|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
| |
|
The 18th and 19th
Centuries
|
|
(Neoclassicism,
Romanticism and
Art Styles in 19th century -
Art Map)
|
Neoclassicism and Romanticism
|
| |
|
see collections:
Francesco Hayez
Eugene Delacroix
see also:
"Between Two
Revolutions"
(From David to Delacroix)
|
The Italian Masters
In comparison with other cultures, the development of Romanticism
was slow in Italy, in literature as well as in painting. Its
principal characteristic was the attribution of historical
significance to individual events, particularly those associated
with the unification of Italy.
Francesco Hayez (1791-1882) did not
possess the dramatic impetus.
nor perhaps the expressive truth, of French painters; for him, the
pictorial fury with which Delacroix translated the immediacy of
events was entirely foreign. He was, however, the most important
figure in the transition from Italian Neoclassicism to Romanticism.
Images became more refined in Italian painting, draughtsmanship
combined with a notable solidity. The artist's illustrations often
assumed the character of a symbolic-romance or, in their lyrical and
sentimental handling of melodramatic events, shared an affinity with
current musical performances in Italy. Have?, favoured a theatrical
style, using backdrops, wings, costumes, and a balanced arrangement
of the characters. The scenery was dictated by a desire for
documentary accuracy, and he developed a symbolic sense of gesture
in his style, which is perfectly exemplified by Melancholy.
|
Francesco Hayez
Melancholy
1842
|
|
THE PEOPLE
|
Eugene Delacroix
Greek Woman among
the Ruins of Missolonghi
1826
|
The heroism of the people who fought for their country and their
faith and who maintained a link with tradition was often used as
subject matter to express grand Romantic political and moral ideals.
Delacroix's Greek Woman among
the Ruins of Missolonghi glorifies the
inhabitants of the Greek city, which they destroyed rather than
surrender to the Turks.
The Italian painter
Francesco Hayez, who in
1841 was proclaimed a "national painter" by the Italian patriot
Giuseppe Mazzini, portrayed the people in the role of a Greek chorus
in his Refugees of Parga. His Romantic subjects never quite lost
their sharp academic outline. The idea of nationhood developed
during the 19th century, when "the people" became a single entity,
treated as a coherent individual. The idealization of the masses
would sometimes lead to stereotypical generalizations of nations or
cultural groups, often bordering on the ridiculous. Romantic artists
often showed the people engaged in struggles, battles, and other
emotionally intense scenes: this theme was also much in evidence in
the narrative prose, poetry, and opera of the time.
|
|
|
Francesco Hayez
Refugees of Parga
1831
|
|
|
__________
__________
|
|
|
The French Masters
Eugene Delacroix used literary, exotic, historical, and also
contemporary events as subjects for his paintings. When he showed
the Massacre at Chios at the Paris Salon in 1824. it caused a
sensation. Suddenly, art no longer had to refer to antiquity but
could presume to document the age in which the artist was living.
Delacroix sought "that expressive force, that energy, that audacity"
that he could not find in the canons of
David's ideal of eternal
beauty. This "force" later emerged in
Gericault's compact, solid
forms based on the contrast between light and shade. The atmospheric
luminosity of Delacroix's landscapes and the brilliant. fierce light
of Morocco brightened his palette with stronger colours. It released
him from the academic technique of chiaroscuro and enhanced the
freedom of his brushwork.
