Discuss the impact of French Revolution on

Romantics.Only the impacts.

In the decades following the French Revolution and Napoleon’s final defeat at
Waterloo (1815) a new movement called Romanticism began to flourish in
France. If you read about Romanticism in general, you will find that it was a pan-
European movement that had its roots in England in the mid-eighteenth century.
Initially associated with literature and music, it was in part a response to the
rationality of the Enlightenment and the transformation of everyday life brought
about by the Industrial Revolution. Like most forms of Romantic art, nineteenth-
century French Romanticism defies easy definitions. Artists explored diverse
subjects and worked in varied styles so there is no single form of French
Romanticism.

Intimacy, spirituality, color, yearning for the infinite

Even when Charles Baudelaire wrote about French Romanticism in the middle of
the nineteenth century, he found it difficult to concretely define. Writing in his
Salon of 1846, he affirmed that “romanticism lies neither in the subjects that an
artist chooses nor in his exact copying of truth, but in the way he feels....
Romanticism and modern art are one and the same thing, in other words:
intimacy, spirituality, color, yearning for the infinite, expressed by all the means
the arts possess."

One might trace the emergence of this new Romantic art to the painting of
Jacques-Louis David who expressed passion and a very personal connection to his
subject in Neoclassical paintings like Oath of the Horatii and Death of Marat. If
David’s work reveals the Romantic impulse in French art early on, French
Romanticism was more thoroughly developed later in the work of painters and
sculptors such as Theodore Gericault, Eugène Delacroix and François Rude.

In 1810, Germaine de Staël introduced the new Romantic movement to France

when she published Germany (De l’Allemagne). Her book explored the concept
that while Italian art might draw from its roots in the rational, orderly Classical
(ancient Greek and Roman) heritage of the Mediterranean, the northern
European countries were quite different. She held that her native culture of
Germany—and perhaps France—was not Classical but Gothic and therefore
privileged emotion, spirituality, and naturalness over Classical reason. Another
French writer Stendhal (Henri Beyle) had a different take on Romanticism. Like
Baudelaire later in the century, Stendhal equated Romanticism with modernity. In
1817 he published his History of Painting in Italy and called for a modern art that
would reflect the “turbulent passions” of the new century. The book influenced
many younger artists in France and was so well-known that the conservative critic
Étienne Jean Delécluze mockingly called it “the Koran of the so-called Romantic
artists.”

The direct expression of the artist's persona

The first marker of a French Romantic painting may be the facture, meaning the
way the paint is handled or laid on to the canvas. Viewed as a means of making
the presence of the artist’s thoughts and emotions apparent, French Romantic
paintings are often characterized by loose, flowing brushstrokes and brilliant
colors in a manner that was often equated with the painterly style of the Baroque
artist Rubens. In sculpture artists often used exaggerated, almost operatic, poses
and groupings that implied great emotion. This approach to art, interpreted as a
direct expression of the artist’s persona—or “genius”—reflected the French
Romantic emphasis on unregulated passions. The artists employed a widely varied
group of subjects including the natural world, the irrational realm of instinct and
emotion, the exotic world of the “Orient” and contemporary politics.

Man and nature

The theme of man and nature found its way into Romantic art across Europe.
While often interpreted as a political painting, Théodore Géricault’s
remarkable Raft of the Medusa (1819) confronted its audience with a scene of
struggle against the sea. In the ultimate shipwreck scene, the veneer of civilization
is stripped away as the victims fight to survive on the open sea. Some artists,
including Gericault and Delacroix, depicted nature directly in their images of
animals. For example, the animalier (animal sculptor) Antoine-Louis Barye
brought the tension and drama of “nature red in tooth and claw” to the exhibition
floor in Lion and Serpent (1835.)

Another interest of Romantic artists and writers in many parts of Europe was the
concept that people, like animals, were not solely rational beings but were
governed by instinct and emotion. Gericault explored the condition of those with
mental illness in his carefully observed portraits of the insane such as Portait of a
Woman Suffering from Obsessive Envy (The Hyena), 1822. On other occasions
artists would employ literature that explored extreme emotions and violence as
the basis for their paintings, as Delacroix did in Death of Sardanapalus (1827-28.)

Eugène Delacroix, who once wrote in his diary “I dislike reasonable painting,” took
up the English Romantic poet Lord Byron’s play Sardanapalus as the basis for his
epic work Death of Sardanapalus (below) depicting an Assyrian ruler presiding
over the murder of his concubines and destruction of his palace. Delacroix’s
swirling composition reflected the Romantic artists’ fascination with the “Orient,”
meaning North Africa and the Near East—a very exotic, foreign, Islamic world
ruled by untamed desires. Curiously, Delacroix preferred to be called a Classicist
and rejected the title of Romantic artist.

Whatever he thought of being called a Romantic artist, Delacroix brought

his intense fervor to political subjects as well. Responding to the overthrow
of the Bourbon rulers in 1830, Delacroix produced Liberty Leading the
People (below, 1830). Brilliant colors and deep shadows punctuate the
canvas as the powerful allegorical figure of Liberty surges forward over the
hopeful and despairing figures at the barricade.

That intensity of emotion, so characteristic of French Romantic art, would be

echoed if not amplified by the sculptor François Rude’s Departure of the
Volunteers of 1792 (La Marseillaise) (1833-6). Its energetic winged figure of
France/Liberty, a modern nike, seems to scream out as she leads the native
French forward to victory in one of the very few Romantic public monuments.

Today, French Romanticism remains difficult to define because it is so diverse.

Baudelaire’s comments from the Salon of 1846 may still apply: “romanticism lies
neither in the subjects that an artist chooses nor in his exact copying of truth, but
in the way he feels.”