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THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT

The Enlightenment, paradoxically, liberated not only reason but also its opposite: it helped to create a new wave of emo­tionalism that was to last for the better part of a century, and came to be known as Romanticism. The word derives from the late-eighteenth-century vogue for medieval tales of ad­venture (such as the legends of King Arthur or the Holy Grail), called "romances" because they were written in a Ro­mance language, not in Latin. This interest in the long-ne­glected "Gothick" past was symptomatic of a general trend. Those who, in the mid-eighteenth century, shared a revul­sion against the established social order and religion ­against established values of any sort-could either try to found a new order based upon their faith in the power of reason, or they could seek release in a craving for emotional experience. Their common denominator was a desire to "re­turn to Nature." The rationalist acclaimed Nature as the ul­timate source of reason, while the Romantic worshiped her as unbounded, wild, and ever-changing. If people were only to behave "naturally," the Romantic believed, giving their im­pulses free rein, evil would disappear. In the name of nature, the Romantics exalted liberty, power, love, violence, the Greeks, the Middle Ages, or anything else that aroused them, although actually they exalted emotion as an end in itself In its most extreme form, this attitude could be expressed only through direct action, not through works of art. (It has mo­tivated some of the noblest-and vilest-acts of our era.) No artist, then, can be a wholehearted Romantic, for the cre­ation of a work of art demands some detachment, self-aware­ness, and discipline. What Wordsworth, the great Romantic poet, said of poetry in 1798-that it is "emotion recollected in tranquillity"-applies also to the visual arts.

To cast fleeting experience into permanent form, the Ro­mantic artist needs a style. But since he is in revolt against the old order, this cannot be the established style of his time; it must come from some phase of the past to which he feels linked by "elective affinity" (another Romantic concept). Ro­manticism thus favours the revival not of one style, but of a potentially unlimited number of styles. In fact, revivals-the rediscovery and utilization of forms hitherto neglected or dis­liked-became a stylistic principle: the "style" of Romanti­cism in art (and, to a degree, in literature and music).

Seen in this context, Neoclassicism was simply the first phase of Romanticism, a revival that continued all the way through the nineteenth century, although it came to repre­sent conservative taste. Indeed, the two seem so interdepen­dent that we should prefer a single name for both, especially after 1800. if we could find a suitable one. ("Romantic Clas­sicism" has not won wide acceptance.) Perhaps it is best, then, to think of them as two sides of the same modern coin. If we maintain the distinction between them, it is because, until about 1800, Neoclassicism loomed larger than the other Romantic revivals, and because of the Enlightenment's ded­ication to the cause of liberty as against the cult of the indi­vidual represented by the Romantic hero.

PAINTING

It is one of the many apparent contradictions of Romanticism that it became, despite the untrammelled freedom of individ­ual creativity, art for the rising professional and commercial class which effectively dominated nineteenth-century soci­ety and which replaced state commissions and aristocratic patronage as the most important source of support for artists. Painting remains the greatest creative achievement of Ro­manticism in the visual arts precisely because it was less dependent than architecture or sculpture on public approval. It held a correspondingly greater appeal for the individualism of the Romantic artist; moreover, it could better accommo­date the themes and ideas of Romantic literature. Romantic painting was not essentially illustrative. But literature, past and present, now became a more important source of inspi­ration for painters than ever before and provided them with a new range of subjects, emotions, and attitudes. Romantic poets, in turn, often saw nature with a painter's eye. Many had a strong interest in art criticism and theory; some, no­tably Goethe and Victor Hugo, were capable draftsmen; and William Blake cast his visions in both pictorial and literary form (see page 643). Within the Romantic movement, art and literature have a complex, subtle, and by no means one ­sided relationship.

Spain

GOYA. Before pursuing Romantic painting in France and England, we must take account of the great Spanish painter Francisco Goya (1746-1828), David's contemporary and the only artist of the age who may be called, unreservedly, a ge­nius. When Goya first arrived in Madrid in 1766, he found both Mengs and Tiepolo working there. He was much im­pressed with Tiepolo, whom he must have recognized immediately as the greater of the two; he did not respond to the growing Neoclassic trend during his brief visit to Rome five years later. His early works, in a delightful late Rococo vein, reflect the influence of Tiepolo and the French masters (Spain had produced no painters of significance for over a century).

But during the 1780s, Goya became more of a libertarian; he surely sympathized with the Enlightenment and the Rev­olution, and not with the king of Spain, who had joined other monarchs in war against the young French Republic. Yet Goya was much esteemed at court, especially as a portrait painter. He abandoned the Rococo for a Neo-Baroque style based on Velazquez and Rembrandt, the masters he had come to admire most. It is this Neo-Baroque style that an­nounces the arrival of Romanticism.

The Family of Charles IV, Goya's largest royal portrait, deliberately echoes Velazquez' The Maids of Honor: the entire clan has come to visit the artist, who is painting in one of the picture galleries of the palace. As in the earlier work, shadowy canvases hang behind the group and the light pours in from the side, although its subtle gra­dations owe as much to Rembrandt as to Velazquez. The brushwork, too, has an incandescent sparkle rivalling that of The Maids of Honor. Although Goya does not utilize the Caravaggesque Neoclassicism of David, his painting has more in common with David's work than we might think. Like David, he practices a revival style and, in his way, is equally devoted to the unvarnished truth: he uses the Neo-Baroque of Romanticism to unmask the royal family.

