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The 18th and 19th
Centuries
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(Neoclassicism,
Romanticism and
Art Styles in 19th century -
Art Map)
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Neoclassicism and Romanticism
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Gustav Carus
see collections:
Caspar David Friedrich
Johan Christian
Dahl
Ludwig Adrian Richter
George
Stubbs
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Friedrich and the Northern Europeans
In The Sea of Ice, by
Caspar David Friedrich, man is absent,
devoured by the awe-inspiring and adverse elements: there are no
traces of the shipwrecked crew in the icy landscape. Glimpses of
small sections of the boat are visible between the slabs of ice,
which form a silent pyramid rising up to the sky. It is thought that
the sea of ice symbolized the "frozen" political climate and the
despondent mood surrounding the struggles for German independence
from Napoleon's forces. For
Friedrich, nature was like a living,
organic creature, untameable and unpredictable. The artist's
uncommissioned painting The Cross in the Mountains (1808) caused a
sensation when it was first exhibited as an altarpiece in the castle
at Tetschen: the crucified Christ was almost lost in his
surroundings, which became the symbol of a cosmic, existentialist
grief. During the Neoclassical period, such emotion would have been
attained through noble and detailed expression, exemplified by the
tomb of Maria Cristina of Austria by the sculptor
Antonio Canova.
For Friedrich, ancient ruins became the symbol of a world of
solitude, where mankind's vain and futile enterprises are lost in a
bleak, intensely cold and ghostly landscape. The artist's Abbey
in the Oakwood shows the remains of human endeavour laid open to
the forces of the cosmos. This painting may be interpreted as a
parable of the divine, suggesting a promise of eternity. The painter
often looked to his religious faith for answers to metaphysical
questions. It portrays an uncertain, mysterious universe, the
workings of which can be glimpsed, but are never fully revealed and
can never be controlled. The grand Romantic work of
Johan Christian
Dahl (1788-1857) was stylistically-close to that of both Friedrich
and the Norwegian landscape painter
Gustav Carus (1789-1869).
Carus
was also a writer, geologist, physiologist, and naturalist. Both men
were friends of Friedrich. The portrayals of the Norwegian landscape
by these artists pioneered a new spirit of Norwegian nationalism,
and work was produced with a definite Nordic identity. The artists
aims were similar to those of the Sturm und Drang writers, a
proto-Romantic movement that sought to free German arts from French
influence.
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Carl Gustav
Carus
(b Leipzig, 3 Jan 1789; d Dresden, 28 July 1869).
German painter and draughtsman. As well as being an artist, he achieved
considerable success as a doctor, a naturalist, a scientist and a
psychologist. As an artist, he was concerned almost exclusively with
landscape painting, although he never practised it professionally. While
still at school in Leipzig, he had drawing lessons from Julius Diez; he
subsequently studied under Johann Veit Schnorr von Carolsfeld
(1764–1841) at the Oeser drawing academy. From 1813 he taught himself
oil painting, copying after the Dresden landscape painter Johann
Christian Klengel, whom he visited in his studio. In 1811 after six
years at university he graduated as a doctor of medicine and a doctor of
philosophy. In 1814 he was appointed professor of obstetrics and
director of the maternity clinic at the teaching institution for
medicine and surgery in Dresden.
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Gustav Carus
A Gondola on the Elbe near Dresden
1827
Oil on canvas, 29 x 22 cm
Kunstmuseum, Düsseldorf
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Gustav Carus
Oaks at the Sea Shore
1835
Oil on canvas, 117,5 x 162,5 cm
Gemäldegalerie, Dresden
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Gustav Carus
Pilgrim in a Rocky Valley
c. 1820
Oil on canvas, 28 x 22 cm
Nationalgalerie, Berlin
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Gustav Carus
Morning Fog
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Gustav Carus
Blick auf Dresden von der Bruhlschen Terrasse
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Gustav Carus
Das Kolosseum in einer Mondnacht
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Gustav Carus
Fenster am Oybin im Mondschein
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Gustav CarusView of Dresden at Sunset
1822
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Gustav CarusA Landscape at Sunset
1830
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Gustav Carus
Wanderer on the Mountaintop
1818
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Gustav Carus
Goethe Monument
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___________________
___________________
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CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH
Born in Greifswald, a smalt harbour town annexed by Prussia in 1815,
Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) was the sixth of ten children.
