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Romantics and Realists

Small in scale within a towering room, a man wearing a white and gold robe sits or stands on a high, covered throne, surrounded by dozens of men in this nearly square painting. All the people appear to have light skin, and many wear religious robes or habits in red, black, or white. The walls of the room are mostly filled with paintings of people in landscapes or, on the entire wall to our right, are shown nude, floating in groups against a blue background. The lowest register on the wall to our left, to either side of the throne, is draped with hanging honey-brown or muted apricot-peach curtains, or is painted to look like hanging curtains. The throne’s canopy, like an awning, hovers two stories over the people gathered beneath it. It is scarlet red and decorated with thick gold bands and coats of arms. A white cloth with gold, floral designs hangs down the back of the canopy to the throne itself. The man on the throne wears a low, white cap over dark hair. He holds his hands together at his chest, just below a wide, jeweled brooch that holds the wide, gold panels of his robe together at his throat. The long robe sweeps down, over the step in front of him. Men in clerical robes, some with books and one holding a triangular hat, gather around the throne on a raised platform. To either side of the platform, rows of men stand, some also looking down at books. Closest to us, about a dozen people, including at least one female nun, are seen from the waist up along the bottom edge of the composition, standing outside the barrier enclosing the ranks. More people stand at an altar, the edge of which is visible along the right side of the canvas. The artist signed the painting in the lower right corner, “Ingres 1810 ROM.”

Overview

Romantic has always been an elusive label -- in 1836 one wag concluded that romanticism "consisted in not shaving, and in wearing vests with heavily starched lapels." Delacroix, who in fact declined to identify himself as a romantic, is often set opposite the "classical" Ingres. Yet both produced romantic works exploring literary, historical, or purely imaginary, often exotic, themes: Delacroix with freely painted, energetic compositions and vivid color, Ingres with carefully controlled but evocative contours and highly refined surfaces. More than defining a style, romanticism suggests an inspiration in the creative imagination and an intense, personal response. In 1846 the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire answered his own question "What is romanticism?" by calling it "a manner of feeling."

For realist artists in the next generation, on the other hand, the painter was to be guided by observation. "Painting is an essentially concrete art," Courbet wrote in 1861, "and can only consist in the representation of real and existent things. It is a wholly physical language, which uses visible objects instead of words; the abstract, invisible and nonexistent, lies outside the scope of painting." He adopted as subjects the events and people of ordinary life and elevated them to a stature previously reserved for themes from the Bible, ancient history, or mythology. It was an affront to the arts establishment, compounded by the way in which he painted, with rough texture and the offhand look of accidental compositions.

A similar bias for fact was already at work in landscape painting. Abandoning the idealization that had long characterized French landscapes, "modern" landscapists -- including Courbet -- depicted real, even unremarkable places with the freshness of direct observation.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, French, 1780 - 1867, Pope Pius VII in the Sistine Chapel, 1814, oil on canvas, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1952.2.23

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Three men on horseback wearing elaborate military uniforms in cream white, crimson red, and gold almost fill this vertical painting. Lit dramatically from the upper left, the men all have peachy, tanned skin. Their red and white uniforms are trimmed liberally with gold. Each man wears a red sash across his chest, cream-white gloves that reach back to mid-forearm, and a tall hat topped with a single, stiff, white feather. At the center of the composition, the man closest to us rides a horse dappled with silver, steel gray, and black, which raises a front hoof as if in mid-stride. The horse and rider’s bodies are angled to our right, but the horse looks back to our left as the man looks directly at us with small brown eyes. His slender nose slopes to a brown handlebar moustache that curves over his pale peach mouth. He leans slightly back in the saddle, which is draped with a scarlet-red blanket with gold trim. The leg we see, to our left, is extended straight in the stirrup, and the man braces a brass trumpet adorned with gold tassels against that thigh. His helmet has a high, square, white crown that comes to points to each side and in front. The boxy shape is outlined in red and has the stiff, bushy feather at the top front and a red tassel hanging along one side. An arched brass plaque with a capital N is affixed to the front of the helmet over a narrow brim. Though held in place with a chin strap, the helmet is slightly askew. To our left and behind the central man, a white horse and rider face away from us. This rider’s upper body is turned back slightly to our right so we see him in profile as he holds a brass horn to his lips. To our right and set father back, the third rider and his gray horse are very loosely painted so features of his face and costume are not clear. All three stand on a ground painted with swipes of caramel brown, mustard yellow, and pine green. The background is slightly darker, in smoky tones of brown, gray, and black with flicks of red. A dark mass, perhaps a deep shadow, rises to the right, behind the third horseman.