The same vital energy was echoed in the vibrant, tense postures
captured by the animal sculptor and painter Antoine-Louis Barye
(1796-1875). This artist brought an extraordinary vigour to his
violent portrayals of fights between tigers, crocodiles and other
wild beasts. These paintings contrasted strongly with the monumental
stillness and sublime calm of Neoclassical art, which was based on
precise aesthetic principles. With the advent of Romanticism,
sculpture became an almost contradictory medium as regards the ideal
theories of the new aesthetic: hence, it was poorly represented as
an art form at this time. Carnage (1834) by
Auguste Preault
(1809-79) appears as a menacing and visionary attack on violence,
while Romantic individualism found expression in the celebrated
medallions of Pierre-Jean David d'Angers (1788-1856). He represented
the characteristics of his famous sitters (including
Delacroix,
Friedrich, Victor Hugo,
Byron, Paganini, and Rossini) almost to the
point of caricature.
|
| |
DELACROIX
The most important painter of the Romantic movement in France,
Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) began his career n Baron Guerin's workship. There, he met
Theodore Gericault, who would prove to
be a
key influence. Among the other painters he admired was
Constable.
Influential in terms of subject matter were his travels in 1832 to
Morocco, Algeria, and Spain. After years of battles with the Salon,
he was given official approval at the Universal Exhibition of 1855.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Eugene Delacroix
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
born April 26, 1798, Charenton-Saint-Maurice, France
died August 13, 1863, Paris
in full Ferdinand-Eugène-Victor Delacroix the greatest French Romantic painter,
whose use of colour was influential in the development of both Impressionist and
Post-Impressionist painting. His inspiration came chiefly from historical or
contemporary events or literature, and a visit to Morocco in 1832 provided him
with further exotic subjects.
Early life
Delacroix was the fourth child of Victoire Oeben, a descendant of the
Oeben-Riesener family, which had createdfurniture for the French king
and court in the 17th and 18th centuries, and of Charles Delacroix, a
government official, who was ambassador to Holland in 1798 and who died
in 1805 while prefect of Bordeaux. One theory attributes Eugène's true
paternity to the statesman Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. This
belief is strengthened both by Delacroix's strong physical resemblance
to Talleyrand and by the fact that the future painter would consistently
receiveimportant patronage from the French government despite the
nonconformist character of his art.
Whatever the truth of his parentage, Delacroix's childhood was
untroubled, and he would always maintain great affection and admiration
for his father. Up to age 17 he pursued classical studies. Within his
distinguished and artistic family, he formed a passion for music and the
theatre. In 1815 he became the pupil of a renowned academic painter,
Baron Pierre-Narcisse Guérin. He knew the historical painter
Antoine-Jean Gros, and as a young man he visited the salon of the
royalist and painter Baron François Gérard. As early as 1822 he received
the backing of Adolphe Thiers, the statesman and historian, who, as
interior ministerin the 1830s, put Delacroix in charge of architectural
decorations.
A child of his century, Delacroix was affected by the Romanticism of the
painter Théodore Géricault and of friends such as the English painter
Richard Parkes Bonington, the Polish-born composer and pianist Frédéric
Chopin, and the French writer George Sand. He did not, however, take
part in the battles of the Romantic movement waged by Victor Hugo,
Hector Berlioz, and others.
Development of mature style
Delacroix's debut at the Paris Salon of 1822, in which he exhibited his
first masterpiece, Dante and Virgil in Hell, is one of the landmarks in
the development of French 19th-century Romantic painting. Dante and
Virgil in Hell was inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy, but its tragic
feeling and the powerful modeling of its figures are reminiscent of
Michelangelo, and its rich colour shows the influence of Peter Paul
Rubens. Among Delacroix's contemporaries, Géricault, who was the young
painter's best friend until his sudden death in 1824, was also
important.
In his subsequent choice of subjects, Delacroix showed an affinity with
Lord Byron and other Romantic poets of his time, and he also drew
subjects from Dante, William Shakespeare, and medieval history. In 1824,
however, he exhibited at the Salon the Massacre at Chios , a large
canvas depicting the dramatic contemporary massacre of Greeks by Turks
on the island of Chios. The nature of his talent is evident in the unity
he achieved in his expression of the haughty pride of the conquerors,
the horror as well as despair of the innocent Greeks, and the splendour
of a vast sky.