His early life was characterized by tragedy: his mother died when he
was seven years old; his younger sister died at only 20 months; and
his brother was drowned as he tried to save Friedrich's life in a
skating accident. The artist studied at the Copenhagen Academy of
Art, one of the most important art schools in Europe, before moving
to Dresden. Admired by his friend Goethe and the dramatist Heinrich
von Kleist, his paintings were purchased by Frederick William III of
Prussia, on the advice of the 15-year-old prince who later become
Frederick William IV. Tsar Nicholas and the Grand Duke Alexander
also bought his works. However,
Friedrich
died in poverty; he was
buried in the Trinity Cemetery at Dresden.
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Caspar David Friedrich
The Sea of Ice
1824
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Caspar David Friedrich
Abbey in the Oakwood
1809
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THE WAYFARER
The concept of nature that emerged with the Romantic movement gave
rise to the figure of the wayfarer, depicted widely in art as well
as literature and music. The wayfarer, or wanderer, was a person who
had renounced the comfort and security of a home in order to travel
through a mysterious and perhaps hostile world, not knowing whether
he would ever return. This theme, illustrated predominantly in
German culture, arises from an anthropological concept whereby man
no longer finds himself at the centre of events and is unable to
control them: indeed, very often the world displays a lack of
harmony and order that he cannot comprehend or face up to.
Romanticism frequently portrayed nature at its most dramatic: raging
tempests, bleak, mountainous landscapes, and forests where one could
become forever lost. These landscapes are places of extraordinary
bleakness and solitude, where man moves aimlessly and wearily,
impelled by an irrational quest for the absolute. Wanderers often
peopled the canvases of Ludwig Adrian Richter (1803-84) and
Caspar
David Friedrich, who successfully captured the essence of the
wayfarer's long and uncertain journey. The Wanderer above the Sea of
Fog is one of the most famous paintings of the Romantic movement: it
symbolizes solitude, expresses despair, and explores the mystery
that engulfs the figure, whose gaze is turned towards the abyss.
This canvas represents the experience of human life as the ultimate
journey, one that leads towards infinity and death.
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Caspar David Friedrich
The Wanderer above the Sea of
Fog
1818
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Ludwig Adrian Richter
Wayfarer Resting in the Mountains
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THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE NIGHT
In contrast to the Apollonian clarity that dominated the aesthetic
ideal of Neoclassicism, the "Romantic night" became a protagonist
in its own right for some artists. It was peopled with spectral
apparitions, strange, ambiguous creatures, and fantastical figures
like those in the paintings of
Henry Fuseli. Night was expressed as
the secret moment of human experience, inhabited by the most
terrifying psychic forces. The success of the nocturne, which became
an elaborate musical form during this period and was favoured by
Chopin, was partly responsible for the theme being adopted and
explored by visual artists. A night setting greatly-intensified the
emotional significance of an ocean horizon, a Gothic ruin gripped by
frost, or a forest where trunks and branches became ghostly,
distorted patterns. There were clear parallels in the operas of
Wagner, which exemplified many of the themes of Romanticism in
music. One powerful portrayal of the night was produced by
George
Stubbs (1724-1806) in
Lion Attacking a Horse. The white horse rears
in terror as a lion springs onto its back out of the darkness. The
contrast between the proud nobility of the domestic animal and the
savagery of the wild beast becomes a symbol of the opposing energies
that inhabit the human soul and sustain its mystery.
The figures in the canvases of
Caspar David Friedrich, such as those
in Moonrise over the Sea, cast their eyes towards a limitless
horizon, lit by a pale, distant moon. Their silent contemplation
seems dominated by the night. Although these figures are placed at
the very edge of the earth and are completely anonymous, the viewer
can empathize with them.
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Caspar David Friedrich
Moonrise over the Sea
1822
Neue
Nationalgalerie, Berlin
It is not so much Friedrich s spirit of
existentialism as his portrayal of nature as
the protagonist of the
piece that was to have such a profound influence on landscape painters
in Europe
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___________________
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George Stubbs
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
born Aug. 24, 1724, Liverpool, Eng.
died July 10, 1806, London
outstanding English animal painter and anatomical draftsman.
The son of a prosperous tanner, Stubbs was briefly apprenticed to a
painter but was basically self-taught. His interest in anatomy,
revealed at an early age, became one of the driving passions of his
life. His earliest surviving works are 18 plates etched for Dr. John
Burton's Essay Towards a Complete New System of Midwifery (1751). In
the 1750s Stubbs made an exhaustive analysis of the anatomy of the
horse. He rented a farmhouse in a remote Lincolnshire village,
where, over a period of 18 months, he undertook the painstaking
dissection of innumerable specimens. After moving permanently to
London in 1760, Stubbs etched the plates for Anatomy of the Horse
(1766), which became a major work of reference for naturalists and
artists alike. Stubbs soon established a reputation as the leading
painter of portraits of the horse. His masterly depictions of
hunters and racehorses brought him innumerable commissions. Perhaps
more impressive than the single portraits are his pictures of
informal groups of horses, such as “Mares and Foals in a Landscape”
(c. 1760–70; Tate Gallery, London).
