The Age of Romanticism

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The Age of Romanticism

• An Age of Passion, Rebellion, and Creativity

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The Age of Romanticism

• Plato described humans as a careful balance of
  reason, passions, and appetites, with reason as
  the guide. The Age of Reason elevated reason,
  but perhaps suppressed passions too much. For
  some, the emphasis on reason had gotten out of
  balance with the rest of human nature. And, thus,
  a return to emotion in the arts.

Beethovens 9th Symphony
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Qualities of Romanticism

• Love of Nature
• Idealization of Rural Living
• Faith in Common People
• Interest in the Exotic
• Emphasis on Freedom and Individualism
• Spirit of Rebellion, Revolt against restraint,
  order
• Spontaneity, intuition, feeling, imagination,
  wonder
• Exploration of the psychological
• Passionate individual religiosity

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QUALITIES OF ROMANTICISM

• Love of Nature
• Are not the mountains, waves, and skies, a
  part / Of me and my soul, as I of them? Byron
• A mountain is the type of a majestic
  intellect, . . . There I beheld the emblem of a
  giant mind that feeds upon infinity. Wordsworth

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Casper David Friedrich
A magnificent thing it is, in infinite solitude
by the sea, under a sullen sky, to gaze off into
a boundless watery waste Heinrich von Kleist,
Feelings before Friedrichs Seascape, Berlin,
Oct. 13, 1810
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Turner Snowstorm
Pantheistic
Impressionistic
Atmospheric light
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QUALITIES OF ROMANTICISM

• Idealization of rural living
• I met a little Cottage Girl / She was eight
  years old, she said / Her hair was thick with
  many a curl / That clustered round her head. /
  She had a rustic, woodland air, / An she was
  wildly clad / Her eyes were fair, and very fair
  / --Her beauty made me glad. Wordsworth

John Constable, White Horse
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QUALITIES OF ROMANTICISM
Exoticism and Primitivism
Marie-Guillemine Benoist, Portrait of a Negress
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QUALITIES OF ROMANTICISM

• Faith in Common People
• For theres not a man that lives who hath not
  known his god-like hours Wordsworth

Jean-Francois Millet, Woman Baking Bread, 1853-4
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QUALITIES OF ROMANTICISM

• Emphasis on Freedom and Individualism, Rebellion
• Political freedom--American and French
  Revolution(liberty, equality, fraternity)
  antislavery movements
• Men of England, wherefore plough / For the lords
  who lay ye low? / Wherefore weave with toil and
  care / The rich robes your tyrants wear? . . . .
  . . . . . . . Wherefore, Bees of England, forge /
  Many a weapon, chain, and scourge, / . . . . . .
  / Sow seed,--but let no tyrant reap / Find
  wealth,--let no imposter heap Shelley
• If a man does not keep pace with his companions,
  perhaps it is because he hears a different
  drummer. Thoreau

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Turner Slave Ship
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William Blake, Satan
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QUALITIES OF ROMANTICISM

• Spontaneity, intuition, feeling, imagination,
  wonder
• Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse,
  not from rules. Blake

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• Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful
  feeling and is put into art from emotion
  recollected in tranquility. Wordsworth

Benjamin Robert Haydon, Wordsworth onHelvellyn
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There is something that is often stronger than
my body which is often enlivened by it. In some
people the inner spark scarcely exists. Without
it, I should die, but it will consume
me(doubtless I speak of IMAGINATION, which
masters and leads me). Delacroix
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QUALITIES OF ROMANTICISM
The Psychological
John Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare
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Edgar Allen Poe, The Pit and the Pendulum

• I was sick -- sick unto death with that long
  agony and when they at length unbound me, and I
  was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were
  leaving me. The sentence -- the dread sentence of
  death -- was the last of distinct accentuation
  which reached my ears. After that, the sound of
  the inquisitorial voices seemed merged in one
  dreamy indeterminate hum. It conveyed to my soul
  the idea of revolution -- perhaps from its
  association in fancy with the burr of a
  mill-wheel. This only for a brief period for
  presently I heard no more. Yet, for a while, I
  saw but with how terrible an exaggeration! I saw
  the lips of the black-robed judges.

