19th-century European Art: From Romanticism to Post-Impressionism

Professor Kimberly RhodesNEH Distinguished Teaching Professor in the

Humanities & Professor of Art HistoryFALL 2021

Class Schedule

9/20 Introduction & Romanticism

9/27 Romanticism to Realism

10/4 Realism to Impressionism

10/11 Impressionism to Post-Impressionism

10/18 Post-Impressionism

Timeline

1753 Linnaeus’ classification system of plants1757 Edmund Burke on the sublime 1769 James Watt patents the steam engine1789 French Revolution1794 Eli Whitney patents the cotton gin1799 Discovery of the Rosetta Stone1799 Napoleon becomes First Consul1804 Napoleon crowns himself Emperor1821 Coronation of George IV1833 Slavery abolished in British colonies

Romanticism:

“a state of mind, a new attitude to the world that differed radically from Enlightenment rationalism. Romantics privileged emotion, faith, and spirituality over intellect and reason. They preferred spontaneity to calculation, individuality to conformity, and the

freedom of nature to the constraints of culture.” (Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, Nineteenth-Century European Art, 161-2)

“Romantic art [according to Schlegel] was to engage with contemporary society and be relevant to it. It did not have to have a specific style . . . but was to embrace any form of expression, as long

as it was ‘poetic,’ a term that carried associations of imagination, emotion, and naturalness.” (Petra ten-Doesschate Chu,

Nineteenth-Century European Art, 162)

Some Primary Sources

Edmund Burke on the sublime: “whatever is in any sort terrible or is conversant about terrible objects or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime.”

Novalis on the romantic: “By giving the commonplace higher meaning--the familiar an enigmatic look, the known the prestige of the unknown, the finite the appearance of the infinite--I make it Romantic.”

Francisco Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, 1799: “Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and source of their wonders” Goya

Caspar David Friedrich, Chalk Cliffs at Rugen, 1818

Caspar David Friedrich, A Wanderer in a Sea of Fog, 1818

William Blake, The Lamb. From Songs of Innocence, 1789 & The Tyger. From Songs of Experience, 1794

Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Marat, 1793

Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon Crossing the Alps at the Saint-Bernard Pass, 1800-01

Antoine-Jean Gros, Bonaparte Visiting the Plague House at Jaffa, Salon of 1804Orientalism

Francisco Goya, The Execution of the Rebels on the Third of May, 1808, 1814

JMW Turner, Snow Storm—Hannibal Crossing the Alps, 1812

JMW Turner, The Field of Waterloo, 1818

JMW Turner, The Fighting Temeraire, 1839

Theodore Gericault, The Raft of the Medusa, 1819, Romanticism

Eugene Delacroix, Scenes from the Massacre at Chios, 1824

JMW Turner, Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, 1840

detail

JMW Turner, Limekiln at Coalbrookdale, c. 1797

JMW Turner, Rain, Steam and Speed—the Great Western Railway, 1844

John Constable, Cloud Study, c. 1821

John Constable, Cloud Study, c. 1822

John Constable, The White Horse, 1819

John Constable, Stratford Mill, 1820

John Constable, The Hay Wain, 1821

Full scale study for The Hay Wain

Henry Fuseli, Titania and Bottom, 1790

William Blake, Jaques and the Wounded Stag, 1806

Eugene Delacroix (left) Dante and Virgil, 1822 (right) Hamlet

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Grande Odalisque, 1814

Eugene Delacroix, The Death of Sardanapalus, 1827-28, Romanticism