointed first painter to the king received a commission to immortalise the king’s family on an enormous canvas. At the royal residence of Aranjuez he produced ten portraits of family members. Back in his Madrid studio Goya assembled the heads as though they were pieces of a puzzle, respecting each one’s dynastic rank. The subjects seem conscious of being painted; they pose speechless and motionless before a smooth wall, as if in a frieze, its axis Queen Maria Luisa. Yet Goya forces his frieze to curve, placing King Charles IV and his successor, the prince of Asturias, in front of the others and filling in the outer corners with the other relatives. [Source: franciscogoya.com] |  Image source: Wikimedia commons |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Family of Charles IV, The | 1800-1 | Oil/Canvas | History Painting |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Goya, Francisco (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes) | 1746-1828, aged 82 | Spanish painter | Romanticism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1360-20] | |
| Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid Spain | 280 x 336 |
 Image source: Wikimedia commons | This painting was an early example of the new subjects that would occupy the emergent French Romantic movement. The commission was given to Girodet in 1801 for the palace of Malmaison, which Napoleon was having furnished for his own use. Ossian purports to be a translation of an epic cycle of Scottish poems from the early dark ages. Ossian, a blind bard, sings of the life and battles of Fingal, a Scotch warrior. Ossian caused a sensation when it was published on the cusp of the era of revolutions, and had a massive cultural impact during the 18th and 19th centuries. Napoleon was seized by the current wave of enthusiasm for the prose epics of the legendary Gaelic poet Ossian. Two paintings on the subject of Ossian were to flank the chimney breast in the reception room. The other was to be painted by François Gérard. [Source: wga.hu] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Ossian receiving the Ghosts of the French Heroes | 1802 | Oil/Canvas | History Painting |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, Anne-Louis | 1767-1824, aged 56 | French painter | Romanticism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1360-21] | |
| Musée National du Château de Malmaison, Avenue du Château de la Malmaison, 92500 Rueil-Malmaison, France | 192 x 184 |
| Returning from Wales to England by way of Llangollen, Cotman saw with delight the Chirk Aqueduct, the recently completed work of Telford, which crossed the marshy valley in a succession of arches. From his sketches of this work he made, some two years afterwards, two distinguished drawings. However, the V&A website suggests it is in fact Crambe Beck Bridge, near Kirkham, Yorkshire. [Source: collections.vam.ac.uk] |  Image source: Wikimedia commons |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Chirk Aqueduct | 1806-7 | WtrC | Landscape |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Cotman, John Sell | 1782 – 1842, aged 59 | English painter | Romanticism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1360-22] | |
| Victoria and Albert Museum, London UK | 0 |
 Image source: Wikimedia commons | The painting represents a statement on the nature of mysticism associated with the Romantic movement, and is undoubtedly the masterpiece of Runge’s short life. He began work on it in Dresden, where he had been greatly moved by Raphael’s Sistine Madonna in the picture gallery, and his tightly structured, vertical compositions have some of the qualities of altarpieces. [Source: wga.hu] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Small Morning, The | 1808 | Oil/Canvas | History Painting |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Runge, Philipp Otto | 1777-1810, aged 33 | German painter | Romanticism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1360-23] | |
| Kunsthalle Hamburg, Glockengießerwall 5, 20095 Hamburg, Germany | 109 x 86 |
| Attributed to Goya until 2008, new art historical and technical studies led to a reconsideration of the painting’s attribution, particularly following the tentative reading of the marks in the lower left corner as the initials “A. J.”. They may refer to Asensio Juliá, a friend and occasional collaborator of Goya. The composition is inspired by Goya’s print of The Seated Giant. The grandiose and metaphorical conception of the print is here translated into a narrative scene of ambiguous meaning. The subject has been related to the Spanish War of Independence but it has also been given more mundane interpretations, such as a storm in the countryside. The uncertain, repetitive brushstroke, the strident colours of the small figures and the dull illumination of both the landscape and the colossus, bear little resemblance to Goya’s impeccable technique. [Source: museodelprado.es] |  Image source: Wikimedia commons |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Colossus, The | 1810 | Oil/Plstr | History Painting |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Goya, Francisco (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes) – now queried | 1746-1828, aged 82 | Spanish painter | Romanticism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1360-24] | |
| Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid Spain | 116 x 105 |