Psychologically, The Family of Charles IV is almost shock­ingly modem. No longer shielded by the polite conventions of Baroque court portraiture, the inner being of these indi­viduals has been laid bare with pitiless candour. They are like a collection of ghosts: the frightened children, the bloated king, and-in a masterstroke of sardonic humor-the gro­tesquely vulgar queen, posed like Velazquez' Princess Mar­garita (note the left arm and the turn of the head). How could Goya get away with this? Did the royal family fail to realize what he had done to them? Goya, we realize, must have painted them as they saw themselves, while unveiling the truth for all the world to see.

When Napoleon's armies occupied Spain in 1808, Goya and many of his countrymen hoped that the conquerors would bring the liberal reforms so badly needed. The savage behavior of the French troops crushed these hopes and gen­erated a popular resistance of equal savagery. Many of Goya's works trom 1810-15 reflect this bitter experience. The great­est is The Third of May, 1808, commemorating the execution of a group of Madrid citizens. Here the blazing color, broad, fluid brushwork, and dramatic nocturnal light are more emphatically Neo-Baroque than ever. The picture has all the emotional intensity of religious art, but these mar­tyrs are dying for Liberty, not the Kingdom of Heaven; and their executioners are not the agents of Satan but of political tyranny-a formation of faceless automatons, impervious to their victims' despair and defiance. The same scene was to be re-enacted countless times in modem history. With the clairvoyance of genius, Goya created an image that has be­come a terrifying symbol of our era.

After the defeat of Napoleon, the restored Spanish monar­chy brought a new wave of repression, and Goya withdrew more and more into a private world of nightmarish visions such as Bobabilicon (Big Booby), an etching from the series Los Proverbios. Although suggested by proverbs and popular superstitions, many of these scenes defy exact analysis. They belong to that realm of subjectively experi­enced horror, which we will meet in Fuseli's The Nightmare, but are infinitely more compelling. Finally, in 1824, Goya went into voluntary exile; after a brief stay in Paris, he settled in Bordeaux, where he died. His importance for the Neo-Baroque Romantic painters of France is well at­tested by the greatest of them, Eugene Delacroix (see pages 635-36), who said that the ideal style would be a combina­tion of Michelangelo's and Goya's art.

France

GROS. The reign of Napoleon, with its glamour and its ad­venturous conquests in remote parts of the world, gave rise to French Romantic painting. It emerged from the studio of Jacques-Louis David, who became an ardent admirer of Na­poleon and executed several large pictures glorifying the em­peror. As a portrayer of the Napoleonic myth, however, he was partially eclipsed by artists who had been his students. They felt the style of David too confining and fostered a Ba­roque revival to capture the excitement of the age. David's favorite pupiL Antoine-Jean Gros (1771-1835), shows us Na­poleon as a twenty-seven-year-old general leading his troops at the Battle of Arcole in northern Italy. Painted in Milan, soon after the series of victories that gave the French the Lombard plain, it conveys Napoleon's magic as an irre­sistible "man of destiny," with a Romantic enthusiasm David could never match.

After Napoleon's empire collapsed, David spent his last years in exile in Brussels, where his major works were play­fully amorous subjects drawn from ancient myths or legends and painted in a coolly sensuous style he had initiated in Paris. He turned his pupils over to Gros, urging him to return to Neoclassic orthodoxy. Much as Gros respected his teacher's doctrines, his emotional nature impelled him to­ward the colour and drama of the Baroque. He remained torn between his pictorial instincts and these academic princi­ples; he never achieved David's authority and ended his life by suicide.

GERICAULT. The Neo-Baroque trend initiated in France by Gros aroused the imagination of many talented younger men. Mounted Officer of the Imperial Guard (fig. 860), painted by Theodore Gericault (1791-1824) at the astonishing age of twenty-one, offers the same conception of the Romantic hero as Gras' Napoleon at Arcole but on a large scale and with a Rubens-like energy.

For Gericault, politics no longer had the force of a faith. All he saw in Napoleon's campaigns was the thrill-irre­sistible to the Romantic-of violent action. Ultimately, the ancestors of this splendid figure are the equestrian soldiers in Leonardo's Battle of Anghiari. Gericault, himself an enthusiastic horseman, later became interested in the British animal painters such as George Stubbs (see page 624). But his chief heroes, apart from Gros and the great Baroque masters, were David and Michelangelo.

A year's study in Italy deepened his understanding of the nude as an image of expressive power; he was then ready to begin his most ambitious work, The Raft of the "Medusa". The Medusa, a government vessel, had foundered off the West African coast with hundreds of men on board; only a handful were rescued, after many days on a makeshift raft which had been set adrift by the ship's cowardly captain and officers. The event attracted Gericault's attention be­cause it was a political scandal-like many French liberals, he opposed the monarchy that was restored after Napoleon­ and a modern tragedy of epic proportions. He went to ex­traordinary lengths in trying to achieve a maximum of authenticity: he interviewed survivors, had a model of the raft built, even studied corpses in the morgue. This search for uncompromising truth is like David's, and The Raft is in­deed remarkable for its powerfully realistic detail.

Yet these preparations were subordinate in the end to the spirit of heroic drama that dominates the canvas. Gericault depicts the exciting moment when the men on the raft first glimpse the rescue ship. From the prostrate bodies of the dead and dying in the foreground, the composition is built up to a climax in the group that supports the frantically wav­ing black man, so that the forward surge of the survivors par­ allels the movement of the raft itself. Sensing, perhaps, that this theme of "man against the elements" would have strong appeal across the Channel (where Copley had painted Wat­son and the Shark forty years before;, Gericault took the monumental canvas to England on a travelling exhibit in 1820.

