which was showered with praise. He was acclaimed as a saviour and humbly agreed to stand up in the sacred cause of art. He had soon forgotten his previous ambitions and with total authority he proclaimed the cult of the beautiful and condemned any deviation from the rule. He had only a few direct disciples but, nevertheless, dull and faded paintings reappeared everywhere. Neo-classical landscape painters turned to Antiquity again and were influenced by Poussin. The general appearance of exhibitions changed completely: colour, movement and life disappeared. Romantic art was still allowed in, but seemed out of place. Greyness and a sense of wisdom had swept in. An English man felt like going for a cold bath as he entered the Exhibition of 1846. New artists appeared like Gérôme with his Cockfighting; the calculated and glamorous effects of the Decadent Romans by Couture appeared vivid and inspired.
Caspar David Friedrich, On the Sailing Boat, 1818–1820.
Oil on canvas, 71 × 56 cm.
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.
It was a time of helplessness. Hyperbolic assertions, polemic beliefs and basic negation were not worthwhile anymore. Either out of scepticism or indifference the most sensitive people accepted the novelties that stood out, whatever doctrine they stemmed from. They preached eclecticism, and events seemed to prove them right. Times were weary though each year probably had its harvest of works worth admiring. Some were as good or even possibly superior to the works of the previous years but their flaws and qualities were precisely the same that had been debated ad nauseam. A feeling of general discomfort and stagnation gradually developed, awaiting the advent of the man, the idea or the work that would be capable of reviving energies, enthusing a new spirit and stirring up art out of its dullness.
At that time precisely a whole chain of events occurred, the importance of which people of the time could not realise. They appear to us, however, as the portents of a new faith, the revelation of which was awaited. On several occasions, works containing elements of poetry focused on reality praised by Géricault were exhibited. Since The Readers in 1840, Meissonier had accustomed the public to meticulous accuracy. The opening of a Spanish gallery at the Louvre in 1848 showed the example of masters filled with an intense naturalist feeling. The daguerreotype was invented in 1839 and photography focused everybody’s attention on views of direct reality once again. At the same time, Balzac, Stendhal and George Sand analysed contemporary life.
Thus realism crept into art and society through obscure and complex mechanisms. At first it only seemed to be claiming a small place but soon it asserted itself as the only truth and that it was up to the realist to regenerate the arts. At the last Exhibitions of the Monarchie de Juillet, two young painters had a modest start as no-one, not even themselves, guessed their potential. Then came the 1848 Revolution and Courbet and Millet discovered their own genius in the middle of the universal turmoil. Amidst a blaze of publicity they proclaimed the beliefs that were at the core of artistic battles. Of course some artists whose soul was definitely Romantic were going to remain: neither Delacroix nor Berlioz or Préault would give up their ideals and they could neither be forgotten nor despised. They would remain a reference for young people and, in a way, would continue to have more influence than ever. However, the continuing action of Romanticism would be of a different kind now, somewhat pacified and somewhat historical. In 1848 a new period started for the arts; Romantic times were over.
Charles-François Grenier de Lacroix, called Charles-François Lacroix de Marseille, A Mediterranean Harbour Scene at Sunset, 18th century.
Oil on canvas, 45.8 × 61 cm.
Private collection.
Richard Parkes Bonington, Boats by the Normandy Shore, c. 1823–1824.
Oil on canvas, 33.5 × 46 cm.
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.
Caspar David Friedrich, Dreamer (Ruins of the Oybin Monastery), c. 1835.
Oil on canvas, 27 × 21 cm.
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.
III. The Romantic Inspiration
Was the movement that we have just described only a violent bout of fever? Was it anything more than exaggeration and distortion? Did it only have a superficial and, when all is said and done, perhaps regrettable influence on artists? Was it going to be remembered as a movement marked by a strong and rampant taste for trinkets, cheap rubbish and mundane anecdotes, a movement mostly interested in subjects taken from fiction or history and easy to turn into vivid scenes? Those subjects corresponded to the fashion of the time, and if Romanticism had been limited to illustrating books and popular historical stories it would then be difficult to understand why it faced such strong resistance. If it was only made of mannerism and failings would it have kept raising so much passion and would it have remained polemical a century later?
Romanticism actually marked a general change of minds. As mentioned at the beginning of this book, it had expressed itself in all areas of human thinking and in all activities; it had had a deep impact on the arts. The works that it had influenced were linked together not just by superficial analogy but were closely related. They had been created according to the same norms and had used similar methods. It is those norms and methods that we are now going to try to unveil.
A Romantic person was first of all sensitive and someone on whom logic and pure ideas had little impact. It was a knowledgeable person whose actions were based on intuition: as a statesman, he would obey a generous or imaginary impetus; as a writer or poet his thinking was taking shape in images. All the more so for artists, who had no interest in abstraction but were indeed visionary. Others tried to draw a perfect type, a pure ideal beauty out of the diversity of humankind, but the Romantic, on the contrary, saw vivid creatures, all different and all touching in some way. He would develop friendships with certain individuals but was never exclusive and, in fact, was ready to change as he feared monotony more than anything else. In turn he would be interested in hook-nosed, pug-nosed, turned up-nosed people, slim or stocky types. He was seduced by unexpected appearances: irregular faces, deformities, alterations caused by illnesses and age. He was accused of cherishing ugliness whilst looking for character above all. Nature provided him with an infinite diversity of individuals and he could not see Apollo anywhere. If, by a miracle, Apollo were to spring up in front of his eyes, he would not represent the god in a fixed eternal attitude but would show him changing all the time, always different from himself because of the miracle of life. The classical man ignored it or, at least, always tried to fight against it whilst the Romantic observed it with pleasure and saw the source of beauty in it. The lines and volumes that the classicist aspired to give balance to according to blind geometry were perceived by the Romantics as a sacred interaction of internal forces. Flesh quivered, blood ran, muscles tensed. Man was a magnificent machine: his shapes were not abstract calligraphy but they expressed the workings of physiological life. Catching life in action and movement before it was finished, observing the short instants when, guided by passion and under the pressure of dramatic circumstances, life reached a paroxysm, avoiding what pretended to be constant and celebrating the transitory and short-lived in life: these were the joys of the artist.
In studios, models would wrap themselves in indifferent clothes with more or less harmonious folds. Man would dress according to the climate he lived in, his needs and his tastes; his dressing style would reflect his personality and participate in his restlessness and existence itself.
To finish, man was not an isolated creature in the middle of a silent world. Life was all around him. Animals ran, flew or crawled, being moved (like humans) by a subtle system of forces. There were tangible affinities between man and animals. Less complex by nature, they provided the eye with sights which man could not rival. Nature was not an empty architectural structure, mere décor or background. It was full of elementary beings, close to us, visible or invisible, and even the things in it were constantly changing. The landscapes that seemed most stable were continually changing with leaves