Romanticism and Realism
British and French Prints 1800 – 1870
19 Jul – 26 Oct 1997
Catalouge Essay
Realism against symbolism, either classicism or romanticism, idealism versus naturalism:
Art has always worked out its tensions by presenting oppositions.
But all these tendencies are present at any one time. Sometimes one style dominates, and talented young artists flock to the banner.
Two hundred years ago in Europe, Romantic ideas began to prevail against the neo-classical values of the late 18th century. Instead of admiring restraint, harmony and balance, Romantic artists asserted the importance of emotion and drama. The present was more vital than the past, irrational dynamism more desirable than static perfection. Classical art's sobriety provoked a strong resurgence of passion, colour and imagination.
The belief that art, music and literature should elicit emotional rather than intellectual responses led to a Romantic view of art's exalted, almost religious role. In England, William Blake, John Martin and Henry Fuseli attempted to express their inner visions and deepest responses to the world around them. These ranged from fear of and delight in the supernatural to awe inspired by the grandeur of nature. Their art reached to an indefinable realm of the sublime, encompassing beauty and death, light and obscurity.
Poor, eccentric, little known in his lifetime, William Blake is now celebrated as a poet and a visionary. His illuminated books and manuscripts consist of small but intense watercolours, relief etchings and calligraphy Blake preferred to illustrate texts that had a deep resonance for him, passages from the Bible as well as his own verse. Jerusalem the emanation of the giant Albion, on which Blake worked between 1804 and 1820, is a prophetic poem about the history and salvation of Britain. He weaves together biblical tales and legends from antiquity, his visions conveyed in words and vivid pictures.
Plate 32 portrays Vala attempting to cover the naked Jerusalem with her veil. Jerusalem, a manifestation of female nature, estranged from Albion, is flanked by her daughters. They stand on an island lapped by the sea, with St Paul's Cathedral on the left and Westminster Abbey to the right. The classical architecture of St Paul's represents the organised religion despised by Blake, while Westminster stands for the living Gothic tradition. Delicate washes of watercolour and translucent ink enliven the etched sepia delineation of the women's bodies. Their muscles are strongly emphasised, in the manner of Michelangelo.
After success with his grandiose paintings of biblical subjects, John Martin began printmaking in the 1820s. The 24 mezzotint compositions he produced to illustrate Milton's Paradise Lost 1824 were worked directly onto the new, soft steel printing plates, which allowed more impressions than copper plates. On their exhibition at the Royal Society of British Artists in 1825, a critic commented 'there is a wildness, a grandeur and a mystery about his designs which are indescribably fine'. Martin is noted for his use of dramatic scale, as well as the striking tonal effects of mezzotint — rich blacks to brilliant whites achieved by burnishing the plate from darkness into light.
A changing Europe saw new icons emerge, new bearers of the collective imagination. Napoléon sought to free the Continent from the old regimes, but increasingly tried to dominate it with French military power. Beethoven at first supported the liberator, then opposed a nationalist dictator, Britain was at war with France from 1793 until 1815, which allowed little artistic dialogue across the Channel.
Nicolas-Toussaint Charlet's homely yet outstanding French soldier 1818 is a new figure of bravery, enduring the carnage of a Napoleonic battlefield. He is Everyman, the embodiment of domestic heroism, now no longer aristocratic. The soldier stands for the suffering, the victories and defeats of the French people which have forged a new nation.
Newly-prized passions challenged older ideals of clarity and calmness. Any experience which enhanced sensation was valued for its intensity. For Eugene Delacroix and Théodore Géricault, wild animals — or even exotic peoples — concentrated the emotions. Delacroix portrayed a Royal tiger 1829, its powerful body brooding on a flat ground against distant mountains. The tiger becomes another bony landscape, its fur stroked in with velvety lithographic crayon, the whole dominated by the beast's crystalline, palpably yellow eyes.
European thinkers — geographers, philosophers, theologians, antiquarians, writers — started to explore another world of beliefs, of the senses, of experience. Their craze for novelty focused on Arabia and Turkey, the politically decadent societies of the waning Ottoman Empire. Europeans saw the Middle East as powerful and unpredictable, while the element of sensuality in Muslim civilisation was a shock to Western sensibilities. For Antoine-Jean Gros and Géricault among others, the military caste of the Mamelukes, the mercenaries who ruled Egypt, displayed the virile virtues. Ousted by the imperial forces of Britain and France, some joined Napoléon. Their courage and sacrifice were celebrated by Géricault in his monumental lithograph Mameluke of the Imperial Guard defending a wounded trumpeter against a Cossack 1818.
At this time, horses exemplify either wild nature or human mastery. Stallions fight, or are devoured by, lions and tigers; cavalry or Arab warlords ride them; they also show their bloodlines and racing prowess. In Adonis 1824 by James Ward, a racehorse stands on a rocky headland, mane and tail swirling in the wind: brute nature, tamed yet untamed.
Francisco del Goya conveys extremes of emotion in his etching series on Spanish politics and society — Disasters of war; Proverbs, Caprichos. He satirises repressive institutions, brilliantly exposing human behaviour and character. During his exile in France, from 1824 until his death in 1828, Goya experimented with the new medium of lithography. His last print series, The bulls of Bordeaux 1825, reveals the crowd as generating animal passions. Division of the arena spotlights the matadors and bulls, at the same time including us, the viewers, in the drama. Goya's agitated crayon depicts the spectacle and the restless crowd from a vantage point high in the stands.
