Preferences and Perspectives - The Romantic Era

    The Romantic era started around 1780 and ended around 1830. During this era, the artists started to show a sense of emotions, something that was not really done before where reason and order were the most important means to understand the world. This was a reaction against the Neoclassical era where many of the romantic artists emphasized the individual's connection to the nature and a more idealized past than before. The two different styles that I have choosen for this blog post to do some research about is heroism and nationalism. The individual's connection to the past was a big thing during the romantic era and artists were starting to creating an idealized past with actual events that happened. A good example of this is the painting Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix and if you want to read more about that painting, you can visit my last blog post here. The artists were trying to express a more sense and more emotions with the paintings and a lot of the events that just happened were people, heroes, fighting for its country during the Revolution wars that were happening years before.  This is also strongly connected to the next style, which is nationalism, and it started to become bigger after the French and American Revolution when people understood the values in loving and embracing the importance of your own nation. A good example of this is the Hudson River School painters that were illustrating the American landscape in multiple works where they put more attention towards the nature. This style was very different from before where artists started to show sense and emotions in their works. Heroism and nationalism have many different artists and the four one's I have decided to write about are Francisco Goya, Eugene Delacroix, Thomas Cole, and Frederic Edwin Church. 

Francisco Goya - The Third of May, 1808 (1814)

    

    This is a great example of heroism but a really sad one in my opinion. In this painting The Third of May 1808 Goya is trying to illustrate the event that happened that day and as we can see in the painting, there are several French soldiers pointing their guns at the Spanish people. The Spanish men look devastated and scared to death in this situation, which is understandable. We can also see some already dead bodies, covered in blood, laying on the ground in front of the Spanish men. I believe that the Spanish man that is the brightest with yellow pants and a white shirt expresses some sort of heroism to me. His body language feels like he is saying: "Shoot me, not everybody else". It is clear to me that Goya tried to show sense and emotion in this painting, with examples such as the facial expression of both the man in the white shirt and in the background where we can see a man covering his face, showing weakness and vulnerability which started to become more and more accepted during the romantic era.

Eugene Delacroix - The Massacres at Chios (1824)

    Just as Goya's painting, my first impression of this painting by Delacroix is devastation shown from the people in the painting. This is totally understandable, with the circumstances that happened during this massacre in Chios. The Turkish people had sent tons of people to destroy this island and it included two weeks of murder, rape, and torture. During these two weeks, almost 90,000 people got killed. This is a very brutal event but some people survived by hiding in caves or by leaving the island by the sea. Delacroix's intentions with this painting is a bit more vague in my opinion compared to other works from him. If I compare this to Liberty Leading the People I would say that the highlight and main event is not as clear in this one. Delacroix "forced" the viewers to pay attention to the main event in Liberty Leading the People while in this painting everything looks like the same color palette. This makes me think that he did not want to "force" our eyes to any part of the painting but instead look at the painting as a whole and interpret it from there. To connect this with the style heroism I would say that it proves it by the event more than the actual painting. Once we know the backstory to the painting, it is easier to connect to heroism with the Greek people making heroic efforts to survive by hiding in caves and leaving the island by sea. For my personal preferences, I would not like to own any of these paintings with the perspective that I have noticed and seen more paintings that fits my style better, with multiple examples from my last blog post. 

Thomas Cole - The Oxbow (1836)

    Moving on to the next style, we have nationalism with the paintings by Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church. For the first painting The Oxbow, there was a group of painters called The Hudson River School that started to become more famoys during this romantic era. They were a group of painters, originally from New York and they were focusing more on landscape, especially the American landscape itself when painting during this time. This national style of art quickly became famous for its symbolism of the limitless resources and opportunities this country has to offer. Cole did a great work here, creating good depth in the painting which makes the mountains in the background look so far away. This is something I believe he wanted us to think about the painting, and I also believe he wanted to show the beautifulness of the United States. This is nationalism for me and a great connection in my opinion. Nationalism can have many different ways of showing it, in my last blog post, I was mentioning examples such as fighting for your country and patriotism but in this case it is more of a peaceful painting with more emotions attached to it. This is exactly what the romantic era was about and it does not matter if you want to create the message natinoalism with a revolutionary war painting or with a painting of the Hudson River because at the end of the day, the artists were trying to spread the same message to its viewers and fellow Americans. That for me, is really cool and fascinating. 

Frederic Edwin Church - Our Banner in the Sky (1861)

    For the second art piece of the nationalism style I decided to choose Our Banner in the Sky by Frederic Edwin Church. This is a great example of the two ways I just described to create the message of nationalism. This is a landscape painting but the main part of this painting is the United States flag that was created in the clouds, with the stars and the stripes. I believe that Church wanted to create, not propaganda, but more of a prideness to his country and show that to the rest of the world. Patriotism is something I have written about earlier and nationalism and patriotism kind of goes hand in hand. I love this painting and it is definitely something I would like to own, of my own country's flag, in my future home. 

    Also, I know that these two paintings kind of was created right after the romantic era was founded but my reasoning for including this is the great connections I can make with emotions, sense, and the romantic era as a whole when looking at these paintings. I believe this is possible because of the great influence the romantic era had on the future, and we can see this when Church and Cole were trying to bring the emotion pride and that anything is possible in this country with their two paintings of the nature and nationalism. 

Sources: 

“Romanticism Movement Overview.” The Art Story, https://www.theartstory.org/movement/romanticism/.

“Romanticism.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., https://www.britannica.com/art/Romanticism/.

Zappella, Christine. “Francisco Goya, the Third of May, 1808.” Smarthistory, https://smarthistory.org/goya-third-of-may-1808/.