19th Century Art: Movements, Painters & Revolution

Introduction: A Century of Artistic Revolution

During the 19th century, a great number of revolutionary changes altered forever the face of art and those who produced it. Compared to earlier artistic periods, the art produced in the 19th century was a mixture of restlessness, obsession with progress and novelty, and a ceaseless questioning, testing, and challenging of all authority. Old certainties about art gave way to new ones, and all traditional values, systems, and institutions were subjected to relentless critical analysis. At the same time, discovery and invention proceeded at an astonishing rate and made the once-impossible both possible and actual. Most importantly, old ideas rapidly became obsolete, which created an entirely new artistic world highlighted by such extraordinary talents as Vincent Van Gogh, Jacques Louis David, Eugène Delacroix, Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Claude Monet.

Painting in the 19th century, still highly influenced by the spirit of Romanticism, proved to be a far more sensitive medium for the kind of personal expression one should expect from the romantic subjectivity of the time. At the very beginning of the modern period stands the imposing figure of Francisco Goya (1746–1828), the great independent painter from Spain. Indebted to Velázquez, Rembrandt, and the wonders of the natural world, Goya occupies the status of an artistic giant. His artistic range goes from the late Venetian Baroque through the brilliant impressionistic realism of his own invention to a late expressionism in which dark and powerful distortions anticipate much of the violence, pain, and suffering found in the art of the 20th century.

Neoclassicism and the Legacy of Jacques Louis David

If Goya appears to be almost impossible to classify, one of his closest contemporaries in France was Jacques Louis David (1748–1825), the leader of the French school in the age of the French Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte. Although he is traditionally regarded as a Classicist — defined by "aesthetic attitudes and principles based on the culture, art, and literature of ancient Greece and Rome, and characterized by form, simplicity, proportion, and restrained emotion" (Pioch, "Classicism") — David remains the father of academic art produced under official patronage in 19th century France. As an artist, David "re-worked in his own individual and often non-classical style all classical and academic traditions while rebelling against the Rococo as an artificial art form" and "exalted classical art as the imitation of nature in her most beautiful and perfect form" (Peillex 156). He also praised Greek art enthusiastically despite lacking any first-hand knowledge of the subject.

David was also active in the French Revolution as a Jacobin ally of the radical Robespierre and a member of the Revolutionary Convention that voted for the death of King Louis XVI. One of David's best-known paintings is his Death of Marat (1793, oil on canvas), which contains cold, neutral space above the dead body of Jean Marat, slumped in a bathtub with one of his propaganda leaflets still clasped in his left hand — the victim of Charlotte Corday. Marat, a personal friend of David and a revolutionary radical, is vividly rendered and is intended to sharpen the viewer's sense of pain and outrage. The painting is convincingly real through its use of light and shadow, almost as if David had photographed the death scene.

The highest qualities of the sublime and the terrible, along with emotions of awe and admiring wonder, are best illustrated in the works of Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863). According to the French poet Charles Baudelaire, Delacroix "inherited from the great Republican and imperial school of David a love for poets and poetry and a strange and impulsive spirit of authenticity" and was the "soul-stirring translator of Shakespeare, Dante, and Byron" (Holt 216). Although the imagination was the most cherished ideal of the Romantic mind, Delacroix recognized that skill and restraint must accompany it. In his view, "imagination was the most precious gift, the most important faculty, but he believed that the imagination remained impotent and sterile if it was not served by competent and exacting skill" (Holt 217). Delacroix's picture dramas were thus products of his conviction that the power of the imagination, fed and kindled by great literature, art, and music, would synthesize works capable of igniting the imagination of the observer. The best example of this is his Liberty Leading the People (1830, oil on canvas), which presents an allegory of revolution itself through the partially nude, majestic figure of Liberty, whose beautiful features express noble dignity as she waves her fellow French rebels forward to the barricades while holding the banner of the Republic.

Romanticism: Delacroix, Ingres, and the English Landscape Painters

The history of 19th century painting in its first sixty years has often been interpreted as a contest between Eugène Delacroix and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1781–1867), who broke away from David on matters of artistic style. Ingres believed that David's art was too realistic and relied too heavily on Greek influences. For Ingres, painting encompassed flat and linear figures, a manner that was severely criticized as "primitive" and Gothic. Nevertheless, Ingres soon became the leader of the academic forces in their battle against Delacroix and his contemporaries. Ingres' best-known work, Grande Odalisque (1814, oil on canvas), illustrates his rather complex mixture of artistic allegiances. His subject — a reclining nude figure — is traditional, but by converting her into an odalisque, a woman of a Turkish harem, Ingres made a strong concession to the contemporary Romantic taste for the exotic.

During the time of Delacroix and Ingres, another important artistic development was occurring in England, particularly in landscape painting by J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) and John Constable (1776–1837). These two artists were highly influenced by the Romantic movement, best symbolized by the poetry of Byron, Shelley, and Keats. As Elizabeth G. Holt points out, "Turner and Constable emotionalized in both its grand and minute manifestations, lives in the canvases of the English school and created the breadth and scope of nature intermixed with the pathos of time, change, distance and the past" (221). Constable, who exerted an influence on Delacroix, once remarked that painting "is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature" (Peillex 187). He also expressed hope that painting would become "a regularly taught profession… scientific as well as poetic" and insisted that the imagination "cannot stand by a comparison with reality" (Peillex 189) — a statement that suggests Constable was thinking about realism some fifty years before it emerged as a distinct phenomenon in the art world.

Although the term "Impressionism" was first used in 1874 by a journalist ridiculing a landscape by Monet, the bitter controversy that raged for more than twenty years over the merits and qualities of Impressionism began eleven years earlier in 1863, when Edouard Manet (1832–1883) shocked the French public with his Déjeuner sur l'Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass, oil on canvas). The painting portrays a nude woman and two clothed men seated in the woods while enjoying lunch and the obvious flirtations of their naked companion. In this work, Manet attempted to combine a modern setting with a much earlier compositional design, as the painting closely resembles a theme derived from 16th century art, similar to something painted by Raphael. However, because Manet refused to idealize the figures or make the picnic seem less contemporary, many fellow artists and critics were offended — particularly given that the nude woman appears to be a French prostitute, judging from her bold, direct gaze at the viewer.

Generally speaking, the Impressionists sought to create the illusion of forms bathed in light and atmosphere, which required an extensive study of natural light as the source of all color. This important truth led to the revelation that the actual color of an object is always modified by the quality of the light in which it is seen, by reflections from other objects, and by the effects produced by colors placed adjacent to one another. Although it is not strictly accurate that the Impressionists used only primary colors, juxtaposing them to create secondary hues and shades, they did achieve remarkably brilliant effects with their characteristically short, choppy brushstrokes, which accurately captured the true qualities of natural light.

Conclusion

The art of the 19th century was composed of a sequence of competing artistic movements that each sought to establish its superiority, ideologies, and style within the artistic community of Europe. These movements — Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, and Post-Impressionism — ultimately spread far beyond the confines of Europe and made modern art an international entity whose influence can still be felt in the artistic world today.