Caspar David Friedrich

Friedrich (German), Wanderer Above a Sea Fog, Romanticism, 1810

As we look at another work by Friedrich, we can think about the idea of loneliness. So Wonder Above a Sea Fog is a really famous work by Friedrich, and it's one that I really like because here he focuses on man and nature so much at the same time, it's impossible to ignore either one. Most of the figures in Friedrich's paintings tend to be rather small, if he includes them at all, but in this one, he puts the figure, first of all, right in the center of the painting and makes him relatively large. Still not as large as this really engulfing landscape that's spreading out in front of him but relatively large. So this is an idea about how nature is uncontrollable and powerful and really how man is small in comparison to it. Romantics often set paintings in wild nature, not peaceful, controlled civilizations, and this is a really good example of that The Wanderer, just like the next painting will look at, The Wreck of the Hope, shows this power of nature in a really raw way.

Albert Bierstadt (American, 1830 - 1902), Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California, Romanticism, 1865 *in the collection of the Birmingham Museum of Art

It's part of the collection at the Birmingham Museum of Art. If you go there you will see it displayed very prominently on the second floor. It's probably the most famous work that the museum has in their collection and certainly one of the most important. So Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California, again, here we are showing part of America Yosemite that is incredibly beautiful and unique to our land. The paintings by Bierstadt tend to have a very transcendental feel to them. He works with very monumental elements. So in this case, he's using a part of the park called Halfdown. And he is showing it against this valley, which makes it feel even larger than maybe it really is. The paintings almost feel three-dimensional as well. The transcendental nature comes from this light that he uses that's coming around. Not very much unlike what Church did with light. Here he's just using a little bit of a different type of scene. The painting almost feels 3-D because of how he uses the light with the dark element immediately in front of it. If you are to go to the museum and see this painting, you will immediately see what I mean by that 3-D sense. Bierstadt's paintings, most of them are on a very grand scale. This one is about eight feet wide by well over six feet tall. So they feel very large, not only in what they're depicting but in their immediate size as well. Bierstadt's works are one of the best ones to talk about Manifest Destiny with because he's showing the beautiful elements of this land that Americans were conceiving as for the first time as their own as something that was rightfully and logically theirs. And there are things that we can contradict about that now and say that there are things that maybe shouldn't have been done at that time, as far as western expansion goes. But to them, to Americans in the 1860s and '70s, this was a very exciting realm of America. Now if we want to think about the sublime with these paintings as I mentioned early on, this is a great one to do that. So we have obviously the breathtaking beauty of the scene. The clouds, the sun, the large mountains, but there is also a sense of fear and a little bit of a sense of not knowing. We don't know what's around this mountain don't know what's lurking in this sort of darker part of the painting, and it does give a little bit of a sense of the frightening nature that the west could hold and did hold for a lot of people.

Realism in America

Leading American Realists were Thomas Eakins and his student, Henry Ossawa Tanner • American Realists, like their French counterparts, avoided historical or fictional subjects, instead focusing on scenes that were very real to them. • Also focused on portraiture frequently Now realism in America maybe we could say it was led by Thomas Eakins but it was very loosely associated movement and he really was essentially just an important artist during this period of time in America. His student was Henry Ossawa Tanner, an African American artist. Both artists were from Philadelphia. Though Eakins trained in Europe under an academic artist, when he returned to the United States, his style really departs from that very strict and very mythological, we can say, academic style that we'll look at in our next lecture. American Realists are very much like their French counterparts. The subject matters that they deal with are real. They are what they saw in the world around them. It is not necessarily beautiful or glorifying but it is true. Portraits are also very important to American Realists both for Eakins and Tanner. Perhaps a little more for Eakins who was really known as one of the greatest American portrait painters.

Realism

Led, unofficially, by Gustave Courbet • Realists disapproved of historical or fictional subjects - "an abstract object, invisible or nonexistent, does not belong in the realm of painting...Show me an angel, and I'll paint one." - Courbet, 1861 • Often depicted lowly scenes of the working-classes, but on a grand scale • Sought to make art a reflection of contemporary life, embrace the "new" • Primarily based in France, but explored by American painters as well Realists rejected the idea that paintings had to reflect historical, mythological, biblical themes, but rather could simply reflect the world around them. • French and American Realists shared some traits, such as simplicity, and realizing beauty in the every-day. • Realism had a large influence on Impressionism, especially in Franc

Realism vs. Academic Art

Realism features only those things that are "real" and contemporary. Academic Art features mythological, biblical, historic subject matter. • Realism strived to break away from traditional art and methods. Academic artists were deeply entrenched in tradition, and did not want to break away from the standards set forth by the Salons. • Realism was heavily influenced by Romanticism. Academic Art was influenced by Neoclassicism. • Realism was largely rejected during its time. Academic Art was hailed during its time.

Eakins( american realism ) The Oarsman, 1874

These -- this is a pair of real brothers that he very often painted rowing along the Schuylkill and the other rivers that go through Philadelphia. He emphasizes strong men typically in his paintings. Very capable. Very comfortable in their surroundings. And as I said, though they might seem anonymous all of them, every one of them had -- is actually very identifiable in these paintings. So Eakins' interpretation of realism is a little different than Courbet and Millet who used strong workers. Eakins' early realist, at least, images feel a bit more leisurely

Jean-Léon Gérôme (French, 1824 - 1904), Thumbs Down, Academic art, 1872

You can see the people in the stands giving the thumbs down signifying to the gladiator that he can kill the opponent. It is so polished. There are so many details in this painting. It's really actually very beautiful and stunning. And you see here, even this small little glimpses of light that are coming in through the sides of this amphitheater. It's really a beautiful painting and almost has a photographic quality to it and that's what I mean by these finely polished paintings produced during this period.

