Click image above to download the Kindle edition of the English language translation of 'Emile' - its free
Art history resources to accompany the book by Remy Dean
Showing posts with label Being Romantic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Being Romantic. Show all posts
Friday, 13 April 2012
Jean Jacques Rousseau: La Nouvelle Heloise (1761) and Emile (1762)
Plenty of info about Rousseau at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Henry Fuseli: Nightmare (1782)
A sleeping woman, contorted by her dreams is draped across a dishevelled bed. Sitting on her chest is a goblin or incubus, and the head of ghostly horse with blank ‘zombie’ eyes enters frame left. The word ‘nightmare’ is derived from Viking folklore where ‘mara’ spirits bring bad dreams in the night and sit on the chests of the dreamers. This ‘night mara’ was probably confused with a ‘night mare’ and here Fuseli explores the linguistic mix-up, personifying both versions. Misunderstood in its day, this represents the first time that the subconscious world of dreams is used as a direct inspiration – preceding the Surrealists by nearly two centuries. The only precedents could be paintings showing the religious visions of saints and works by Bosch.
Fuseli’s dark Romantic style is well showcased here and in his later variations of the theme. The Romantic movement came about as a reaction to the Enlightenment, developing out of a ‘re-discovery’ of the power of feelings, poetic inspiration, dreams, imaginings and the ultimate truth of the emotional response. As with the Enlightenment, in France, Romanticism, in Britain began primarily as a literary and philosophical movement. Reflecting this, Fuseli illustrated scenes from the plays of Shakespeare and the Greek Myths. He had first visited England 1765 when he met William Blake, becoming a friend and an acknowledged influence upon the younger artist. After touring Europe, Fuseli returned to England where he became an associate of the Royal Academy and was then influenced by the figurative style that Blake had developed. The works of these two artists bear many similarities.
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Click image below for reviews or to buy this basic introduction to the life and works of Fuseli
William Blake: Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794)
Number 5 in my all time top 10 pieces of art... read my piece about 'Songs of Innocence and Experience' at I'M HOT GOAT
Click image below to preview and buy this beautiful facsimile edition from Tate Publishing
William Blake: Newton and Nebuchadnezzar (both 1795)
The William Blake Archive is an excellent on-line resource!
Click image below for reviews or to buy this overview of Blake's life and works
Marie-Denise Villers: Young Woman Drawing (1801)
What appears to be a well-executed, straight-forward portrait rewards close attention with layers of meaning and some truly groundbreaking formal innovations. The young woman of the title is looking towards a mirror as she sketches for a self-portrait. The viewer occupies the position of the mirror and so the subject makes direct and searching eye-contact. Cleverly, the white paper on her drawing board reflects the window light onto her face, giving a slightly underlit ethereal softness as the direct light sets her hair aglow. This halo of light demarks her from the flat dark grey wall behind her.
The background is made up of a grid of flat rectangular forms, the floor, the wall, the four panes in the window and the board that rests on her lap. The woman’s organic form fluidly disrupts this strict grid. Her face is expressive and perhaps melancholy. At her eye level, through the window and in the receding space beyond the picture plane, we see a man and woman outside. Another rigid grid of rectangles in the façade of a building draws our eye to them, although they are small. Their positioning makes these figures significant and we also notice that the window pane that frames them is fractured. The shape of the curved crack in the glass almost exactly echoes the shape made by the back of the chair in which the young woman is sitting, creating visual parentheses that balance the diagonal of her torso.
So perhaps this woman is thinking about herself as she practices her art, about what she may be giving up, in order to pursue a career as a portrait painter. This was not a respectable job for a lady. Women were expected to marry and supervise the home. A working woman was almost synonymous with a prostitute. By giving herself to art, the idyll of marriage is fractured. This woman is not just a technically good painter. This piece is ambitious and displays many features that will be applauded when other painters experiment with very similar approaches.
The similar use of repeated forms ‘bracketing’ a composition will be seen in the works of Paul Cezanne in the 1870s. James Abbot McNeill Whistler’s famous painting, Arrangement in Black and Grey, Portrait of the Artist’s Mother (1871) bears more than a passing resemblance to Viller’s composition. Both these works have flattened the canvas and pay attention to the balance of rectilinear blocks of tone and colour, the figures are posed in a similar way and both at a fluid diagonal across the ‘patchwork’ background, the framing and edges of each painting are also given prominence by their composition and point of ‘cut-off’. Villers’ work is much brighter and also contains strong narrative and symbolist elements…
Why is 'Whistler’s Mother' so renowned as a groundbreaking approach to formal arrangement of shapes and blocks of tonal colour when Denise Villers produced this visually similar canvas 70 years earlier? Is it because Villers is French, or a woman? Some of her works (including this painting) have been wrongly attributed to her contemporary, Jacques-Louis David… and there remains some doubt as to the providence of this work, though experts seem to be in agreement about its dating. This means that whoever painted it, they painted it using approaches that were to be key in the development of Modernism and used these approaches seven decades in advance of the examples cited in most art histories.