• They appeared to me white -- whiter than the
  sheet upon which I trace these words -- and thin
  even to grotesqueness thin with the intensity of
  their expression of firmness -- of immoveable
  resolution -- of stern contempt of human torture.
  I saw that the decrees of what to me was Fate,
  were still issuing from those lips. I saw them
  writhe with a deadly locution. I saw them fashion
  the syllables of my name and I shuddered because
  no sound succeeded. I saw, too, for a few moments
  of delirious horror, the soft and nearly
  imperceptible waving of the sable draperies which
  enwrapped the walls of the apartment.

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PSYCHOLOGICAL
Sir John Everett MILLAIS, OPHELIA
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QUALITIES OF ROMANTICISM

• Passionate individual religiosity
• Pantheism
• Transcendentalism
• Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that
  calld Body is a portion of Soul discernd by the
  five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this
  age. William Blake

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AMERICAN ROMANTICISM

• AFTER STYLE OF EUROPEAN ROMANTICS
• IDEALISTIC VISION OF AMERICA NEW GARDEN OF EDEN
• NOSTALGIA FOR PRE-ROMANTIC DAYS
• LANDSCAPES
• EXPANSION WESTWARD
• TRANSCENDENTALISM

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TRANSCENDENTALISM

• CONTEMPLATION OF LANDSCAPE COULD PROVIDE MORAL
  EDIFICATION, THROUGH NATURE ONE COULD MORE EASILY
  BECOME ACQUAINTED WITH GOD

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EMERSON THOUGHTS ON ART

• ARTISTS SHOULD PRODUCE WORKS OF ART FOR ALL MEN
  AND PAINTING SHOULD BE A VEHICLE THROUGH WHICH
  THE UNIVERSAL MIND COULD REACH THE MIND OF
  MANKIND. ART IS NOT THE EXPRESSION OF THE
  ARTISTS OWN FEELINGS.

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HUDSON RIVER PAINTERS

• IN THE PURE BLUE SKY IS HE HIGHEST SUBLIME. ALL
  IS DEEP, UNBROKEN REPOSE UP THERE-VOICELESS,
  MOTIONLESS, WITHOUT COLORS, LIGHT AND SHADOWS,
  AND EVERCHANGING DRAPERIES OF THE LOWER EARTH

OXBOW, Thomas Cole
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2ND GENERATION HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL JOHN
FREDERICK KENSETT

• BRIGHT COLORS ARE SPARINGLY DISTRIBUTED
  THROUGHOUT THE NATURAL WORLD. THE WHITE, RED,
  BLUE AND YELLOW OF BLOSSOMS OF PLANTS, SHRUBS,
  AND TREES ARE NOT PROMINENT EVEN IN T HEIR SEASON
  OF BLOOM WHILE THE MAIN MASSERS ARE MADE UP OF
  COOL GREENS, GRAYS, DRABS, AND BROWNS
  INTERMINGLED

LAKE GEORGE, John Frederick Kensett
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2ND GENERATION FREDERC CHURCH

• BELIEVED ART WOULD FLOURISH IF PANTERS JUST
  CONCENTRATED ON THE MOST VARIED AND BRILLIANT
  FEATURES OF NATURE

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WESTERN EXPANSION ALBERT BIERSTADT
ROCKY MOUNTAINS
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Romanticism A Poetic Age

• Wordsworth-- Poetry is the spontaneous overflow
  of powerful emotions recollected in tranquility.
• Hazlitt--poetry is the language of imagination
  and the passions.
• Shelley--poetry redeems from decay the
  visitations of the divine in man.
• Keats--If poetry comes not as naturally as the
  Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.

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Gothic Models Replace Greco-Roman Architecture
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Prehistory and ancient replace classical imagery
The Mysterious monument of Stonehenge, standing
remote on a bare and boundless pesent, carries
you back beyond all historical records into the
obscurity of a totally unknown period. Constable
Stonehenge, John Constable