His numerous studies for it had taught him how to explore extremes of the human condition scarcely touched by earlier artists. He went now not only to the morgue, but to the in­sane asylum of Paris. There he became a friend of Dr. Georget, a pioneer in modern psychiatry, and painted for him a series of portraits of individual patients to illustrate various types of derangement, such as that in figure 862. The con­ception and execution of this oil sketch has an immediacy that recalls Frans Hals, but Gericault's sympathy toward his subject makes his work contrast tellingly with Malle Babbe; this ability to see the victims of mental disease as fellow human beings, not as accursed or bewitched out­casts, is one of the noblest fruits of the Romantic movement.

INGRES. The mantle of David finally descended upon his pupil Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867). Too young to share in the political passions of the Revolution, Ingres never was an enthusiastic Bonapartist; in 1806 he went to Italy and remained for eighteen years. Only after his return did he become the high priest of the Davidian tradi­tion, defending it from the onslaughts of younger artists.

What had been a revolutionary style only half a century be­fore now congealed into rigid dogma, endorsed by the gov­ernment and backed by the weight of conservative opinion.

Ingres is usually called a Neoclassicist, and his opponents Romantics. Actually, both factions stood for aspects of Ro­manticism: the Neoclassic phase, with Ingres as the last im­portant survivor, and the Neo-Baroque, first adumbrated in Gros' Napoleon at Arcole in France. These two camps seemed to revive the old quarrel between "Poussinistes" and "Rubenistes" (see page 597). The original "Poussinistes" had never quite practiced what they preached, and Ingres' views, too, were far more doctrinaire than his pictures. He always held that drawing was superior to painting, yet a canvas such as his Odalisque (fig. 863) reveals an exquisite sense of color; instead of merely tinting his design, he sets off the petal­smooth limbs of this Oriental Venus ("odalisque" is a Turkish word for a harem slave girl) with a dazzling array of rich tones and textures. The exotic subject, redolent with the en­chantment of the Thousand and One Nights, is itself char­acteristic of the Romantic movement; it would be perfectly at home in the Royal Pavilion at Brighton (see fig. 894). De­spite Ingres' professed worship of Raphael, this nude embod­ies no classical ideal of beauty. Her proportions, her languid grace, and the strange mixture of coolness and voluptuous­ness remind us, rather, of Parmigianino.

History painting as defined by Poussin remained Ingres' lifelong ambition, but he had great difficulty with it, while portraiture, which he pretended to dislike, was his strongest gift and his steadiest source of income. He was, in fact, the last great professional in a field soon to be dominated by the camera.

Ingres' Louis Bertin at first glance looks like a kind of "super-photograph." But this impression is deceptive; comparing it with the preliminary pencil drawing, we realize how much interpretation the portrait contains. The drawing, quick, sure, and precise, is a masterpiece of detached observation, but the painting endows the sitter with a massive force of personality. Bertin's pose is shifted slightly to the left, opening his jacket to lend the figure greater weight, while the position of his powerful hands, which are barely indicated in the drawing, has been adjusted to convey an almost leonine strength. Ingres further applies the Ca­ravaggesque Neoclassicism he had inherited from David to introduce slight changes of light and emphasis in the face, subtly altering its expression, which now manifests an al­most frightening intensity.

Among the Romantics, only Ingres could so unify psycho­logical depth and physical accuracy. His followers concen­trated on physical accuracy alone, competing vainly with the: camera; the Neo-Baroque Romantics, in contrast, empha­sized the psychological aspect to such a degree that their portraits tended to become records of the artist's private emo­tional relationship with the sitter (see fig. 868). Often these are interesting and moving, but they are no longer portraits in the full sense of the term.

DELACROIX. The year 1824 was crucial for French paint­ing. Gericault died (after a riding accident); Ingres returned to France from Italy, and had his first public success; the first showing in Paris of works by the English Romantic painter John Constable was a revelation to many French art­ists; and The Massacre at Chios established Eugene Delacroix as the foremost Neo-Baroque Romantic painter. An admirer of both Gras and Gericault, Delacroix (1798-1863) had been exhibiting for some years, but the Massacre-conservatives called it "the massacre of painting," others acclaimed it enthusiastically-made his reputation. For the next quarter century, he and lngres were acknowledged rivals, and their polarity, fostered by partisan critics, dominated the artistic scene in Paris.

Like The Raft of "The Medusa," The Massacre was inspired by a contemporary event: the Greek war of independence against the Turks, which stirred a sympathetic response throughout Western Europe (the full title is Scenes of the Mas­sacre at Chios: Crech Families Awaiting Death or Slavery). Delacroix, however, aimed at "poetic truth" rather than at re­capturing a specific, actual event. He shows us an intoxicat­ing mixture of sensuousness and cruelty, but he does not succeed in forcing us to suspend our disbelief. While we revel in the sheer splendour of the painting. We do not quite accept the human experience as authentic; we react, in other words, much as we do to J. M. W. Turner's Slave Ship.

One reason may be the discontinuity of the foreground, with its dramatic contrasts of light and shade, and the luminous sweep of the landscape behind (Delacroix is said to have hast­ily repainted part of the latter after seeing Constable's work). Originally, the background of The Massacre was probably like that in Gericault's Mounted Officer; the Turkish horseman directly recalls Gericault's earlier picture.

