Romanticism After 1789: Géricault’s Raft, Delacroix’s Liberty, Turner and Goya
From Absolute History.
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1789 shattered old certainties and ignited Romantic art. This episode traces how revolution, the sublime, and the individual reshaped painting across Europe.
From the fall of the Bastille, Western artists challenged neoclassical rules and elevated private feeling, nature, and the heroic or tragic individual. We unpack Edmund Burke's pairing of beauty and the sublime and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's call for the dignity of the individual that fueled this turn.
In France, Jacques-Louis David bridges neoclassicism and romantic impulse, from the Oath of the Horatii to Napoleon at the St Bernard Pass, while his pupil Antoine-Jean Gros intensifies emotion. Théodore Géricault transforms a recent disaster into monumental history in The Raft of the Medusa, rebuilding the raft from a survivor's model and seizing the moment a rescue ship is sighted but sails on; later he explores extreme states in portraits from an asylum.
Eugène Delacroix advances the movement with Dante and Virgil, The Massacre at Chios, The Death of Sardanapalus, and the emblematic Liberty Leading the People, where a red-capped, tricolor-bearing Liberty strides with citizens of every class over the July barricades.
In Spain, Francisco de Goya's late vision darkens after illness and deafness. From Los Caprichos and The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters to The Disasters of War and The Third of May 1808, he pioneers an unflinching, anti-heroic language of terror and pity.
Across the Channel, landscape becomes the crucible. John Constable seeks truth in Suffolk with The Hay Wain (Landscape: Noon), Willie Lott's Cottage, and cloud studies he called the "chief organ of sentiment." J.M.W. Turner applies Goethe's color theory to the sublime in Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying and in Rain, Steam and Speed, a locomotive hurtling across the Maidenhead bridge through storm and mist.
In Germany, Caspar David Friedrich renders nature as devotion itself in Monk by the Sea, Abbey in the Oak Forest, and The Cross in the Mountains, turning landscape into an altarpiece.
Romanticism prized freedom, imagination, and the self, handing that liberty to the Impressionists who followed.
#Romanticism #ArtHistory #Goya #Delacroix #Turner #Constable #Géricault #Friedrich
From the fall of the Bastille, Western artists challenged neoclassical rules and elevated private feeling, nature, and the heroic or tragic individual. We unpack Edmund Burke's pairing of beauty and the sublime and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's call for the dignity of the individual that fueled this turn.
In France, Jacques-Louis David bridges neoclassicism and romantic impulse, from the Oath of the Horatii to Napoleon at the St Bernard Pass, while his pupil Antoine-Jean Gros intensifies emotion. Théodore Géricault transforms a recent disaster into monumental history in The Raft of the Medusa, rebuilding the raft from a survivor's model and seizing the moment a rescue ship is sighted but sails on; later he explores extreme states in portraits from an asylum.
Eugène Delacroix advances the movement with Dante and Virgil, The Massacre at Chios, The Death of Sardanapalus, and the emblematic Liberty Leading the People, where a red-capped, tricolor-bearing Liberty strides with citizens of every class over the July barricades.
In Spain, Francisco de Goya's late vision darkens after illness and deafness. From Los Caprichos and The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters to The Disasters of War and The Third of May 1808, he pioneers an unflinching, anti-heroic language of terror and pity.
Across the Channel, landscape becomes the crucible. John Constable seeks truth in Suffolk with The Hay Wain (Landscape: Noon), Willie Lott's Cottage, and cloud studies he called the "chief organ of sentiment." J.M.W. Turner applies Goethe's color theory to the sublime in Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying and in Rain, Steam and Speed, a locomotive hurtling across the Maidenhead bridge through storm and mist.
In Germany, Caspar David Friedrich renders nature as devotion itself in Monk by the Sea, Abbey in the Oak Forest, and The Cross in the Mountains, turning landscape into an altarpiece.
Romanticism prized freedom, imagination, and the self, handing that liberty to the Impressionists who followed.
#Romanticism #ArtHistory #Goya #Delacroix #Turner #Constable #Géricault #Friedrich