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Francisco Goya: Third of May 1808 (1814)
Image of this painting with accompanying notes at the Artchive
Click image above for reviews or to buy this Taschen book about Goya
Eugène Delacroix: (The Death of) Sardanapalus (1827) and Liberty Leading the People (1830)
Read my extended analysis of these works at DEAN - my personal weblog
Click image above for reviews or to buy this overview of the life and works of Delacroix
Delacroix was a revolutionary French Romantic painter and is credited as introducing the use of ‘structural colour’ as a method to govern the way the eye of the viewer moves over the picture plain. He used the distribution of colour within some of his major works as a way to direct how we actually look at his paintings and read the narrative they contain. He was heavily influenced by the British literary Romantics and, in turn, was a major influence on the French Impressionists.
Delacroix knew that the place that the average human viewer wants to rest their gaze within a composition is slightly left of centre. If you divide these works in half horizontally and then in half vertically, you find the centre of the composition…. and slightly to its left, we find... nothing of interest. There is no reward, nothing to hold our interest, so the eyes look for something more satisfying.
In Liberty, his most famous work, we are attracted either to the yellow of the dress, or the red section of the flag. This keys us into those colours and then our eyes pick out the flashes of reds and yellows scattered around the composition. This is what gives the painting its sense of movement. Our eyes do not rest easy but are dragged from one key colour detail to the next. This movement of our eyes lends movement to the figures that are actually painted in a very posed manner, static as statues – which, in turn, gives the scene its sense of grandeur and historic import.
He had used the same technique with Sardanapalus: slightly left of centre, our eyes find nothing to ‘hold on to’, so it is the red swathe that thrusts diagonally up through the composition, or the ivory white of the sultan’s robes that attract our attention, and then our eyes find the scattered rhythm of these two colours throughout the rest of the canvas. This gives the arrangement of quite static figure studies the atmosphere of a decadent orgy.
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Liberty Leading the People is discussed in a short video at the Khan Academy
John Everett Millais: The Vale Of Rest (1859)
Image of this painting at the Tate Collection on-line
Click image above for more info, a preview, or to buy this illustrated book about the major artists involved with the Pre-Raphaelites
Claude Monet: Sunrise, An Impression (1873)
Click image above for the basic Taschen overview of the life and work of Monet
Click image below for a book aimed at children that focusses on the Impressionist landscapes accompanied by extracts from Monet's own correspondence and notes
William-Adolphe Bouguereau: Nymphs and Satyr (1873)
Romantic painting was popular throughout the Victorian era and tended to deal with mythical themes, death, beauty and eroticism. Many artists, particularly the Decadents, pushed the boundaries of ‘decency’ and challenged the often hypocritical moral standing of a society that had massive class divisions and ‘double standards’.
In this painting, Bouguereau shows a satyr from Greek mythology seemingly being dragged away by a group of nubile nymphs who intend to have their way with him. This image was highly controversial for its depiction of dominant female sexuality. The nudity was not at all controversial, but to show young women asserting their sexuality over a traditional symbol of masculinity struck a chord with the Victorian moralists, marking this work apart from most of his other more sentimental and acceptable subjects. 'Banned' from being displayed in Britain, it found its way to New York where it was hung in a hotel saloon, a traditionally male environment, though it attracted many female viewers to venture into this masculine domain and it is said to have directly inspired a local feminist culture, earning the district the nickname of “Ladies’ Mile”.
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Click image below for more info or to buy this Kindle compilation of Bouguereau's work, mainly portraits...
Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The Blessed Damozel (1878)
Image of this painting at the extensive and well presented Rossetti Archive website
Click image above for reviews or to buy this book about Rossetti's life and works
Christopher Dresser: Clutha Glass Vases (1880s)
Above: Clutha glass vases by Dresser
Below: one of the Japanese vases that inspired him
Click image below for reviews or to buy this excellent overview of Dresser's life and works
The Design Museum has some pictures of the Dresser items in their collection with accompanying notes
Pierre-Auguste Renoir: Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881)
Click image below for info or to buy a really good value way to get scans of many (460!) of Renoir's works in this Kindle edition
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