French Romanticism:  Subject Matter and the Artist

The Romantic was Janus-faced, facing the present and commenting upon it while turning away for current events in order to yield to the lure of fantasy, legend, myth, and exoticism.  On one hand, Jean-Antoine Gros called attention to the human costs of Napoléon’s brutal wars in Napléon at Eylau in 1818, and, on the other hand, Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres retreated into Nordic myth in his Dream of Ossian of 1813 and his charming paintings of troubadour legends.  On one hand, Girodet produced a reverie of eroticism with his Sleep of Endymion in 1791 as the opening volley of Romanticism and Géricault explored the limits of Romanticism with his portraits of insane people and his renditions of severed limbs. One did not have to be an avant-garde artist to be “Romantic,” for the avant-garde was just beginning to form.  One did not have to challenge Academic standards to be Romantic, for the Academy could very well accommodate exciting contemporary narratives, as long as they were correctly painted or sculpted.  Although associated with bold color and visible brushstrokes, Romanticism is not a style, nor is it a particular content, nor is it a rebellion against authority.  The successful and celebrated Romantic artists wanted to be accepted by the academic powers and vied for position and honors within the Salons.  For many of these artists, their reputation as “romantic rebels” rests upon a few works of art.   Most of the Romantic artists were part of the establishment and did not live the life of an outside artist, unappreciated and scorned by the forces of the status quo.  The myth of the Romantic artist has been entangled anachronistically with that of the avant-garde, and the full-blown outsider movements of Realism and Impressionism were decades away.

The so-called rebelliousness of the Romantic artists is less political than entrepreneurial, linked more directly to the loss of traditional patrons: church, state, and aristocrats.  The Romantic artist acted as an opportunist or a performance artist who sought to both slide past the conservative jury of the Salon and also to shock the spectators with spectacular and entertaining art. The art audience had become more and more middle class, which attended the Salons in large numbers.  The bourgeoisie, the crowd, the mob must be addressed in some fashion.  Fueled by fashions, literature and restless aggressive politics, the public developed a taste for scenes of sex and violence unsanctioned by the Academy and swooned over the newly discovered beauties of Nature.  The public had little interest in erudite academic subject matter and gravitated towards the familiar and the market for genre painting and landscape painting began to develop, inspiring artists to concentrate their efforts in these areas that were not supported by the academic hierarchy and hence were open professional territories for ambitious artists.

Landscape painting began to free itself from its traditional role as a backdrop for a narrative in the foreground, and “pure” landscape, painted for pure pleasure and free of moralizing became more and more popular.  Like still lives, landscapes could fit into any home and was acceptable to any taste, and did not offend any political opinions.  The so-called lower genres were directed not so much towards the academy but to a public that was inclined to buy decorative art. The most important group of landscape painters was the Barbizon School, located in the village of Barbizon in the Forest of Fountainebleau.  Artists such as Theodore Rousseau and Narcisse Diaz sketched in situ but finished the paintings in their studios.  They shared, along with many Romantic painters, a new concern for direct observation of Nature at its most natural and most accurate.  The Barbizon artists followed the Claudian precepts of the beautiful but they were distinctly modern in their refusal to include narrative in the painting.  These artists, such as Constantin Troyon, produced “pure landscapes.”  At the other end of the spectrum from marketable landscapes, the public taste for the strange and the exotic was also linked to economics.  The “Orient”, the “East” became open territory to be subdued and conquered by the Western Europeans who were beginning another phase of unchecked imperialism.  The delight in the themes of sex and violence, imagined by the European to be part and parcel of the Middle East, was fueled as much by sexual desires as by imperial pride.  A large number of artists, called “Orientalists” imagined the mysterious East as a place of harems and beheadings, inhabited by an alien and violent people who could only benefit from benevolent French rule.

Although the aristocrats, old and new, were restored to power during Napoléon’s rule and after the Restoration of Louis XVIII, the new audience for art was largely middle class.  The Romantic artist was sundered from traditional conservative artistic styles, separated from traditional patronage, and stripped of the historical social role as servant to higher powers. From the fall of Napoléon on, the artist was forced to re-invent him/herself as a social being and was forced to re-create a new cultural place and new purpose for unsanctioned art.  The imported German idea of “art-for-art’s-sake” fulfilled multiple purposes, providing art and the artist with a new and exalted role in society.  The artist had to be a free and independent creator who was an innovator and pushed art to change.  As the new aesthetic theories gained a following, the art world began to splint between the avant-garde who rebelled and displeased the public and the academics who conformed and pleased the audience.  By 1835, the writer and art critic, Théophile Gautier attacked conventional critics for their adherence to ideas of decorum and good taste.  In the preface to Madamoiselle de Maupin, Gautier advocated for beauty and art for their own sakes.  For the artist to be free to express original and personal feelings, art should have no useful purpose. Although these ideas give new impetus to art and a new place in society to the artist, they also begin the separation between the artist and the public that will be accelerated by the Revolution of 1848 in France.

Seen in the literary and the visual arts, Romanticism was an international movement and a cultural rejection of the Enlightenment and its stress on objective reason and rational thinking.   Romanticism was subjective and the ultimate truth was individual emotions, feelings, and expression. This shift from the objective to the subjective, from object to subject, or the individual, as the source of truth was a radical transformation in Western thought, perhaps the logical consequence of Protestant emphasis on individuality and European hopes for a political democracy.  The artist became important to society in a new way: not as an explicator of moral ideals, but as a “genius,” a seer who brought, through art, new insights into life.  Although a new critical vocabulary was created as aesthetics moved to the center as artistic concern, the Romantic artists offered no coherent programme nor did they have a common goal.  Wrapped up in their sense of individuality, artists produced works of art that proclaimed individual personalities and the originality that was the prerogative of the genius. Romanticism, as a challenge to academicism, was associated with forces of disorder and anarchy and revolution.  As an extension, drawing and low key color, disciplined stylistics, and a smooth “licked” surface in painting and sculpture, characteristic of Neoclassicism, became politically tied to the state.  Color, rough painting or impastoed facture became politically tied to the emotions that might lead to unrestrained social behavior.  Politics aside, most so-called Romantic artists, such as Delacroix, were actually politically quiet conservative, as are most artists because social and political stability are necessary for art making to be possible.

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