Western Art: Romanticism

Russia experiences a flowering of literature and the arts despite the repressions of this period.

Noted European and American painters travel with traders, explorers, and expeditions for the opportunity to paint the West and its Native American peoples.

Among those who encounter and paint the Assiniboine from life are painters Karl Bodmer and George Catlin.

Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, now thirty-two, has worked in Italy for the past three years, sketching the Italian countryside.

Rejecting neoclassical techniques in favor of heavy brushstrokes and dense impasto, Corot combines white lead paint with other hues to produce an extraordinary luminosity in his landscapes.

Though intended as studies, the plein-air Italian paintings’ avoidance of academic values, coupled with Corot’s faithfulness to natural light, anticipates Impressionism, which some decades on is to revolutionize art by a taking a similar approach—quick, spontaneous painting done in the out-of-doors.

However, where the Impressionists will use rapidly applied, unmixed colors to capture light and mood, Corot usually mixes and blends his colors to achieve his dreamlike effects.

The world loses an acute observer of society with the death of the brilliant Spanish painter and printmaker Francisco Goya, who dies at eighty-two in voluntary exile in Bordeaux on April 16, 1828.

Eugène Delacroix, having rejected the norms of Academicism in favor of Romanticism and having explored various romantic strands, knits them together in the Death of Sardanapalus (1827-8).

The thirty-year-old painter vivifies his emotionally stirring painting of the death of the Assyrian king with beautiful colors, exotic costumes, and tragic events, depicting the besieged king watching impassively as guards carry out his orders to kill his servants, concubines, and animals.

The literary source is a play by Byron, although the play does not specifically mention any massacre of concubines.

The availability of tube paints has opened the outdoors to painters who wish to capture landscapes directly from nature rather than perform studio translations of pen-and-pencil sketches into color from memory.

The influential young English Romantic landscape painter Richard Parkes Bonington, has, by example, popularized watercolors on the Continent, until now a province of British artists.

Unfortunately, the 26-year-old Bonington dies of tuberculosis in London in September 1828.

French artist and chemist Louis Daguerre, having experimented on making pictures from 1824, showing dioramas around France, England and Scotland, in 1829 joins French inventor Nicéphore Niépce, said to have first produced long lasting images in 1824, in the quest to perfect the photographic process.

Grandville, the pseudonym of French caricaturist Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard, had at the age of twenty-one come to Paris, where he soon afterwards published a collection of lithographs entitled Les Tribulations de la petite proprieté.

He followed this by Les Plaisirs de toutdge and La Sibylle des salons.

In 1828-29, he publishes a satirical work entitled “Metamorphoses du jour” (“Present-day Metamorphoses”), a series of seventy scenes in which individuals with the bodies of men and faces of animals are made to play a human comedy.

These drawings are remarkable for the extraordinary skill with which human characteristics are represented in animal facial features.

The success of this work leads to his being engaged as artistic contributor to various Parisian periodicals, such as Le Silhouette, L'Artiste, La Caricature, and Le Charivari.

Grandville, the pseudonym of French caricaturist Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard, had at the age of twenty-one come to Paris, where he soon afterwards published a collection of lithographs entitled Les Tribulations de la petite proprieté.

He followed this by Les Plaisirs de toutdge and La Sibylle des salons.

In 1828-29, he publishes a satirical work entitled “Metamorphoses du jour” (“Present-day Metamorphoses”), a series of seventy scenes in which individuals with the bodies of men and faces of animals are made to play a human comedy.

These drawings are remarkable for the extraordinary skill with which human characteristics are represented in animal facial features.

The success of this work leads to his being engaged as artistic contributor to various Parisian periodicals, such as Le Silhouette, L'Artiste, La Caricature, and Le Charivari.

Samuel Palmer, a key figure in English Romanticism, produces such visionary pastoral paintings as “In a Shoreham Garden”, circa 1829, depicting a rustic Kentish garden in a mystic light.