Delacroix had already become interested in the delicate technique of his
English painter friends Richard Parkes Bonington and the Fielding
brothers (Thales, Copley, Theodore, and Newton), and he also admired the
English landscapes of John Constable, which were exhibited in Paris in
1824. Indeed, the luminous tonalities evident in the Massacre at Chios
are said to have been inspired by Constable's style. To round out his
technical and cultural education, Delacroix left for London in 1825.
There his technique, developed by contact with J.M.W. Turner, Constable,
and Sir Thomas Lawrence, acquired the freedom and suppleness that until
then he had been admiring in Rubens and striving to achieve for himself.
Between 1827 and 1832, Delacroix produced masterpieces in quick
succession. Chief among them is The Death of Sardanapalus (1827), a
violent and voluptuous Byronic subject in which women, slaves, animals,
jewels, and rich fabrics are combined in a sensuous but somewhat
incoherent scene. One of his finest paintings on historical subjects,
The Execution of the Doge Marino Faliero (1826–27), dates from this
period as do two works on medieval history, The Battle of Nancy (1831)
and The Battle of Poitiers (1830). He also painted the typically Byronic
subject of Combat Between the Giaour and the Pasha (1827). Like Géricault,
Delacroix explored the newly invented medium of lithography and made a
set of 17 lithographs (1827) illustrating a French edition of Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust.
In 1830 Delacroix painted Liberty Leading the People to commemorate the
July Revolution that had just brought Louis-Philippe to the French
throne. This large canvas mixes allegory with contemporary realism in a
highly successful and monumental manner and isstill perhaps the most
popular of all Delacroix's paintings. The relatively subdued manner of
Liberty Leading the People also reflects a change in Delacroix's style,
which became somewhat more quiet while still retaining elements of
animation and grandeur.
From January to July 1832, Delacroix toured in Algeria, Spain, and
Morocco with the comte de Mornay, King Louis-Philippe's diplomatic
representative to the sultan. Morocco proved to be a revelation to
Delacroix, who found in its people and way of life the Homeric nobility
and beauty that he had never seen in French academic Neoclassicism
itself. The sights of exuberant nature and the beauty of the horses, the
Arabs and their flowing costumes, would henceforth inspire his visual
memory, even in his last works. Delacroix made copious sketches and
notes during the trip and used them to good effect upon his return to
Paris. After Morocco his drawing and paint handling became freer and
hisuse of colour even more sumptuous. The first fruits of his Moroccan
impressions are collected in Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (1834),
in which three sumptuously costumed Arab women and their surroundings
are portrayed in a blaze of exquisitely warm colour harmonies.
Delacroix's other recapitulations of his North African experiences
include Fanatics of Tangier (1838) and Jewish Wedding (1839). He
continued to paint Arab subjects almost to the end of his life.
Building decoration
In the latter part of his career, Delacroix was favoured with a string
of important commissions to decorate government buildings. His first
commission, in 1833–36, was to paint a group of murals for the Salon du
Roi at the Palais-Bourbon. He was subsequently commissioned to decorate
the ceiling of the Library of the Palais-Bourbon (1838–47), the Library
of the Palais du Luxembourg (1840–47), the ceiling of the Galerie
d'Apollon at the Louvre (1850), the Salon de la Paix at the Hotel de
Ville (1849–53; burned in 1871), and the Chapel of the Holy Angels in
the Church of Saint-Sulpice (1849–61). His murals represent the last
great effort of this kind in the tradition of the Baroque ceiling
painters.
During this period Delacroix also painted several canvaseson the largest
scale of his career, notably two for the museum of history at
Versailles: The Battle of Taillebourg (1837) and Entry of the Crusaders
into Constantinople (1840). Among his later easel paintings are ones on
Arab, religious, and classical subjects and several superb scenes of
wild animals and hunts, among them the Lion Hunt of 1858and the Lion
Hunt of 1861. Delacroix painted several notable self-portraits during
the course of his long career and occasionally produced portraits of
such friends as Chopin and Sand (both in 1838).