Delacroix's sympathy with the Greeks did not prevent his sharing the enthusiasm of fellow Romantics for the Near East. He was enchanted by a visit to North Africa in 1832, finding there a living counterpart of the violent, chivalric, and picturesque past evoked in Romantic literature. His sketches from this trip supplied him with a large repertory of subjects for the rest of his life-harem interiors, street scenes, lion hunts. It is fascinating to compare his Odalisque with Ingres' version: reclining in ecstatic repose, she exudes passionate abandon and animal vitality­ the exact opposite of Ingres' ideal.

This contrast persists in the portraiture of these perennial antagonists. Delacroix rarely painted portraits on commis­sion; his finest examples are of his personal friends and fel­low victims of the "Romantic agony," such as the famous Polish composer Frederic Chopin. Here we see the image of the Romantic hero at its purest: a blend of Gros' Napoleon at Arcole and Gericault's The Madman, the com­poser is consumed by the fire of his genius.

DAUMIER. The later work of Delacroix reflects the attitude that eventually doomed the Romantic movement: its growing detachment from contemporary life. History, literature, the Near East-these were the domains of the imagination where he sought refuge from the turmoil of the Industrial Revolution. It is ironic that Honore Daumier (1808-1879), one of the few Romantic artists who did not shrink from re­ality, remained in his day practically unknown as a painter; his pictures had little impact until after his death. A biting political cartoonist, Daumier contributed satirical drawings to various Paris weeklies for most of his life. He turned to painting in the 1840s but found no public for his work. Only a few friends encouraged him and, a year before his death, arranged his first one-man show.

Although Daumier is sometimes called a realist, his work falls entirely within the range of Romanticism. The neat out­lines and systematic crosshatching in Daumier's early car­toons (figure 869 is a sample) show his conservative training. He quickly developed a bolder and more personal style of draftsmanship, however, and his paintings of the 1850s and 1860s have the full pictorial range of the Neo-Baroque. Their subjects vary widely; many show aspects of everyday urban life that also occur in his cartoons, now viewed from a painter's rather than a satirist's angle. The Third-Class Car­riage is such a work. Daumier's forms reflect the compactness of Fran<;ois Millet's, but are painted so freely that they must have seemed raw and "unfinished" even by Delacroix's standards. Yet its power is derived from this very freedom; his concern is not for the tangible surface of reality but for the emotional meaning behind it.

In The Third-Class Carriage, he has captured a peculiarly modern human condition, "the lonely crowd": these people have in common only that they are traveling together in one railway car. Though they are physically crowded, they take no notice of one another-each is alone with his or her own thoughts. Daumier explores this state with an insight into character and a breadth of human sympathy worthy of Rem­brandt, whose work he revered. His feeling for the dignity of the poor also suggests Louis Le Nain, who had recently been rediscovered by French critics (compare; the old woman on the left seems the direct ancestor of the central figure in The Third-Class Carriage.

Other paintings by Daumier have subjects more charac­teristic of Romanticism. The numerous canvases and draw­ings of the adventures of Don Quixote, from Cervantes' sixteenth-century novel, show the perennial fascination this theme had for him. The lanky knight-errant, vainly trying to live his dream of noble deeds, and Sancho Panza, the dumpy materialist, seemed to embody for Daumier a tragic conflict within human nature that forever pits the soul against the body, ideal aspirations against harsh reality. In Don Quixote Attacking the Windmills, this polarity is forcefully realized: the mock hero dashes off in the noonday heat to­ward an invisible, distant goaL while Panza helplessly wrings his hands, a monument of despair. Again we marvel at the strength, the sculptured simplicity, of Daumier's shapes, and the expressive freedom of his brushwork, which make Delacroix's art seem almost tame and conventional by com­parison.

LITHOGRAPHS. Nearly all of Daumier's cartoons were done with lithography. Invented in Germany shortly before 1800 by Alois Senefelder, it is the most important of the pla­nographic processes, meaning that the print is made on a flat surface. Using a greasy crayon or ink, called tusche, the artist draws or brushes the design onto a special lithographic stone; alternatively, it can be transferred from paper. (Metals such as zinc and aluminum have also been used as plates.) Once the design is fixed by an acid wash, the surface is dampened, then rolled with oily ink which adheres to the greasy design but is repelled by water. The print is made by rubbing moistened paper under light pressure against the stone. Because a limitless number of prints can be pulled relatively cheaply, lithography has been closely associated from the beginning with commercial printing and the popu­lar press.

French Landscape Painting

Owing to the cult of nature, landscapepainting became the most characteristic form of Romantic art. The Romantics be­lieved that God's laws could be seen written in nature. While it arose out of the Enlightenment, their faith, known as pan­theism, was based not on rational thought but on subjective experience, and the appeal to the emotions rather than the intellect made those lessons all the more compelling. In order to express the feelings inspired by nature, the Romantics sought to transcribe landscape as faithfully as possible. Whereas the Neoclassicists subjected landscape to pre­scribed ideas of beauty and linked it to historical subjects, the Romantics modified the appearance of nature to evoke heightened states of mind in accordance with dictates of the imagination, the only standard they ultimately recognized.

COROT. The first and surely the greatest French Romantic landscape painter was Camille Corrot (1796-1875). Todav his finest work seems not to be his late landscapes, misty and poetic; it is the early ones that establish his importance for the development of modern landscape painting. In 1825 he went to Italy for two years and explored the countryside around Rome, like a latter-day Claude Lorraine. But Corot did not transform his sketches into idealized pastoral visions; what Claude recorded only in his drawings-the quality of a particular place at a particular time. Corot made into paintings, small canvases done on the spot in an hour or two.