This small canvas is one of a series of cavalrymen Géricault painted between 1812 and 1814. It is difficult to categorize Géricault's horsemen: neither true portraits nor genre scenes, they are more finished than studies yet not fully independent works. They convey the romantic excitement of battle and the glamour of military uniforms in the Napoleonic era. Géricault studied his subjects -- and they are more often trumpeters than soldiers -- with precision. The heroism of French expansion throughout Europe was soon reduced to disillusion and despair as the allied opposition gained the upper hand in 1814.

Here Géricault seems to have been preoccupied in the painting itself, in a lively handling of pigments and the working out of his design. Notice the soft spots of color on the center horse's muzzle and the long, rippling streaks in its tail. This painting shows the influence of the Flemish and Italian artists he was copying in the Louvre. Géricault's trumpeter and his mount reflect elements taken from Rubens and Van Dyck. The energetic styles of these baroque artists and their emphasis of color were well matched to a sensibility that valued inspiration and emotion.

Théodore Gericault, French, 1791 - 1824, Mounted Trumpeters of Napoleon's Imperial Guard, 1813/1814, oil on canvas, Chester Dale Fund, 1972.25.1

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A leafless, ash-white tree trunk has fallen from a broken stump into the wide V of a neighboring tree at the edge of a body of water near a verdant forest in this horizontal landscape painting. The fallen trunk creates a diagonal from near the lower left corner to the upper right. As it fell, it sheared off a substantial branch from a neighboring tree with a dark trunk. The bark where the damaged branch has pulled away is honey-orange, the same color as the leaves at the canopy, which has been pinned under the fallen trunk. Trees, vines, and other vegetation fill the space around and beyond this pair. In the lower right corner of the painting, vines grow over a broken stump, which deep in shadow. Between the stump and fallen tree, the peanut-brown surface of the water is smooth. Tiny in scale beneath the fallen tree and easily overlooked, there are two men and a dog in a boat. One man stands at the back of the boat and pushes it along with a long pole. He wears a tall, brown, cloth hat, a white shirt rolled up to the elbows under a blue vest, and loose-fitting pants. A second man wears a flat-topped, white hat with a black brim, a long, forest-green jacket, and tight-fitting slate-blue pants. He braces a rifle against one shoulder and shoots into the forest. The dog is white with brown spots, and it stands with its front paws on the edge of the boat, presumably ready to spring after the target. A patch of blue sky with puffy white clouds is seen above the trees in the upper left corner. The artist signed and dated the work in the lower right corner: “H. Vernet Rome 1833.”

Though less well-known than other painters on this tour, Horace Vernet was regarded by many in his day as one of the greatest French artists of all time. Horace's forthright and accurate reporting of facts was already being disparaged by some romantic critics before his death -- and more recently he has been compared to Norman Rockwell. Increasingly, however, his naturalism is appreciated as foreshadowing the work of realists like Courbet.

This painting was made in Italy after Vernet had been appointed director of the French Academy in Rome. Following the July Revolution of 1830, which installed "Citizen King" Louis Philippe, Vernet found himself the most senior French official in the city -- an uncomfortable post, given the antipathy of the pope and Italian public toward a more liberal French monarchy. It was often advantageous to be out of town, and the painter's love of hunting offered frequent opportunities.

Here, tiny figures are overshadowed by the wild landscape -- an ancient wooded marsh some forty kilometers from Rome. Vernet described it as a majestic place, where the presence of man did not interrupt the order of nature.

Horace Vernet, French, 1789 - 1863, Hunting in the Pontine Marshes, 1833, oil on canvas, Chester Dale Fund, 1989.3.1

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A young woman reclines and reads a book near a stream that winds through a wooded landscape in this horizontal painting. Painted with rich pine green, trees tower along the riverbanks and fill most of the painting. The olive-colored water seems to have cut straight down over time, creating high banks painted with tones of caramel and honey brown. Steel and slate-gray boulders are scattered in intervals near the river. Deep in the hazy blue distance, mountains line the horizon, which comes halfway up the composition. In the lower left corner of the painting, close to the river, the woman lies on her stomach as she props herself up on her elbows to read. She has pale white skin and her long, dark hair falls over her shoulders. Her white shirt hangs low over her shoulders, and her rose-pink skirt falls just short of her bare feet.

At first there seems to be something a bit incongruous here. The forest is rough, almost wild, but a young woman lies on the ground to read. Her blouse falls perilously low, but her book has the look of a biblical text. Viewers who saw this at the Salon in 1834, however, would have quickly recognized the woman as Mary Magdalene from her book, the deer, and especially her long tresses. Corot apparently added the figure as an afterthought -- she is painted over bits of foliage and water -- probably to elevate his landscape in the hierarchy of the Salon. By introducing a narrative element, and a religious one at that, his subject would be accorded greater prestige and justify the large size of his canvas.

