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ARTISTS

Romanticism and Classicism

Two painters who were contemporaries in the late 18th and early 19th centuries illustrate clearly the varying reactions to the great social upheavals of the French and American revolutions and the beginnings of a new, industrial order. They are the Frenchman Jacques Louis David (1748-1825) and the Spaniard Francisco Goya (1746-1828). For David, the strife and uncertainty of a violent present required the antidote of a firmly established order. This he conceived under the influence of contemporary archaeological discoveries and developed in a style of cold and harshly colored areas defined by a precisely rigid line. It rivals in total effect the relief sculpture of classic antiquity. Typical is his Rape of the Sabine Women (1799), though at times his manner becomes more lively in portraits like that of Mme. Recamier (1800).

Goya, by contrast, reacted strongly and positively to the great events of his time; his Execution of the Madrilenos (1814) is a memorable pattern of strong colors painted in vivid silhouettes, embodying the most profound feeling of a great mind shocked by the wanton violence of war. Many portraits of the Spanish royal family which he painted leave no doubt as to the consequences of generations of unrestrained license and debauchery, yet no one of his time studied with a more sympathetic eye the life and ways of the common people. It was the expressive quality of his art which made him the technical inspiration of many of the progressive painters of the later 19th century in France.

The contrasting emphases upon formal order in the painting of David and emotional expressiveness in that of Goya establish the distinction between the two principal trends in early 19th century art: neoclassicism and romanticism. They appear as well in the work of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, on the one hand, and Theodore Gericault and Eugene Delacroix on the other. Ingres (1780-1867) was an assistant of David and a student in the French Academy at Rome, where the admiration he conceived for the painting of Raphael became one of the guiding influences of his entire career. His style is essentially one of line which he used with consummate mastery in scores of sensitively executed pencil portraits, in cold and pompous allegories like the Apotheosis of Homer (1827), and as a form-building device of great flexibility to create effectively organized designs in studies of the nude like the Odalisque (1858), now in the Metropolitan Museum.

Gericault (1791-1824) and Delacroix (1798-1863) sought more immediate and direct emotional values in their paintings which are characterized in general by dependence on color rather than line and by consciously nonclassic subject matter. Gericault's Raft of the Medusa (1819) was held to be a deliberate negation of all that painting should be, since it dealt with a contemporary theme upon a monumental scale. For similar reasons Delacroix was called the murderer of the art in his painting Massacre of Scio (1824), and the free color scheme based upon the tradition of Rubens and Watteau was considered the antithesis of sound pictorial practice. But the feeling for drama and excitement that characterizes Delacroix's painting, as it does the romantic literature of writers contemporary with him, found its most complete expression in patterns of color, and the maintenance by him of the primary importance of this element in painting is one of his most significant contributions to the art of the early 19th century.

Another aspect of early 19th century romanticism was the new feeling for nature which found expression in notable developments in landscape painting. John Constable (1776-1837) regarded the English countryside with a feeling not unlike that of his countrymen Wordsworth and Keats, and its varied moods are embodied in the lively hues of accurately observed color that are found in the Hay Wain (1821) -to mention but one of his many distinguished works. Joseph M. W. Turner (1775-1851), also an Englishman, observed rather the drama of sunrise and sunset and gave form to the emotional reactions of a sensitive temperament in color patterns of brilliant intensity. The methods of both Constable and Turner were to inspire the later 19th century French painters of the Impressionist school. Their more immediate French contemporaries of the so-called Barbizon group have a more sober vision. Theodore Rousseau (1812-1867) and Jean Francois Millet (1814-1875) are of this group. The former, in works like The Edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau (1845) reveals an intimate understanding of the forms of nature as the latter does of its inhabitants in studies of peasant life like the well known Sower (1850) and The Angelus. Camille Corot (1796-1875) was the most distinguished of the Barbizon painters, however; popular for the misty evocations of mood as in the Dance of the Nymphs (1850), his earlier works reveal a sense of landscape as something of almost architectural formality of organization as in the View of Geneva (c.1844) in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.