• Identify major figures in Romantic and Realist humanities and their works. (CO1)

Romanticism and Realism

All non-cited images were gathered from the free domain and are not under any copyright law restrictions. All images gathered from wikipedia.org.

The Rise of Romanticism• By 1800, Neoclassicism was the dominant style in European art and architecture, but Romanticism was beginning to emerge.

French painting would oscillate for four decades between the classical and intellectual paintings of artists such as Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and the romantic and emotional paintings of Delacroix.

While classicism was based on logic, rigor, clarity, and exactitude, romanticism stressed inexactitude and indeterminacy.

The Rise of Romanticism

One notable Romantic painter was Francisco Goya, who was the most important chronicler of France’s war with Spain.

In the Romantic era, sculpture fell out of favor.

The Rise of Romanticism

Romantics embraced Gothic architecture.

• Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s autobiographical Confessions was a celebration of the self and a powerful example of reflective self-analysis.

Bodoklecksel. Reims Kathedrale. 2006. JPG.

• The unity of humanity with nature was a special theme of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The Rise of Romanticism

• Living close to nature was, for Henry David Thoreau, the very source of humankind’s strength.

The Rise of Romanticism

Much nineteenth century literature focused on human ignorance and the search for truth.◦ Examples include:

Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, in which Captain Ahab is seeking a final truth in the form of a great white whale.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, who is always trying to figure out “who done it.”

William Blake’s poetry showed him to be a man with a profound interest in human emotions.

Romanticism and Literature

Probably the most important literary event in the Romantic era was the publication in 1798 of the Lyrical Ballads, co-authored by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which rejected the sophisticated syntax and vocabulary of Neoclassical writing.

One of the great English Romantic poets

was Lord Byron, a free spirit who was known for his unconventional behavior.

Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is a fully Romantic work that breaks new ground in the violence of its scenes and the extravagance of its style.

Romanticism and Literature

Perhaps the most influential writer of the Romantic era was Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, who witnessed the shift from the Enlightenment emphasis on reason, objectivity, and scientific fact to the Romantic concern for emotion, subjectivity, and imaginative truth.

His play Faust has been described as a defining work of European Romanticism.

Romanticism and Literature

The two outstanding American poets of the nineteenth century were Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.

Whitman experimented with language and form, while Dickinson’s poems are partly rooted in the metaphysical poetry of John Donne.

Romanticism and Literature

While innovative Romantic composer Hector Berlioz wrote mostly in large forms, Frederic Chopin wrote in small ones.

Where Berlioz wrote for orchestra, Chopin wrote mostly for the piano.

Italy’s greatest Romantic composer was Giuseppe Verdi, composer of Rigoletto.

As Beethoven dominated the musical world for the first half of the nineteenth century, Richard Wagner dominated the second half.

Romanticism and Music

In Realist art and literature, the aim was to tell the truth about the realities of modern life, especially the lives of the working class.

According to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the working class had no effective political voice other than revolution and were alienated from their labor by an increasingly mechanized industrial system.

In 1848, as they were writing The Communist Manifesto, Europe was undergoing an unprecedented economic decline.

Revolution quickly followed in France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland and Italy.

One of the first truly successful painters of the working class was Rosa Bonheur, who celebrated the French peasant.

The other great Realist of the day was Gustave Courbet, who refused to idealize working life. 

Romanticism and Reality

Photography was invented in 1839 and literally changed the way we see the world.

The American Civil War was the first war to be documented by photography.

Mathew Brady was the best-known war photographer.

While France and the rest of Europe were locked in class struggle, Americans were immersed in the Civil War.

It was the Civil War that gave the impetus to American realism.

Romanticism, Photography and Realism

By 1850, new technological achievements offered architects and sculptors new possibilities.

The Crystal Palace in London, which extended the idea of a glass-framed greenhouse, was built for the Great Exhibition of 1851.

Romanticism and Technology

Romanticism and Technology

The Statue of Liberty was designed in 1875 by Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi and given to the United States by France.

Schwen, Daniel. Statue of Liberty frontal. 2008. JPG.

Realist writers such as Honoré de Balzac aimed to represent contemporary life with precision and objectivity.

The Realist novel that represented the most thorough attack on the Romantic sensibility was Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.

Important Realist novelists of the time included Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and George Eliot.

The interest in precision was shared by the Realist scientists such as Louis Pasteur and Charles Darwin, the latter famous for his theory of evolution.

Romanticism and Realism

Resources

Bodoklecksel. Reims Kathedrale. 2006. JPG.

Schwen, Daniel. Statue of Liberty frontal. 2008. JPG.

All non-cited images were gathered from the free domain and are not under any copyright law restrictions. All images gathered from wikipedia.org.