The Challenge of Romanticism: Art and Architecture

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Artists and Economic Competition. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries social and economic forces were at work that eventually transformed the conditions in which artists worked and expressed themselves. The emergence of a consumer-oriented market economy coupled with industrialization created an increasingly pluralistic society with new sources of wealth and an accelerating division of labor. This society included new consumers (more and more of whom were women) with new tastes and money to invest in art, including books, musical concerts, paintings, and buildings.Among artists, most of whom were men, these new conditions brought about growing specialization, increased competition for consumers, and a greater freedom to create original or singular works of art. By the late eighteenth century, European cities—especially Rome, Paris, and London—suffered from a glut of artists, especially painters. Art schools, such as the British Royal Academy, produced more painters than the market could absorb, and many of them had little hope of employment.

The Cult of the Individual Genius. While these competitive conditions left many an artist in economic straits, they also conditioned artists to seek a means to distinguish themselves from others. One way to differentiate oneself from the others was to pose as the isolated, even alienated, eccentric genius—a role still common among artists. An ideology of self expression served the need to differentiate onself, and the desire to give substance to the individual imagination became a hallmark of Romanticism. It had other effects as well. The cult of the individual genius gave rise to an elitism among some artists who believed that

their work must be separated from crass popularism. In a related way, itgave rise to artists such as the English painter James Barry (1741–1806), who spurned commissions for portraits from wealthy consumers because he refused to gratify the vanities of the newly rich. Yet another result of this individualism was the rise of the idea of freedom, both of the individual and of society. The French Revolution initially championed this idea, and manyRomantics, including painter Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) in his LibertyLeading the People (1831), expressed it in their art. Some artists, such as William Blake (1757–1827), pursued a personal vision to the point of economic noncompetitiveness and thus to financial ruin.Often, Romantic artists—from the French painter Théodore Géricault (1791–1824) to the German musician Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)—embraced the theme of heroic sacrifice in their works, a notion that paralleled the artist’s view of his own activity as a heroic struggle often unappreciated by the ordinary consumer.

Sentiment. The groundwork for the cult of the individual genius was laid during the eighteenth century with the new psychology of sensation—or, as it was called then, “sensibility.” The prizing of feeling and emotion over reason emerged from the Enlightenment justas much as the belief in rationality. Both, after all, sprang from nature. By the mid eighteenth century, this psychology increasingly pervaded the new public, and many artists had come to value sentiment more highly than “cold” reason as the mark of true art. During the second half ofthe eighteenth century the “revolt against reason” became another defining characteristic of Romanticism.

Painting and the Revolt against Reason. The German painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) signaled the dominant values of Romanticism—individualism and sentiment—when he succinctly announced that “the artist’s feeling is law.” He encapsulated in hislandscape paintings a reality beyond the compass of reason, a boundlessnessand immeasurable sense of infinitude set in a scene where stillness and silence hold sway. In this setting, individuals, if there are any in the picture at all, stand isolated and even vulnerable, as in Friedrich’s Capuchin Friar by the Sea (1808–1809). The world of this painting cannot be known rationally; its meaning can only be felt. The revolt against reason was registered in other ways too, as in the drawings, etchings, and paintings of the Spaniard Francisco Goya (1746–1828). Goya still held out a hope for human progress, but he also perceived a demonic nonrational side of human nature, which he expressed vividly in Reason Asleep (1796–1798) and in his series of etchings The Horrors of War (1810–1813).

Painting, Nationalism, and National Identity. Enlightenment rationality was challenged by Romantic sentiment.Similarly, Enlightenment universalism, rooted in the authority of antiquity and the style of Classicism, clashed with nationalism, which was also expressed in Romantic style. Writers such as Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) rejected the timeless authority of the ancients and

countered with an argument that cultures were products of specific histories and expressed themselves in a variety of modes. This cultural pluralism became a foundation stone of nationalism, and artists embraced it. Herder’s cultural, historical pluralism lent itself to thinking of cultures as organisms; that is, as natural, living entities, they pass through stages of youthfulness, maturity, and decay. A nation’s identity was seen to inhere in its artifacts and its people (or “folk”). Artists often seized on the portrayal of ruins as a way to convey a national identity inherited from the past, or sometimes they portrayed it as a yearning for lost vitality, as in A Veteran Highlander (1819) by Scottish painter David Wilkie (1785–1841).

