Painting

C

German Romantic Painting

Of Germany's romantic artists, Caspar David Friedrich was the leading figure. Landscape was his favored vehicle of expression. He imbued his hypnotic pictures with religious mysticism, portraying the earth undergoing transformations at dawn and sunset, or in the fog and mists, perhaps alluding thereby to the transience of life. Philipp Otto Runge also devoted his brief career to painting mystical landscapes. Morning (1808-1809, Kunsthalle, Hamburg) is part of an otherwise unfinished allegorical landscape cycle, The Four Phases of the Day.

D

American Romantic Painting

America's first truly romantic artist was Washington Allston, whose paintings are mysterious, brooding, or evocative of poetic reverie. Like other romantics, he was inspired by the Bible, poetry, and novels, as is evident in numerous works. Several artists working between 1820 and 1880 are now distinguished as the Hudson River School; their enormous canvases reveal their reverence for the beauty of the American landscape. Thomas Cole, the most noteworthy of these painters, charged his scenes with moral implications, as is evident in his epic series of five allegorical paintings, The Course of Empire (1836, New-York Historical Society, New York City).

In mid-19th-century landscape painting there appeared a new trend, now defined as luminism, an interest in the atmospheric effects of diffused light. Among the luminist painters were John F. Kensett, Martin J. Heade, and Fitz Hugh Lane. A sense of “God in nature” is apparent in their pictures, as in the earliest works of the Hudson River School. In contrast to the smaller and more intimate luminist works—for example, Kensett's scenes along the Rhode Island shore—Frederic E. Church and Albert Bierstadt painted the spectacular scenery of South American jungles and the American West on enormous canvases. See American Art.

X

19th-Century Nonromantic Painting

Although romanticism was the dominant movement in the arts throughout much of the 19th century, other—completely opposite—tendencies existed, and certain painters worked outside any tradition. For example, Francisco de Goya, Spain's foremost painter, cannot be defined by alliance with a particular art movement. His early works are in a modified rococo style, and his late works (exemplified by the remarkable Black Paintings on the walls of his home, the Quinta del Sordo) are expressionistic and hallucinatory. In portraits of the royal family—for example, Family of Charles IV (1800, Prado)—he emulated a device used by his earlier compatriot Velázquez (in Las meninas) and included himself at the easel. But, unlike the work of Velázquez, Goya's portraiture was never objective; his psychological acumen reveals the vapidity of his subjects, and his brilliant brushwork bluntly records their physical shortcomings.

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A

Realism

About the middle of the 19th century in France, the painter Gustave Courbet, rejecting both neoclassicism and romanticism, proclaimed a one-man movement called realism. He had no interest in history painting, portraiture of heads of state, or exotic subject matter, for he believed that the artist should be realistic and paint everyday events involving ordinary people. The milieu chosen by Courbet for many of his canvases was Ornan, his native village in eastern France; there he portrayed laborers building a road, townspeople attending a funeral, or men sitting around the dinner table listening to music and smoking. Although there was no formal realist movement in art, trends in the work of certain other 19th-century painters can be identified as realistic. Honoré Daumier, although better known for his lithographs, painted small realistic canvases of Paris street life, and Jean Millet, of the Barbizon school, is sometimes termed a social realist.

B

Late 19th-Century American Painting

Three great American geniuses—Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and Albert Pinkham Ryder—worked in the late 19th century independent of the major art movements on the continent. Homer explored humanity's struggle against the forces of nature in numerous oils and watercolors of the sea and shore. Like the luminists before him and the impressionists of his own day—with whom he was otherwise not aligned—Homer showed a keen interest in light and atmospheric effects. Eakins also used light with great effectiveness in his powerful realistic paintings of surgeons—for example The Gross Clinic (1875, Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia)—and a series of portrayals of rowers on the Schuylkill River, meticulously planned and executed in every detail. Ryder, on the other hand, turned from external reality to explorations of the interior self; his reduction of objects to patterns and silhouettes has affinities with the symbolists. Favorite motifs were boats, sea, and night sky, which Ryder infused with romantic and mystical feelings.