Delacroix died in 1863, leaving more than 6,000 drawings, watercolours,
and prints to be sold. His Journals are among the most penetrating of
artists' notebooks since those kept by Leonardo da Vinci. A selective
edition of them in English by Hubert Wellington was published in 1951 as
The Journal of Eugène Delacroix.
With Turner, Delacroix was the forerunner of the bold technical
innovations that strongly influenced the development of Impressionism
and subsequent modernist movements. The uninhibited expression of energy
and movement in his works, his fascination with violence, destruction,
and the more tragic aspects of life, and the sensuous virtuosity of his
colouring have helped make him one of the most fascinating and complex
artistic figures of the 19th century.
Rene Huyghe
|
|
|
EUGENE DELACROIX:
"THE ABDUCTION OF REBECCA"
|
Eugene Delacroix
The Abduction of Rebecca
1846
oil on canvas; 82 x 100 cm (32 x 40 in)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
|
This work, which illustrates a popular fictional dramatic scene, is
signed and dated at bottom left. It belongs to the artist's fully
mature period: a second version is housed in the Louvre. The subject
is based on the romantic novel Ivanhoe, written by Sir Walter Scott
in 1820. It recounts a tale of the wars between the Normans and
Saxons at the time of Richard I (1189-99), known as Richard the Lionheart. In the foreground, Rebecca, a rich young Jewish woman, is
lying across the haunch of a horse, held between two men in
flamboyant costumes; one holds her by the waist, the other by the
legs. Below right, in the middle ground, a knight in armour, with
his cloak billowing in the wind, spurs on his mount to reach the
victim. In the upper background, amid trails of smoke, stands a
castle in flames.
|
|
|
|
The animated composition follows a rigorously studied plan, its
balance established by two main right-angled axes. The vertical axis
falls from the edge of the tower to the right hands of the
horseman and the girl, then to the left leg of the abductor seen
from behind. The horizontal axis is lower down, passing through the
feet of the standing abductor and the rear hooves of the horse.
Above this axis, the movement of the composition is arranged in a
series of intersecting lines and contours.
The painting is full of energy and drama. This shines through,
not only from the compositional plan, but also from the dominant
line from which the form is composed. The use of curved lines
accentuates the sense of continuous, dramatic movement, resiliently
bounding and rebounding from one form to another. The dynamic
tension of these curves binds together each element of the
composition, creating a single dramatic whole.
A closer look at the juxtaposition of colours reveals the
careful preliminary research and planning that characterizes
Delacroix's work. The pure colours are laid on the canvas in
adjacent tones that anticipate the experiments of the
Impressionists. The contrast is made up of complementary warm and
cold tones, for example, the red cloth and the green saddle, the
blue area of the sky among the orange clouds and the brown of the
horse's mane. The background has cold touches of green alternating
with warm burnt ochre. The basis of the painting is the rhythmical
cadence of blue-greens and brown-reds, and flashes of white tinged
with flesh fortes or silver.
The vigour of the brushwork is key to the painting's powerful
effect. The artist s movements are immediate and energetic, evident
in the flowing brushstrokes. Light also plays an important role in
the strong emotive content of the picture. In the atmosphere
darkened by the smoke of the fire, the light floods on to the two "good" figures,
the woman and the knight rushing to her assistance. The light makes
them the two focal points of the scene, although more space is given
to the abductors and the horse. Particularly successful is the
dramatic way in which the artist captures every posture, gesture,
and movement of both the humans and the animals.
The castle ramparts emerge from the darkened background of smoke
like an apparition. The smoke spirals up in great plumes, painted
with energetic brushstrokes. Although the smoke is contained in the
upper third of the picture, the light it reflects invades the scene
in the foreground. The orange in the clouds and the red and yellow
streaks in the flames serve as indications of movement in the scene.
|
Eugene Delacroix
The Abduction of Rebecca
(detail)
|
|
|