Such a work is his view of Papigno, an obscure little hill town. In size and immediacy, these quickly exe­cuted pictures are analogous to Constable's oil sketches, yet they stem from different traditions. If Constable's view of nature, which emphasizes the sky as "the chief organ of sentiment," is derived from Dutch seven­teenth-century landscapes, Corot's instinct for architectural clarity and stability recalls Poussin and Claude. But he, too, insists on "the truth of the moment"; his exact observation and his readiness to seize upon any view that attracted him during his excursions show the same commitment to direct visual experience. The Neoclassicists had also painted oil sketches out-of-doors; Corot's willingness, however, to accept them as independent works of art marks him unmistakably as a Romantic.

ROUSSEAU. Corol's fidelity to nature was an important model for the Barbizon School, though he was not actually a member. This group of younger painters cantering on Theodore Rousseau (1812-1867) settled in the village of Bar­bizon, near Paris, to paint landscapes and scenes of rural life. Enthused, however, by Constable, whose work had been ex­hibited in Paris in 1824, they turned to the Northern Baroque landscape as an alternative to the Neoclassical tradition. From Ruisdael's example, Rousseau learned how to imbue his encrusted forms and gnarled trees with a sense of inner life, but it was the hours of solitary contemplation in the forest of Fontainebleau that enabled him to penetrate nature's secrets. A Meadow Bordered by Trees is typical of his landscapes, which are filled with a simple ven­eration that admirably reflects the rallying cry of the French Romantics-sincerity.

MILLET. The Sower by Francois Millet (1814­-1875), another of the artists of the Barbizon School, has a somewhat self-conscious flavor. Blurred in the hazy atmo­sphere, this "hero of the soil" is nevertheless a timeless image. Could Millet have known the pathetic sower from the October page of the Tres Riches Heures du Due de Berry? Ironically, the painting monumentalizes a rural way of life that was rapidly disappearing under the pressure of the Industrial Revolution.

BONHEUR. Millet and the Barbizon School advocated a re­turn to nature as a way of fleeing the ills attendant to indus­trialization and urbanization. Despite their conservative outlook, the popular revolution of 1848 elevated them to a new prominence in French art. That same year Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899), also an artist of the out-of~doors, re­ceived a French government commission that led to her first great success and helped to establish her as a leading painter of animals-and eventually as the most famous woman artist of her time. Her painting Plowing in the Nivernais was exhibited the following year, after a winter spent in mak­ing studies from life. The theme of humanity's union with nature had already been popularized in, among other works, the country romances of George Sand. Bonheur's picture shares Millet's reverence for peasant life, but the real subject here, as in all her work, is the animals within' the landscape; these she depicts with compelling accuracy, a quality which later placed her among the most original Realists.

England

FUSELI. England was as precocious in nurturing Roman­ticism as it had been in promoting Neoclassicism. In fact, one of its first representatives, John Henry Fuseli (1741­-1825), was the contemporary of West and Copley. This Swiss-born painter-originally named Fussli-had an ex­traordinary impact on his time, more perhaps because of his adventurous and forceful personality than the merits of his work. Ordained a minister at twenty, he had left the Church by 1764 and gone to London in search of freedom. Encour­aged by Reynolds, he spent the 1770s in Rome. There he encountered Gavin Hamilton, but Fuseli based his style on Michelangelo and the Mannerists, not on Poussin and the antique. A German acquaintance of those years described him as "extreme in everything, Shakespeare's painter." Shakespeare and Michelangelo were indeed his twin gods; he even visualized a Sistine Chapel with Michelangelo's figures transformed into Shakespearean characters where the sublime would be the common denominator for "classic" and "Gothic" Romanticism. Such fusion marks Fuseli as a transitional figure. He espoused many of the same Neo­classical theories as Reynolds, West, and Kauffman, but bent their rules almost to the breaking point. We see this in The Nightmare: the sleeping woman-more Mannerist than Michelangelesque-is Neoclassic. The grinning devil and the luminescent horse, on the other hand, come from the demon-ridden world of medieval folklore, while the Rembrandtesque lighting reminds us of Reynolds.

Here the Romantic quest for terrifying experiences leads not to physical violence but to the dark recesses of the mind. What was the genesis of The Nightmare? Nightmares often have a strongly sexual connotation, sometimes quite openly expressed, at other times concealed behind a variety of dis­guises. We know that Fuseli originally conceived the subject not long after his return from Italy, when he had fallen vio­lently in love with a friend's niece who soon married a mer­chant, much to the artist's distress. We can see in the picture a projection of his "dream girl," with the demon taking the artist's place while the horse, a well-known erotic symbol, looks on.

BLAKE. Later, in London, Fuseli befriended the poet­ painter William Blake (1757-1827), who possessed an even greater creativity and stranger personality than his own. A recluse and visionary, Blake produced and published his own books of poems with engraved text and hand-coloured illus­trations. Though he never left England, he acquired a large repertory of Michelangelesque and Mannerist motifs from engravings and through the influence of Fuseli. He also con­ceived a tremendous admiration for the Middle Ages, and came closer than any other Romantic artist to reviving pre­Renaissance forms (his books were meant to be the succes­sors of illuminated manuscripts).

These elements are all present in Blake's memorable image The Ancient of Days. The muscular figure, radically foreshortened and fitted into a circle of light, is de­rived from Mannerist sources, while the sym­bolic compasses come from medieval representations of the Lord as Architect of the Universe. With these precedents, we would expect the Ancient of Days to signify Almighty God, but in Blake's esoteric mythology, he stands rather for the power of reason, which the poet regarded as ultimately destructive, since it stifles vision and inspiration. To Blake, the "inner eye" was all-important; he felt no need to observe the visible world around him.