Stubbs also painted a wide variety of other animals, including the
lion, tiger, giraffe, monkey, and rhinoceros, which he was able to
observe in private menageries. According to the artist Ozias
Humphrey, Stubbs was so convinced of the importance of observation
that he visited Italy in 1754 only to reinforce his belief that
nature is superior to art. Among Stubbs's best-known pictures are
several depicting a horse being frightened or attacked by a lion
(“Horse Frightened by a Lion,” 1770) in which he emphasizes the wild
terror of the former and the predatory power of the latter.
Stubbs's historical paintings are among the least successful of his
works; much more convincing are his scenes of familiar country
activities done in the 1770s. Unfortunately, he tended to execute
his paintings in thin oil paint, and relatively few survive in
undamaged condition. In later life Stubbs knew considerable
hardship. His last years were spent on a final work of anatomical
analysis: A Comparative Anatomical Exposition of the Structure of
the Human Body, with that of a Tiger and Common Fowl, for which he
completed 100 drawings and 18 engravings. The Anatomical Works of
George Stubbs was published in 1975.
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George
Stubbs
A Horse Frightened by a Lion
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George
Stubbs
Lion Attacking a Horse
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George
Stubbs
Lion Devouring a Horse
1763
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George
Stubbs
Lion Attacking a Horse
1769
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Caspar David Friedrich
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
born Sept. 5, 1774, Greifswald, Pomerania [Germany]
died May 7, 1840, Dresden, Saxony
pioneer early 19th-century German Romantic painter. His vast, mysterious
landscapes and seascapes proclaimed man's helplessness against the forces of
nature and did much to establish the idea of the sublime as central concerns of
the Romantic movement.
Friedrich studied from 1794 to 1798 at the academy at Copenhagen but was largely
self-taught. Settling at Dresden, he became a member of an artistic and literary
circle that included the painter Philipp Otto Runge and the writers Ludwig Tieck
and Novalis. His drawings in sepia, executed in his neat early style, won the
poet J. W. von Goethe's approval and a prize from the Weimar Art Society in 1805.
His first important oil painting, “The Cross in the Mountains” (c. 1807),
established his mature style, characterized by an overwhelming sense of
isolation, and was an attempt to replace the traditional symbology of religious
painting with one drawn from nature. Other symbolic landscapes, such as
“Shipwreck in the Ice” (1822), reveal his fatalism and obsession with death.
Though based on close observation of nature, his works were coloured by his
imaginative response to the atmosphere of the Baltic coast and the Harz
Mountains, which he found both awesome and ominous. In 1824 he was made professor
of the Dresden academy. For a long time his work was forgotten; but it was
revived when the 20th century recognized its own existential isolation in his
work.
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ECSTASY AND ESTRANGEMENT
The treatment of time by Romantic artists tended to fall into two
categories. Sometimes, it appeared to be compressed by the whirling
mass of dramatic events, a portrayal that was particularly common in
the works of Delacroix and
Gericault. Elsewhere, however, it appears
that time has suddenly ceased to exist, and cannot be perceived or
contemplated. At such moments, man finds himself estranged, and the
literal meaning of the word "ecstasy" as "outside one's own mind" is
applicable. This definition calls to mind
Friedrich's portrayal of
the human condition, where nature serves as a vast backdrop against
which the irreconcilable solitude of humanity is projected. Monk on
the Seashore again shows the religious symbolism that is often found
in Friedrich's work, while lacking an explicit, specific religion.
It also conveys the presence of a mystery before which man no longer
has any power: he can contemplate it. but to be able to measure
himself against this anonymous force, he must come "out of himself".
The word "monk" comes from the Greek for "alone", and we share his
powerful sense of loneliness with him. The artist's chosen setting
for his painting A Man and a Woman Contemplate the Moon is a German
forest, in which there is no visible path for the figures to follow.
Among the dark silhouettes of the trees linger two figures who look
across the landscape at the moon, which hangs low in the night sky.
A symbol of Christ, the moon indicates a hope given to humankind; it
is also a sign of the supernatural world in which that hope may be
eventually fulfilled.
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Caspar David Friedrich
A Man and a Woman Contemplate the Moon
1830-35
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Caspar David Friedrich
Monk on the Seashore
1810 |
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see
collections:
Caspar David Friedrich
Johan Christian
Dahl
Ludwig Adrian Richter
George
Stubbs
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