The Orient, and Arabia in particular, was more than the scene of military adventures: it was the location of biblical events from the Old Testament and the life of Jesus. David Roberts and David Wilkie travelled to Egypt, Syria and Turkey in the 1830s and 1840s, viewing the peoples and landscapes of the Middle East as characters in, or settings for, ancient religious texts. It was assumed that contemporary Palestinian dress had not changed, that despite Islam, Arabic civilisation had frozen for over a millennium.
Roberts documented the remnants of the many empires he saw — Petra, Egypt, Greece, Rome and the Ottoman Empire. The pursuit of the exotic posed Europe as the centre, a stable, domestic environment from which journeys could begin. English 'milords' ventured into rural Britain, much as they travelled to France, Switzerland or Italy to experience the picturesque and the sublime. In art, J.M.W. Turner showed new vistas of mountains, the scenery explored in poetry by Wordsworth or Coleridge. Eugène Isabey represented the cliffs and mountains of France as a newly-discovered landscape of the mind: vertiginous, remote, veiled in mystery and romance.
Pastoral landscapes show the charming world of shepherds and their flocks, a theme drawn from Virgil's poetry. Samuel Palmer's The sleeping shepherd 1857 dreams in his vine-clad bower, as the sun rises on a ploughman already at work. James Duffield Harding's bucolic scene of Endsleigh, Devon 1827 represents another, less literary rendition of a specific place. Both are idealised: Palmer looks to Blake where Harding relies on John Constable's transcendent art based on close observation of nature.
Camille Corot disseminated his versions of classical landscape with etchings, lithographs and the proto-photographs of clichés-verre, or glass prints. His views of Rome or the Barbizon forest look backward to idyllic landscapes by Nicolas Poussin, the French painter of 17th-century Italian Arcadia. In his etching Near Rome 1866, narrow hatching creates the effect of light through leaves, in contrast to heavier, looser lines for the tree trunks. Corot's vision is that of a woodland inhabited only by philosophers, not the urban reality of Europe in the 1860s.
One measure of the shift from Romanticism to Realism is the artist's attitude towards human presence in the landscape. For the Barbizon artists — Jean-Francois Millet, Charles Daubigny and Ferdinand Chaigneau especially — the people who worked the land were a central preoccupation, not merely exotic appendages.
Herders, labourers, needleworkers are the subejects, in their rural or domestic settings. Millet’s Diggers 1855-56 are hard at work in a field, but the simple, solid figures achieve a kin of nobility. As well as painting in oils, Millet used the medium of etching to distribute many copies of his images.
Social and political change reflected the shift from agricultural to urban life for a majority of people. Against the worthy, picturesque or classical depictions of country life stood the lively, almost journalistic view of the 19th-cntury city life, usually in the capitals of France and England, Paris and London conjured up bustling sophistication, trade, culture and progress. For the Englishman on the Grand Tour, like the artist Thomas Shotter Boys, Paris meant the medieval remnants of the Notre Dame.
Edouard Manet recorded the tragedy of the anarchists and socialists of the Paris Commune of 1871. After military defeat by the Prussians, Parisians revolted against their reactionary French rulers. Manet’s The barricade 1871 proposes the artist as witness: government forces execute the French patriots staging a last insurrection. Central to the composition is a line of soldiers shooting a horrified victim. Manet’s reaction is conveyed by the sketchy, animates quality of his lithographic crayon.
After the 1848 revolutions failed, many artists on the Continent were more involved in burning aesthetic questions than in politics. The American etcher and painter James McNeill Whistler lives in France and England from 1855. He was an outsider who participated in the debates of ‘advanced art’ – the etching revival, plein-air or open air art, increasing abstraction and symbolism. Instead of reworking sketches to produce conventional academic compositions, modern painters left their studios. They took their easels into the streets or out in the countryside. From 1857 Whistler often worked ‘from nature’, drawing directly onto his small, prepared etching plates.
Whistler’s brilliant studies of old women, village streets, his nephew and niece, and his mistress Furnette were collected for publication as Twelve etchings from nature 1858, known as The French set. At the time the medium of etching was being revitalised on both sides of the Channel. In Britain it was promoted by Whistler's brother-in-law Seymour Haden, a successor to the engraving tradition of Blake and Turner and the pastoral landscapes of Constable and Harding. Whistler's daring etching technique and direct approach produced new effects of subtlety and strength.
In the struggle of ideas last century, the Romantics won the early years while Realists held the central decades. But how distinctive are the two groups? Romantic artists looked inward or far away for their inspiration, rather than directing their view onto prosaic objects. The English mystics saw religious visions, the French imperial grandeur, while both interpreted the animal world as nature unconfined. By mid-century, scientific, dispassionate investigation of nature and society seemed to hold the key to a new understanding of the world. The Romantic search for exotic and heroic subjects in contemporary life was over, Realists preferring more humble material.
The Realists, committed to objectivity, were criticised for their reluctance to moralise: they did not show poverty as either pitiable or ennobling, for example. In fact, they did make strong visual statements about beliefs and institutions, particularly the conditions of urban and rural life, in the new ways they depicted everyday subjects. The heightened passions of Romanticism are often contrasted with the sober observations of Realism. But it is clear that the art of both groups is based on intense scrutiny of their subjects. Realist artists applied and carried further the Romantic program of art. Rather than conflicting aesthetic models, perhaps the main difference is one of mood.
Christine Dixon and Kathryn Weir