English Landscape Painting

It was, however, in landscape rather than in narrative paint­ing that English painting reached its fullest expression. Landscape inspired the Romantics with passions so exalted that only in the hands of the greatest history painters could humans equal nature in power as protagonists. Hence, the Romantic landscape lies outside the descriptive and emo­tional range of the eighteenth century. It superseded the beautiful, the sublime, and the picturesque by subsuming all three.

CONSTABLE. During the eighteenth century, landscape paintings had been, for the most part, imaginative exercises conforming to Northern and Italian examples. John Consta­ble (1776-1837) admired both Ruisdael and Claude Lor­raine, yet he strenuously opposed all flights of fancy. Landscape painting, he believed, must be based on observ­able facts; it should aim at "embodying a pure apprehension of natural effect." Toward that end, he painted countless oil sketches out-of~doors. These were not the first such studies, but, more than his predecessors, he was concerned with the intangible qualities-conditions of sky, light, and atmo­sphere-rather than with the concrete details of the scene. Often, as in Hampstead Heath, the land serves as no more than a foil for the ever-changing drama overhead, which he studied with a meteorologist's accuracy, the better to grasp its infinite variety. In endeavoring to record these fleeting effects, he arrived at a painting technique as broad, free, and personal as that of Cozens' "ink-blot landscapes," even though his point of departure was the exact opposite.

All of Constable's pictures show familiar views of the En­glish countryside. It was, he later claimed, the scenery around his native Stour Valley that made him a painter. Al­though he painted the final versions in his studio, he pre­pared them by making oil studies based on sketches from nature. The sky, to him, remained "the key note, standard scale, and the chief organ of sentiment," as a mirror of those sweeping forces so dear to the Romantic view of nature. In The Haywain, painted the same year as Hamp­stead Heath, he has caught a particularly splendid mo­ment-a great sweep of wind, sunlight, and clouds playing over the spacious landscape. The earth and sky seem both to have become organs of sentiment informed with the artist's poetic sensibility. At the same time, there is an inti­macy in this monumental composition that reveals Constable's deep love of the countryside. This new, personal note is characteristically Romantic. Since Constable has painted the landscape with such conviction, we see the scene through his eyes and believe him, even though it per­haps did not look quite this way in reality.

TURNER. Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) ar­rived at a style that Constable deprecatingly but acutely de­scribed as "airy visions, painted with tinted steam." Turner began as a watercolorist; the use of translucent tints on white paper may help to explain his preoccupation with colored light. Like Constable, he made copious studies from nature (though not in oils), but the scenery he selected satisfied the Romantic taste for the Picturesque and the Sublime-moun­tains, the sea, or sites linked with historic events; in his full­scale pictures he often changed these views so freely that they became quite unrecognizable.

Many of Turner's landscapes are linked with literary themes and bear such titles as The Destruction of Sodom, or Snowstorm: Hannibal Crossing the Alps, or Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: Italy. When they were exhibited, he would add appropriate quotations from ancient or modem authors to the catalogue, or he would make up some lines himself and claim to be "citing" his own unpublished poem, "Fallacies of Hope." Yet these canvases are the opposite of history painting as defined by Poussin: the titles indeed indicate "noble and se­rious human actions," but the tiny figures, lost in the seeth­ing violence of nature, suggest the ultimate defeat of all endeavor-"the fallacies of hope."

The Slave Ship is one of Turner's most spectac­ular visions, and illustrates how he transmuted his literary sources into "tinted steam." First entitled Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying-Typhoon Coming On, the painting compounds several levels of meaning. Like Gericault's The Raft of the "Medusa" (see fig. 861), which had been exhibited in England in 1820, it has to do, in part, with a specific incident that Turner had recently read about: when an epidemic broke out on a slave ship, the captain jet­tisoned his human cargo because he was insured against the loss of slaves at sea, but not by disease. Turner also thought of a relevant passage from The Seasons, by the eighteenth­ century poet James Thompson, that describes how sharks follow a slave ship during a typhoon, "lured by the scent of steaming crowds, or rank disease, and death." The title of the picture conjoins the slaver's action and the typhoon-but in what relation? Are the dead and dying slaves being cast into the sea against the threat of the storm (perhaps to lighten the ship)? Is the typhoon nature's retribution for the captain's greed and cruelty? Of the many storms at sea that Turner painted, none has quite this apocalyptic quality. A cosmic catastrophe seems about to engulf everything, not merely the "guilty" slaver but the sea itself with its crowds of fantastic and oddly harmless-looking fish.

While we still feel the force of Turner's imagination, most of us today, perhaps with a twinge of guilt, enjoy the tinted steam for its own sake rather than as a vehicle of the awe­some emotions the artist meant to evoke. Even in terms of the values he himself acknowledged, Turner strikes us as "a virtuoso of the Sublime," led astray by his very exuberance. He must have been pleased by praise from the theorist John Ruskin, that protagonist of the moral superiority of Gothic style, who saw in The SLave Ship, which he owned, "the true, the beautiful, and the intellectual"-all qualities that raised Turner above older landscape painters. Still, Turner may have come to wonder if his tinted steam had its intended effect on all beholders. Soon after finishing The SLave Ship, he could have read in his copy of Goethe's CoLor Theory, re­cently translated into English, that yellow has a "gay, softly exciting character," while orange-red suggests "warmth and gladness." Would these be the emotions aroused by The SLave Ship in a viewer who did not know its title?