 Image source: Wikimedia commons | This was the first painting by Friedrich, one of the principal figures of German Romantic art, to enter a British public collection when it was purchased by the National Gallery in 1987. A man, having cast aside his crutches, lies against a large boulder in a snowy landscape as he prays in front of a shining crucifix protected by three fir trees – a trinity that recalls the Christian Trinity of God the Father, Christ and the Holy Ghost. The silhouette of a German Gothic cathedral or church looms in the mist, its facade and spires echoing the shapes of the trees. The picture appears to be a companion to another painting, of the same date and title, in the Staatliches Museum, Schwerin. In the Schwerin picture, a similar tiny figure, leaning on a crutch, stares at a deserted snow-covered landscape under a grey-black sky as he wanders among dead or dying oak trees. If that picture is one of desolation and despair, the National Gallery painting offers the hope of resurrection through Christian faith. [Source: nationalgallery.org.uk] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Winter Landscape | 1811 | Oil/Canvas | Landscape |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Friedrich, Caspar David | 1774-1840, aged 65 | German painter | Romanticism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1360-25] | |
| National Gallery, London UK | 33 x 45 |
 Image source: Wikimedia commons | The painting was Géricault’s first exhibited work and it is an example of his attempt to condense both movement and structure in its art. It represents French romanticism and has a motif similar to Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps, but non-classical characteristics of the picture include its dramatic diagonal arrangement and vigorous paint handling. In The Charging Chasseur, the horse appears to be rearing away from an unseen attacker. The turning figure on a rearing horse is derived from the large early Ruben’s Saint George (at the Museo del Prado), though there the view is from the side. [Source: Wikimedia commons] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Charging Chasseur, The (Officier de chasseurs à cheval) | c1812 | Oil | History Painting |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Géricault, Théodore | 1791-1824, aged 32 | French painter | Romanticism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1360-26] | |
| Musée du Louvre, Paris France | 349 x 226 |
| Hannibal Barca was Commander of the Carthaginian army in 200-100 BCE, a celebrated military leader. Although he is referenced in the title of this work, Hannibal himself is not pictured. Rather than focus on an individual leader, this work expresses human’s vulnerability when faced with the power of nature. The attention is on the victims of the conflict, the soldiers struggling in the harsh conditions. [Source: .tate.org.uk] |  Image source: Wikimedia commons |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Snow Storm, Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps | 1812 | Oil/Canvas | History Painting |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Turner, JMW (Joseph Mallord William) | 1775 – 1851, aged 76 | English painter | Romanticism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1360-27] | |
| National Gallery, London UK | 146 x 238 |
| Goya treated the theme of bullfighting in a number of paintings, in a celebrated series of prints, the Tauromaquia published in 1816, and in four lithographs published in Bordeaux in 1825 when he was in exile. During the mid-nineteenth century there was a brisk business in copies of Goya’s popular bullfight compositions, and the use here of certain motifs that appear in Goya’s other bullfight scenes has led some authorities to view our painting as a pastiche by another hand. The richness of the composition however, and the brilliant handling of the foreground crowd are worthy of Goya himself. [Source: metmuseum.org] |  Image source: metmuseum.org |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Bullfight in a Divided Ring | 1814 | Oil/Canvas | Genre Painting |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Goya, Francisco (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes) | 1746-1828, aged 82 | Spanish painter | Romanticism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1360-28] | |
| Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY USA | 98 x 126 |
 Image source: Wikimedia commons | In 1807, Napoleon, bent on conquering the world, brought Spain’s king, Charles IV, into alliance with him in order to conquer Portugal. Napoleon’s troops poured into Spain, supposedly just passing through. But Napoleon’s real intentions soon became clear: the alliance was a trick. The French were taking over. Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother, was the new king of Spain. On May 2, 1808, hundreds of Spaniards rebelled. On May 3, these Spanish freedom fighters were rounded up and massacred by the French. Their blood literally ran through the streets of Madrid. Even though Goya had shown French sympathies in the past, the slaughter of his countrymen and the horrors of war made a profound impression on the artist. [Source: khanacademy.org] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Third of May 1808, The | c1814 | Oil/Canvas | History Painting |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Goya, Francisco (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes) | 1746-1828, aged 82 | Spanish painter | Romanticism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1360-29] | |
| Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid Spain | 268 x 347 |
 Image source: Wikimedia commons | Turner’s painting of the North African city of Carthage, founded by Dido its first queen, was inspired by Virgil’s epic poem, the Aeneid. The figure on the left dressed in blue and wearing a diadem is Dido herself, visiting the tomb that is being built for her dead husband, Sychaeus. The man in a cloak and helmet standing before her is probably Aeneas, the hero of the poem, with whom she will fall in love. Turner painted ten major paintings on the subject of Carthaginian empire. The story of the rise and fall of empires was a theme that preoccupied him throughout his life. This is the first of Turner’s paintings in which he set out to match the seventeenth-century French landscape painter, Claude, in particular Claude’s seaport paintings. In his will, Turner specified that Dido building Carthage, together with his Sun Rising through Vapour, should be hung in the National Gallery alongside two of Claude’s paintings. [Source: nationalgallery.org.uk] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Dido Building Carthage | 1815 | Oil/Canvas | History Painting |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Turner, JMW (Joseph Mallord William) | 1775 – 1851, aged 76 | English painter | Romanticism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1360-30] | |
| National Gallery, London UK | 156 x 230 |
| This oil painting portrays the construction of a barge at a dry-dock owned by Constable’s father. It is based on a tiny pencil drawing in a sketchbook at the V&A. Constable painted the landscape entirely in the open air. His biographer C. R. Leslie praised its ‘atmospheric truth’, such that ‘the tremulous vibration of the heated air near the ground seems visible’. [Source: collections.vam.ac.uk] |  Image source: Wikimedia commons |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Boatbuilding Near Flatford Mill | 1815 | Oil | Landscape |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Constable, John | 1776-1837, aged 63 | English painter | Romanticism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1360-31] | |
| Victoria and Albert Museum, London UK | 51 x 62 |
 Image source: Wikimedia commons | In the foreground, a young man stands upon a rocky precipice with his back to the viewer. He is wrapped in a dark green overcoat, and grips a walking stick in his right hand. His hair caught in a wind, the wanderer gazes out on a landscape covered in a thick sea of fog. In the middle ground, several other ridges, perhaps not unlike the ones the wanderer himself stands upon, jut out from the mass. Through the wreaths of fog, forests of trees can be perceived atop these escarpments. In the far distance, faded mountains rise in the left, gently leveling off into lowland plains in the right. Beyond here, the pervading fog stretches out indefinitely, eventually commingling with the horizon and becoming indistinguishable from the cloud-filled sky. [Source: Wikimedia commons] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, The | c1818 | Oil | Landscape |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Friedrich, Caspar David | 1774-1840, aged 65 | German painter | Romanticism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1360-32] | |
| Kunsthalle Hamburg, Glockengießerwall 5, 20095 Hamburg, Germany | 95 x 75 |
| This is an over-life-size painting that depicts a moment from the aftermath of the wreck of the French naval frigate Méduse, which ran aground off the coast of today’s Mauritania on 2 July 1816. On 5 July 1816, at least 147 people were set adrift on a hurriedly constructed raft; all but 15 died in the 13 days before their rescue, and those who survived endured starvation and dehydration and practiced cannibalism. The event became an international scandal, in part because its cause was widely attributed to the incompetence of the French captain. [Source: Wikimedia commons] |  Image source: Wikimedia commons |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Raft of the Medusa, The | 1818-9 | Oil/Canvas | History Painting |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Géricault, Théodore | 1791-1824, aged 32 | French painter | Romanticism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1360-33] | |
| Musée du Louvre, Paris France | 491 x 716 |
 Image source: Wikimedia commons | The mural paintings that decorated the house known as ‘la Quinta del Sordo’, where Goya lived have come to be known as the Black Paintings, because he used so many dark pigments and blacks in them, and also because of their somber subject matter. The private and intimate character of that house allowed the artist to express himself with great liberty. He painted directly on the walls in what must have been mixed technique, as chemical analysis reveals the use of oils in these works. The Baron Émile d´Erlanger acquired ‘la Quinta’ in 1873 and had the paintings transferred to canvas. The works suffered enormously in the process, losing a large amount of paint. Finally, the Baron donated these paintings to the State, and they were sent to the Prado Museum, where they have been on view since 1889. [Source: museodelprado.es] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Dog, The | 1819-23 | Oil/Canvas | Animal Painting |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Goya, Francisco (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes) | 1746-1828, aged 82 | Spanish painter | Romanticism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1360-34] | |
| Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid Spain | 132 x 79 |
| John Varley, an artist, astrologer and close friend of Blake, reported in his Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy (1882) that Blake once had a spiritual vision of a ghost of a flea and that ‘This spirit visited his imagination in such a figure as he never anticipated in an insect.’ While drawing the spirit it told the artist that all fleas were inhabited by the souls of men who were ‘by nature bloodthirsty to excess’. In the painting it holds a cup for blood-drinking and stares eagerly towards it. Blake’s amalgamation of man and beast suggests a human character marred by animalistic traits. [Source: tate.org.uk] |  Image source: Wikimedia commons |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Ghost of a Flea, The | 1819-20 | Tmp/Panel | Abstract |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Blake, William | 1757-1827 | English graphic artist | Romanticism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1360-35] | |
| Tate Galleries, Millbank, Westminster, London SW1P 4RG UK | 21 x16 |
 Image source: Wikimedia commons |
| Another mural painting that decorated the house known as ‘la Quinta del Sordo’, where Goya lived, it is one of the the fourteen so-called Black Paintings. It shows two flying figures hovering over a landscape dominated by a large tabled mountain. There is no written or oral record as to the series’ intended meaning. [Source: museodelprado.es] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Asmodea | 1820-3 | Oil/Geso | History painting |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Goya, Francisco (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes) | 1746-1828, aged 82 | Spanish painter | Romanticism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1360-36] | |
| Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid Spain | 127 x 263 |
 Image source: Wikimedia commons | Joseph Karl Stieler was a German painter, who from 1820 until 1855 worked as royal court painter of the Bavarian kings. He is known for his Neoclassical portraits, especially for the Gallery of Beauties at Nymphenburg Palace in Munich, as well as this emblematic portrait of Ludwig van Beethoven, which has become one of his most famous works. [Source: Wikimedia commons] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Ludwig van Beethoven | 1820 | Oil/Canvas | Portrait |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Stieler, Joseph Karl | 1781-1858, aged 76 | German painter | Romanticism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1360-37] | |
| Neue Pinakothek, Beethoven-Haus, Bonngasse 20, 53111 Bonn, Germany | 62 x 50 |
| The view is of the millpond at Flatford on the River Stour. Flatford Mill was a watermill for grinding corn, operated by the Constable family for nearly a hundred years. It still survives and is about a mile from Constable’s birthplace at East Bergholt, Suffolk. The house on the left also survives; in Constable’s time it was occupied by tenant farmer Willy Lott. The title, The Hay Wain, refers to the wooden wagon (wain) used for transporting cut and dried meadow grass (hay). The empty wagon is making its way through the shallow water to cross to the meadow on the other side where haymakers are at work. Although the painting evokes a Suffolk scene, it was created in the artist’s studio in London. Working from a number of open-air sketches made over several years, Constable then made a full-size preparatory oil sketch to establish the composition before painting the final picture. [Source: nationalgallery.org.uk] |  Image source: Wikimedia commons |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Hay Wain, The | 1821 | Oil/Canvas | Landscape |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Constable, John | 1776-1837, aged 61 | English painter | Romanticism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1360-43] | |
| National Gallery, London UK | 130 x 185 |
 Image source: Wikimedia commons |
| Mental aberration and irrational states of mind interested artists against Enlightenment rationality. Géricault, like many of his contemporaries, examined the influence of mental states on the human face and shared the belief, common in his time, that a face more accurately revealed character, especially in madness and at the moment of death. He made many studies of the inmates in hospitals and institutions for the criminally insane, and he studied the heads of guillotine victims. Géricault’s Insane Woman, her mouth tense, her eyes red-rimmed with suffering, is one of several portraits he made of the mentally ill. These portraits present the physical facts with authenticity, especially in contrast to earlier idealized commissioned portraiture. (Source: Wikimedia commons) |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Woman with Obsessive Envy (aka Insane Woman) | 1822 | Oil | Portrait |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Géricault, Théodore | 1791-1824, aged 32 | French painter | Romanticism (Brut Art) |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1360-38] | |
| Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, Lyon |
 Image source: Wikimedia commons | This too is a mural painting that decorated the house known as ‘la Quinta del Sordo’, where Goya lived It is another of the the fourteen so-called Black Paintings. [Source: museodelprado.es] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Saturn Devouring His Son | 1823 | Oil/Canvas | History Painting |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Goya, Francisco (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes) | 1746-1828, aged 82 | Spanish painter | Romanticism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1360-39] | |
| Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid Spain | 143 x 81 |
| At the end of 1821 the leading Romantic painter in France, Théodore Géricault, returned from a year long stay in EnglandLack of sales and his own prodigious spending meant that he was strapped for cash. His health was soon to suffer. On his return to France, a riding accident led to complications, causing a tumor to develop on the spine that proved fatal. He died, aged 32, in January 1824. Perhaps the greatest achievement of his last years were his portraits of the insane. There were ten of them originally. Only five have survived. It seems likely that the women were painted in the women’s hospital Salpêtrière, while the men were selected from among the inmates of Charenton and Bicȇtre. The upper image is Portrait of a Kleptomaniac, see also Woman Suffering from Obsessive Envy (The Hyena). [Source: khanacademy.org]. |  Image source: Wikimedia commons |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Kleptomaniac, Portrait of a (Le Monomane du vol)) | 1823 | Oil/Canvas | Portrait |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Géricault, Théodore | 1791-1824, aged 32 | French painter | Romanticism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1360-40] | |
| Museum of Fine Arts, Fernand Scribedreef 1, 9000 Gent, Belgium | 61 x 50 |
 Image source: Wikimedia commons | Pausing on their nocturnal walk through a mountain forest is a couple on a rise beside a dramatically contorted, uprooted oak. Darkness envelops the strollers; their eyes are raised to the reassuring celestial light of the moon that permeates the atmosphere with a solemn stillness. Deep in the moonlit night the trees and rocks acquire strange, almost eerie, dimensions and importance. The two figures are united by their shared experience of the natural world confronting them with an awareness of their transience; together they face the mystery of the unfathomable. The date of origin of this painting is disputed; various dates between 1818 and 1835 have been proposed. [Source: artsandculture.google.com] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Man and Woman Gazing at the Moon | 1818-1835 | Oil/Canvas | Landscape |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Friedrich, Caspar David | 1774-1840, aged 65 | German painter | Romanticism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1360-41] | |
| Nationalgalerie, Berlin Germany | 34 x 44 |
| The Bridge at Narni is an 1826 painting of the Ponte d’Augusto at Narni by Corot. The painting is on display at the Musée du Louvre in Paris. It was painted in September 1826 and was the basis for the larger and more finished View at Narni, which was exhibited at the Salon of 1827 and is in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. The view was not a novel one: in 1821 Corot’s teacher, Achille-Etna Michallon had drawn the same scene, as had Corot’s friend Ernst Fries in 1826. Art historian Peter Galassi describes Corot’s study as a reconciliation of traditional and plein air painting objectives. [Source: Wikimedia.commons] |  Image source: Wikimedia commons |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Bridge at Narni | 1826 | Oil/Canvas | Landscape |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille | 1796-1875, aged 78 | French painter | Romanticism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1360-42] | |
| Musée du Louvre, Paris France | 34 x 48 |
 Image source: metmuseum.org | The Quaker minister and painter Edward Hicks is best known for his Peaceable Kingdom pictures, of which sixty-two exist. The paintings represent a messianic prophecy in the book of Isaiah (11:6): The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. During the 1820s, a severe rift formed within the Society of Friends. In this version of Hicks’s favorite motif, the split is represented by the shattered tree trunk, and the desire for peace between the factions by the menagerie of discordant beasts lying down in perfect harmony. The lion and his companion, the ox, were, for Hicks, symbols of redemption. [Source: metmuseum.org] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Peaceable Kingdom, The | 1826 | Oil/Canvas | Animal Painting |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Hicks, Edward | 1789 – 1849, aged 69 | American painter | Romanticism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | ||
| Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY USA | 45 x 61 |
Forward to 1.3.6.1 Romanticism B (1826 onwards)
Back to 1.3.5 Neoclassicism (1750-1830) – Back to 1.3 Renaissance to Romanticism Index
Forward to 1.3.7 African Art (800-1897)