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| November 2007 |
| Billie Silvey |
| Four Romantic Artists |
| Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) |
| The Spaniard Goya expressed the democratic ideals of the Romantic period by portraying the common coarseness of the nobility and the nobility of common people. In 1800, he painted Charles IV and the Royal Family with a startling realism that displayed their smug stupidity. Goya himself appears with his easel in the left background. |
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| Napoleon’s troops occupied Madrid in 1808, setting up his brother Joseph as ruler. From then until 1814, Spain was in a continuous state of revolt. Goya’s statement on the arrest and execution of innocent civilians is seen in a massive painting, the Third of May 1814, which depicts the absurdity of war. The anonymous soldiers are seen as a uniform row of backs, while their victims form the expressive center of attention in the painting. |
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| Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) |
| Many of the major themes of the Romantic movement are evident in the art of the period. The following four artists, from different countries and decades, and in differing styles, demonstrate some of those themes. |
| Friedrich was a landscape painter. In his Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, he found his own way of glorifying the individual by presenting him against a backdrop of the dramatic extremes of nature in the Alps. But his landscapes go beyond the classical enjoyment of beauty to a mystic expression of the spiritual. As he put it, “The painter should paint not only what he has in front of him, but also what he sees inside himself.” |
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| In his Cloister Cemetery in the Snow, Friedrich combines the gothic theme of the Romantic period with its preoccupation with death. He also expresses his own religious sentiments. |
| Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) |
| Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) |
| His later paintings were often distinguished by a vortex in which all revolves around a center point. His works gradually grew less representative, pointing toward the Impressionists to follow. Marked by extremes, they were either calm and peaceful or driving and turbulent. |
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| The English Turner also was a landscapist, but he was less representational than Friedrich. Turner was fascinated by the interplay of atmosphere and light. His characteristic luminesence was achieved by underlaying his paint with white as opposed to black. |
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| The French Delacroix was perhaps the most Romantic of the four. His paintings are massive canvases, filled with emotional figures. His Massacre of Chios represents the exotic theme of Romantic art, with distant lands and historical references. At a time when important paintings were done in the style of the Old Masters, this painting was so unusual that it was called "The Massacre of Painting." |
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| His Liberty Leading the People, his most distinctly French work, celebrated the Revolution of 1830. It pays homage to the Romantic theme of freedom, recalling that other Lady Liberty, the statue sent as a gift from France to the young United States. |
| His Slave Ship suggests the horrors of slavery and the slave trade in its litter of bodies, its sea monsters in the foreground of the painting, and its lurid sky. |