Garden Design and Sentiment. The new psychology of sensation was expressed in landscape architecture as well. In the eighteenth century radically new natural-looking garden designs supplanted the geometric and ordered designs of the previous century. In both centuries “gardens” were like parks, sometimes covering hundreds of acres. Seven tee nth-century gardens, such as those at the royal palace of Versailles or at Vaux le Vicomte in France, were derided in the next century as contrived and unnatural artifice (and thus disconnected from the primal order of

nature). The new “picturesque garden” became popular. Picturesque gardens, which appeared first in England and so became known as“English” gardens, were laid out to give the viewer an impression of a landscape painting, hence the name picturesque. These new gardens also were designed so that walking through the park would be an emotive and, in the term invoked at the time, “sensational” experience. The English garden at Stourhead is a fine example of landscape architectural design according to these principles; as one moved through the park, one was confronted with surprising vistas hidden from view until one crested a hill, emerged from a stand of trees, or rounded a bend. Thus, one’s senses were continually stimulated by unexpected new landscapes, or “pictures,”that evoked a range of moods. Such garden designs were entirely in keeping with the new sensationalist psychology, which held that the natural, human reaction of astonishment heightened the operations of the soul.

The Gothic Revival and Monumental Restoration in Architecture. Architecture, no less than painting, was perceived to bear the stamp of national identity, and—as in painting—nineteenth-century architectural style countered the universalism of Classicism with particularist nationalism. This trend, which associated buildings with the glory of a nation’s past, can be seen in the surge in popularity of the Gothic style for new buildings and in the restoration of old ones. The Gothic revival was most visible in England and Germany, nations that increasingly perceived their character as rooted in a Germanic, or Gothic (as opposed to a Roman and thus Classical), past. New buildings such as the Houses of Parliament in England, which were begun in 1840 after a fire, were designed as a conscious appeal to an organic and unified past. The architect responsible for the decorative elements and furniture in the new buildings, A. W. N. Pugin (1812–1852), intended them to be a vehicle of national unity through which the country, whose social and moral fabric was being torn by industrialization, could heal itself. The Gothic-inspired restoration movement emerged most clearly in France and is associated with the work of Eugéne-Emmanuel Violletle-Duc (1814–1879). Sharing the spreading belief that the soul of a nation was embodied in its great architectural monuments from the past, he set about restoring them to their original splendor. His first project was the medieval church of the Madeleine in Vézélay, a small hilltop town in Burgundy. The guiding principle of his enormously influential and widely read ten-volume Dictionnaire raisonné de I’architecture françalse du Xle au XVIe siècle (Dictionary of French Architecture from the Eleventh to the Sixteenth Century, 1854-1868) was Gothicism. As he wrote in his dictionary, he perceived in Gothic architecture a perfected “structural system in which every element contributed to the dynamic equilibrium of the whole, and in which material was reduced to a daring but reasoned minimum.”

Sources

Barry Bergdoll, European Architecture, 1750-1890 (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2000).

Matthew Cnske, Arf in Europe, 1700-1830: A History of the Visual Arts in an Era of Unprecedented Urban Economic Growth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, volume 2 (New York: Knopf, 1952).

Francois Loyer, Architecture of the Industrial Age, 1789-1914, translated by R.F.M.Dexter (Geneva: Skira,1983).

Robin Middleton and David Watkin, Neoclassical and Nineteenth-Century Architecture (New York: Abrams, 1981).

Fritz Novotny, Painting and Sculpture in Europe, 1780-1880 (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1978).

Robert Rosenblum, Nineteenth-Century Art (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:Prentice-Hall/New York: Abrams, 1984).

William Vaughan, Romantic Art New York: Oxford University Press,1978).