Today, Corot is most appreciated for very different kinds of landscape: for plein air sketches, never destined to be exhibited themselves but painted outdoors in preparation for studio pictures, and for lyrical views of the countryside he called souvenirs. The soft, silvery souvenirs recapture a poetic response to nature. Their fresh touch and light atmosphere are informed by outdoor studies and combined with a strong sense of form retained from classical French landscapes of the seventeenth century. Corot's work was an important influence on younger impressionist painters.

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, French, 1796 - 1875, Forest of Fontainebleau, 1834, oil on canvas, Chester Dale Collection, 1963.10.109

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Dark, nickel-gray clouds encircle a spot of bright blue sky above a river and forest in this horizontal landscape painting. The tops of the clouds are creamy white in the sunlight and steel gray beneath. The horizon comes about a third of the way up the painting, and on the land below, a tall, deep green, leafy tree nearly reaches the top edge of the painting to our right of center. More trees cluster around it on a spit of land that runs along an olive-green body of water. Along the shoreline, across from us, several wooden rowboats have pulled up to a low dock. One person holding a tall, thin rod sits in one of the boats. A woman and child walk toward the boat, away from another pair of people under the trees. The woman with the child looks over her shoulder toward the clouds. On our side of the water, a man, also with a tall rod, climbs onto a dock in the lower left corner. Flat meadows meet rolling hills in the deep distance, beneath streaks in the clouds above, perhaps falling rain far away. The artist signed and dated the painting with red in the lower left corner: “C. TROYON 1849.”

In the 1840s Troyon worked with other landscape painters centered in the village of Barbizon in the forest of Fontainebleau. This group had emerged from the so-called Generation of 1830, young painters who as the July Revolution was deposing a conservative monarch were themselves overturning long-held traditions of French landscape painting. They had been influenced by John Constable's panoramic views of the English countryside, two of which had been shown at the Paris Salon of 1824, which encouraged them to express nature without academic convention or idealization. Here Troyon has depicted an ordinary, if beautiful place in a straightforward way. Preparing for the last ferry crossing before a storm, country people look at the looming, dark sky. The air is filled with the approaching storm -- more than anything else this is the "subject."

If the Barbizon painters' unembellished themes offended tradition, so did their manner of painting. The texture of the paint is clearly visible, helping to convey the scene's rustic character. This free handling of paint, along with a feeling for light in all its variations, was to be an inspiration for the impressionists. But the Barbizon painters were not interested in nature's fleeting effects, but sought out the rugged and enduring unity beneath its changing aspects.

Constant Troyon, French, 1810 - 1865, The Approaching Storm, 1849, oil on canvas on board, Chester Dale Fund, 1995.42.1

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The hero, the individual of talent and passion who follows a difficult, solitary path to greatness, was central to romanticism. Here is Columbus at the final moment of frustration before his ultimate triumph. Almost penniless, he and his son have sought shelter in the monastery of La Rábida, where, according to legendary accounts, word of the fateful meeting with Queen Isabella would soon arrive.

Calm rectangular forms dominate: the juncture of walls and ceiling, the parade of dark canvases down the hall, the large map that Columbus contemplates. The figure groups have solid geometrical form. Even the colors are quiet: the monks' habits, the soft light and brown shadows -- only the plume of Columbus' hat, which points to him as protagonist, interrupts this muted range. Neither the tone nor composition matches our image of Delacroix as the champion of color and exuberant form. More typical of his work, for example, are the bright color accents and dynamic zigzagging energy of Arabs Skirmishing. Columbus and His Son is one of a pair -- the second painting (Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio), much richer in color and effect, shows the explorer returning in triumph -- and it seems likely that Delacroix wanted to underscore radically opposed circumstances by corresponding differences in feel.

Eugène Delacroix, French, 1798 - 1863, Christopher Columbus and His Son at La Rábida, 1838, oil on canvas, Chester Dale Collection, 1963.10.127

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Set in a valley carpeted in sage green, about a dozen armed men, on foot and horseback, close to us, line up and face off against an attack advancing from the back left in this vertical painting. The men, clothing, and horses closest to us are painted with dashes and swirling brushstrokes, which contrasts with the soft look of the approaching crowd and landscape beyond, which are painted indistinctly with loose and blended brushstrokes. All the men we can see have medium brown skin and are armed with rifles. The men close to us wear long tunics and boots in shades of teal blue, ivory white, crimson red, earth brown, and golden yellow. Most of them wear turbans and some have straight or curved daggers hanging from their waists. Closest to us in the bottom left, a chestnut-brown horse with a black mane collapses on its rider, who sprawls along the ground with arms overhead. The horse lifts its head and twists back toward us facing our left, so the white blazes down its nose are visible. Near the horse’s legs and along the left edge of the painting, a man wearing a mustard-yellow tunic kneels and leans his forehead against the barrel of his rifle, which he braces like a walking stick. His other hand rests on the hilt of his dagger at his waist. To our right of the fallen horse, six men line up along a low rise that angles to our right and into the distance, where it meets a grove of green trees. At the front of that group, near the lower center of the composition, a rider on a dark horse charges the approaching men. Those men emerge from a line of emerald-green trees and growth at the foot of a steep, rocky hill. These men are more loosely painted so details are difficult to make out, but several are backlit by white smoke, presumably from firing their rifles. The hill above is mottled with warm taupe, light gray, cinnamon-brown, and moss-green growth. Atop the hill and to our left, a walled building complex with thick, square towers faces a row of sheer cliffs that march in from the upper right to enclose the space. Their jagged faces are shadowed with cool tones of slate blue, pewter gray, and touches of rust red. An azure-blue sky, scattered with thin layers of steel-gray and white clouds, spans the top of the composition. Bright sunlight flows in from the upper right, illuminating the fallen horse and the men near it. Sunlight also warms the face of the terracotta building and the hill, as well as the peaks of the mountains on the right. The artist signed and dated the work in black in the lower center: “Eug. Delacroix 1863.”