Germany

FRIEDRICH. In Germany, as in England, landscape was the finest achievement of Romantic painting, and the underlying ideas, too, were often strikingly similar. When

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), the most important German Romantic artist, painted The Polar Sea, he may have known of Turner's "Fallacies of Hope," for in an earlier picture on the same theme, now lost, he had inscribed the name "Hope" on the crushed vessel. In any case, he shared Turner's attitude toward human fate. The painting, as so often before, was inspired by a specific event, which the artist endowed with symbolic significance: a dangerous moment in William Parry's Arctic expedition of 1819-20.

One wonders how Turner might have depicted this scene-perhaps it would have been too static for him. But Friedrich was attracted by this immobility; he has visualized the piled-up slabs of ice as a kind of megalithic monument to human defeat built by nature herself. Infinitely lonely, it is a haunting reflection of the artist's own melancholy. There is no hint of tinted steam-the very air seems frozen-nor any subjective handwriting; we look right through the pigment-covered surface at a reality that seems created with­out the painter's intervention.

This technique, impersonal and meticulous, is peculiar to German Romantic painting. It stems from the early Neoclas­sicists-Mengs, Hamilton, and Vien-but the Germans, whose tradition of Baroque painting was weak, adopted it more wholeheartedly than the English or the French. About 1800, German painters, calling themselves the Nazarenes, rediscovered what they regarded as their native pictorial her­itage: the "medieval" painters of the fifteenth and early six­teenth centuries. This "Gothic Revival," however, remained limited to subject matter and technique; the painstaking pre­cision of the old German masters merely reinforced the Neo­classic emphasis on form at the expense of colour. Although in Friedrich's hands this technique yielded extraordinary ef­fects, it was a handicap for most German artists who lacked his compelling imagination.

United States

Painting following the American Revolution was dominated by proteges of Benjamin West, who took every young artist arriving from the New World under his wing. Strangely enough, the only ones to enjoy much success were portrait­ists such as Gilbert Stuart. Using the fashionable conventions of Joshua Reynolds, they conferred the aura of established aristocracy on the Federalists, who were only too eager to forget the recent revolutionary past enshrined by the history painters. What the United States wanted was an art based not on the past but on the present. During the 1820s, Ameri­cans found their history painting in genre scenes descended from Dutch and English examples. At the same time, they discovered landscape painting. (Before then, settlers were far too busy carving out homesteads to pay much attention to the poetry of nature's moods.)

The attitude toward landscape began to change only as the surrounding wilderness was gradually tamed, allowing Americans for the first time to see nature as the escape from civilization that inspired European painters. As in England, the contribution of the poets proved essential to shaping American ideas about nature. By 1825, they were calling on artists to depict the wilderness as the most conspicuous fea­ture of the New World and its emerging civilization. Panthe­ism virtually became a national religion during the Romantic era. While it could be frightening, nature was everywhere, and was believed to playa special role in determining the American character. Led by Thomas Cole (1801-1848), the founder of the Hudson River School-which flourished from 1825 until the Centennial celebration in 1876-American painters elevated the forests and mountains to symbols of the United States.

COLE. Like many early American landscape painters, Cole came from England, where he was trained as an engraver, and learned the rudiments of painting from an itinerant artist in the Midwest. It was his genius to invent the means of ex­pressing the elemental power of the country's primitive land­scape by transforming the formulas of the English picturesque, following a summer sketching tour up the Hud­son River. Because he also wrote poetry, Cole was able to create a visual counterpart to the literary rhetoric of the day. Schroon Mountain, Adirondacks shows the peak rising majestically, like a pyramid, from the forest below. It is treated as a symbol of permanence surrounded by death and decay, signified by the autumnal foliage, passing storm, and lightning-blasted trees. Stirred by sublime emotion, the artist heightened the dramatic lighting, so that the broad landscape becomes a revelation of God's eternal laws.

BINGHAM. Fur Traders Descending the Missouri by George Caleb Bingham (1811-1879) shows this close identification with the land in a different way. The picture is both a landscape and a genre scene, and it is full of the vast­ness and silence of the wide-open spaces. The two trappers in their dugout canoe, gliding downstream in the misty sun­light, are entirely at home in this idyllic setting. The asser­tion of human presence in this hospitable setting portrays the United States as a benevolent Eden in which settlers assume their rightful place. Rather than being dwarfed by a vast and often hostile continent, these hardy pioneers live in an ideal state of harmony with nature, symbolized by the waning daylight. The picture canies us back to the river life of Mark Twain's childhood. At the same time. it reminds us of how much Romantic adventurousness went into the west­ward expansion of the United States. The scene owes much of its haunting charm to the silhouette of the black cub chained to the prow and its reflection in the water. This mas­terstroke adds a note of primitive mystery that we shall not meet again until the work of Henri Rousseau.

SCULPTURE

The development of sculpture follows the pattern of painting. However, we shall find it a good deal less venturesome than either painting or architecture. The unique virtue of sculp­ture-its solid, space-filling reality (or, if you will. its "idol" quality)-was not congenial to the Romantic temperament. The rebellious and individualistic urges of Romanticism could find expression in rough, small-scale sketches but rarely survived the laborious process of translating the sketch into a permanent, finished monument. The new standard of uncompromising, realistic "truth" was embarrassing to the sculptor. When a painter renders clothing, anatomical detaiL or furniture with photographic precision he does not produce a duplicate of reality, but a representation of it; while to do so in sculpture comes dangerously close to mechanical re­production-a handmade equivalent of the plaster cast. Sculpture thus underwent a crisis that was resolved only to­ward the end of the century.

CANOVA. At the beginning of the Romantic era, we find at first an adaptation of the Neoclassical style to new ends by sculptors, especially older ones. The most famous of them,

Antonio Canova (1757-1822), produced a colossal nude statue of Napoleon inspired by portraits of ancient rulers whose nudity indicates their status as divinities. The elevation of the emperor to a god marks a shift away from the noble ideals of the Enlightenment that had given rise to Neoclassicism. The glorification of the hero as a noble ex­ample, seen in Houdon's statue of George Washington, is abandoned in favour of the Romantic cult of the indi­vidual. There is no longer any higher authority-neither re­ligion, nor reason is invoked-only the imperative of Greek art remains unquestioned as a style divorced from content. Not to be outdone, Napoleon's sister Pauline Borghese per­mitted Canova to sculpt her as a reclining Venus. The statue is so obviously idealized as to still any gossip; we recognize it as a precursor, more classically proportioned, of Ingres' Odalisque. She is equally typical of early Romanticism, which incorporated Rococo eroticism but in a less sensuous form. Strangely enough, Pauline Borghese seems less three-dimensional than the painting. She is de­signed like a "relief in the round," for front and back view only, and her very considerable charm radiates almost en­tirely from the fluid grace of her contours.

Here we also encounter the problem of representation ver­sus duplication, not in the figure itself but in the pillows, mattress, and couch. The question recurs on a larger scale in Canova's most ambitious work, the Tomb of the Archduch­ess Maria Christina. Its design, again essentially linear and relief like though the statues are carved in the round, has no precedents in earlier tombs: the deceased ap­pears only in a portrait medallion framed by a snake biting its own tail, a symbol of eternity. Presumably, but not actually, the urn carried by the woman in the centre contains her ashes. This is an ideal burial service performed by classical figures, mostly allegorical (the group on the left represents the Three Ages of Man), who are about to enter the pyra­mid-shaped tomb.

What troubles us is that this ensemble, in contrast to the tombs of earlier times, does not include the real burial place-the pyramid is a sham, a shallow facade built against the wall of the church. But if we must view the monument as a sort of theatrical performance in marble, we expect the artist to characterize it as such by cre­ating a "stage space" that will set it apart from its surround­ings (like Bernini's The Ecstasy of St. Theresa). Since Canova has not done this, the performance becomes confusingly realistic. Should we join the "actors" on their perfectly real marble steps? No, for we cannot follow them into a mock pyramid. What distinguishes the real from the mock architecture? To what level of reality does the cloth on the steps belong?

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PREAULT. This dilemma could be resolved in two ways: by reviving a pre-classical style sufficiently abstract to restore the autonomous reality of sculpture, or by a return to the frankly theatrical Baroque. Only the latter alternative proved generally feasible at the time, although there were isolated attempts to explore the former. Auguste Preault (1809­-1879), who was the boldest sculptor of his day and whose personality closely approached the Romantic ideaL experi­mented in both directions. His relief, Slaughter, is brimming with a physical and emotional violence far beyond anything found in Baroque art, yet its expressive distortions, its irrational space filled to the bursting point with writhing shapes, evoke memories of Gothic sculpture. In fact, the helmeted knight's face next to that of the screaming mother hints that the subject itself is medieval: some dread apocalyptic event beyond one's control. But in true Romantic fashion Preault does not define this event. He proclaimed, "Je ne suis pas pour Ie fini. Je suis pour l'infini" (I am not for the finite. I am for the infinite), a play on words conveying his preference for the unfinished over the finished as well as for the infinite over the finite.

RUDE. When Slaughter was shown to the public in 1834 it found few admirers. One of these must have been the some­what older sculptor Francois Rude (1784-1855), as sug­gested by his own masterpiece, the splendidly rhetorical La Marseillaise on one pier of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. The soldiers, volunteers of 1792 rallying to defend the Republic, are still in classical guise, but the Genius of Liberty above them imparts her great forward-rushing movement to the entire group. She would not be unworthy of Puget.

BARYE. The ultimate source of La Marseillaise is pictorial. In a similar way, Stubbs' Lion Attacking a Horse is the sire of animal groups by Antoine-Louis Barye (1795-1875), the Romantic sculptor closest to Delacroix. The forms of his Jaguar Devouring a Hare have energy and volume; their simplicity, for all the anatomical detail, is rare indeed in mid-nineteenth-century sculpture. However, these qualities can be found only in Barye's smaller pieces; as an architectural sculptor he is disappointingly ac­ademic.

CARPEAUX. Rude's real successor in the field of architec­tural sculpture was Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1827-1875), whose famous group for the facade of the Paris Opera, The Dance, perfectly matches Charles Gamier's Neo­Baroque architecture. The plaster model in our illustration is both livelier and more precise than the final stone group. Its coquettish gaiety derives from small Rococo groups such as Clodion's and its sense of scale, too, seems at odds with its size-although the figures look smaller than life, the group is actually fifteen feet tall. Nor is this the only discrep­ancy; Carpeaux's figures, unlike Clodion's, look undressed rather than nude. We do not accept them as legitimate den­izens of the realm of mythology, and they slightly embarrass us, as if "real people" were acting out a Rococo scene. A sin­gle leg, detached from this group, might well be mistaken for a cast from nature. "Truth" here has destroyed the ideal reality that was still intact for Clodion a century before.