In 1832 Delacroix accompanied a French diplomatic mission to Morocco. His five months in North Africa would provide inspiration for the rest of his life. The exoticism and the vicarious thrill of this violent subject are typical of romantic art. While in Morocco Delacroix had painted watercolors and filled notebooks with sketches recording details of landscape and Arab dress, but he wrote later that "I did not begin to do passable work in my trip to Africa until the moment when I had sufficiently forgotten the small details to recall in my pictures only the striking and poetic aspect: up to that point I was haunted by that love of exactitude which people are apt to mistake for truth."

In this painting details are muted, subsumed into atmosphere and the energy of the attack. It has the look of a quick improvisation, yet a close look reveals how carefully painted it is. In distant bluffs, small touches of color enliven the luminous haze. In the middle range, figures and surroundings merge into one mélange of color, where churning brushstrokes convey the turbulence of action. And in the foreground, brilliant accents of green, blue, and red stand out to produce a closer -- and more dangerous -- sense of reality. Delacroix's free handling of paint and juxtapositions of complementary colors influenced the impressionists.

Eugène Delacroix, French, 1798 - 1863, Arabs Skirmishing in the Mountains, 1863, oil on canvas, Chester Dale Fund, 1966.12.1

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Towering, sheer cliffs loom to our left, over a sunny beach scattered with boats in this horizontal landscape painting. The chalky, rugged faces of the cliffs are dappled and streaked with olive green, dark brown, gray, rust red, and mustard yellow. The horizon comes a third of the way up the composition so the cliffs are outlined against the powder-blue sky, which is loosely veiled with wispy, cream-white clouds. The mossy tops of the cliffs are illuminated by sunlight from the upper left, and a solitary leafy tree leans into view between the two cliff-tops closest to us. Four empty, wooden boats sit on the flat, sandy beach below. We look onto the long sides of the two closest to us. One is stripped and appears dilapidated, while the one behind it has a ginger-brown sail attached to the mast in the prow. Two more wooden poles or oars jut out from the cockpit on either side of the mast. A small flag with horizontal bands of blue, white, and red flies from a short pole near the middle of the boat. A bundle the same color as the unfurled sail sits in the boat. Another sail is spread out on the sand to our right, and coiled ropes lie nearby. The two other boats are slightly further back on the right, with one angled to our left while we view the other straight on. There are two people a short distance beyond these boats. One faces our left in profile while the other sits on the sand looking toward the water. Thin trails of white delineate the low surf and a few sailboats drift by on the brilliant blue water. The artist signed the lower left, “G. Courbet.”

During 1869 Courbet had worked along the beaches in Normandy, painting sketches that he later used to produce a number of finished paintings in the studio: "Did I ever earn my bread and butter," he wrote a friend, "I painted twenty seascapes...." Years later,while in exile in Switzerland, he painted more beach scenes, perhaps returning to the same sketches or recalling the landscape from memory.

Recent scholarship suggests that this painting is probably one of the later group. The light and air lack the kind of vivid freshness of Courbet's work done while he was still under his immediate impression of a place. The rocky cliff seems generalized rather than defined by its strong highlights. Still, its bulk attracts our attention; our eyes are drawn by the sheer tactile mass of the pigments there. In many places Courbet painted not with a brush, but with a palette knife. His rough technique, like the unsentimentalized peasant subjects he pioneered, scandalized the art establishment -- and helped galvanize the bold style being adopted by younger painters like Manet. Fiercely proud of his rural roots and his country-bred vigor, Courbet retained a forthright and physical connection to the world. He painted the concrete, he said, and he gave what he saw actual physical dimension on his canvas.

Gustave Courbet, French, 1819 - 1877, Beach in Normandy, c. 1872/1875, oil on canvas, Chester Dale Collection, 1963.10.10

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