Romanticism

• Rose from desires for freedom - political, religious, speech • Values imagination over reason; emotion over logic • Relied on the sublime, and on fearful, dark moods; images can be frightening, morbid, or savage • Asymmetrical compositions • Depictions of the power of nature • Few historical depictions, most paintings include contemporary, and sometimes often unpleasant events • A painterly style - broad, loose strokes, lack of outlines, blended colors • Fascinated with foreign, exotic cultures • Rejected Neoclassical reliance on the Enlightenment and Classical cultures • Strived to evoke emotions and stimulate the min

Gérôme (French), Diogenes, Academic Art, 1861

Also the subject matter not only is historic but also heroic. Another painting by Gerome, this one Diogenes, one of the famous founders of the philosophy of cynicism. So he lived in a wine barrel for many years rejecting all sorts of material, the goods. And so here you see Diogenes. But again, you see this beautiful sense of light. You see a realistic scene in the background. You see the tightly polished and beautifully painted here the straw of the hairs on the dogs. Everything has this beautiful finish to it. And again, it's meant to be a historical hero. Now Bougeureau is one of the most famous academic artists. He's important to Birmingham as we have one of his most famous [inaudible] a part of his most famous series at our museum.

Adolphe William Bouguereau (French, 1825 - 1905), Nymphs and Satyr, Academic art, 1873

But we start out by looking at his [inaudible]. So here you have a mythological event again with mythological creatures. These are not real nudes. So the nudity was much more accepted than it was when you see Manet painting a nude for instance. 4 So again, it's this beautiful very lyrical sense to this painting if you could follow the arm of this [inaudible] or down. It takes you across the painting very well. They're beautiful variations between the darks and the light. The beautiful way that the light shines down on this [inaudible]. It's a fine polished beautiful work of art. This is what the academies were producing. This is what the salons wanted to see. The salons and what they chose to put in their work had great deal of control over the kind of art that was being produced in France at the time

Friedrich

Caspar David Friedrich was the leading German Romantic. He's still remembered as one of the most important German painters in history and someone that really introduced the idea of artists painting what they felt and not just what they saw. That's a very modern concept. So along with an artist like Turner, Friedrich is another Romantic who's really helping to move art forward toward the modern era. Friedrich's works tend to focus on lonely, sometimes frightening, sometimes eerie landscapes. One thing that I will point out about Friedrich that separates him from other romantics is his brushstrokes. He uses a very tight, linear brushstroke, much more in line with what a neoclassical artist would have done rather than a romantic, and that just goes to show you that there are really no hard and fast rules. We can look at tendencies of stylistic periods, but there will be exceptions, and Friedrich's brushstrokes are one of those.

Courbet (French), Burial at Ornans, Realism, 1849

Courbet spent a lot of his time in rural France where he was from, and so the Banks of the Seine painting is a little bit of an anomaly for him, as most of his works are more like The Stone Breakers or like this one, Burial at Ornons. He uses color in this painting to really create a very austere and weighty tone, hence, the subject matter, the Burial at Ornons. Ornons was his hometown in rural France. So he uses mostly grays and blacks in this painting with the exception of the reds that the cardinals wear and that the choirboys wears just around the bottoms of their robes and their hat. This painting is 20-1/2 feet long. So we are talking incredibly large, and that sized painting was usually reserved for really grand history paintings, and it looks, in composition, much like the grand portraits that we saw by Hals or Rembrandt during the Dutch period. The coloring is a little more like that of the Spanish painter, maybe somebody like Goya. The grave in the center, of course, brings us back to the central point of the painting, and it actually encroaches onto our space. We only see half of it as if we are stepping toward it. It takes this slice of rural life and puts it -- what Courbet did is take this slice of rural life and put it on center stage in Paris. It actually was shown at one of the salons, but of course, it was not very well received at the salon. It was criticized for, once again, depicting very ordinary and somewhat ugly people. Of course, these were real people to Courbet. These were people he knew in his hometownHe even included his sisters among some of the mourners. He puts one right there. He brings together different types of people, and he depicts what a funeral what have really looked like. There's no allegory. There is no theatricality. It's just a real scene.

Gustave Courbet- Realism

He was the most important realist painter in France in the 19th century, and also, as we're looking at realism, I want you to remember that this is a time when there is, again, overlap between stylistic periods. Certainly, when Realism is beginning to take hold, Romanticism is still very important, as far as a movement within France, and it will also overlap somewhat with Impressionism. It will also influence Impressionism. So what do we need to know about Realism? Realist artists disapproved of historical or fictional subjects. In other words, they wanted to paint the real world. Hence, the name of the movement. Courbet has an incredibly important quote where he says, "Show me an angel, and I'll paint one." This is basically saying why should I paint something that doesn't exist in the real world, when I can show the real world painted on a beautiful scale in a beautiful way with beautiful light, and that's exactly what he did.

Eakins (American), The Gross Clinic, Realism, 1875

His most famous work is The Gross Clinic. So this one has -- again it's someone working but we're not seeing that laboring idea that we saw with Millet and Courbet. In The Gross Clinic, we see Eakins most famous work played out really in a way that pays homage to what he liked to pay attention to which was anatomy. So this is The Gross Clinic. This is Dr. Gross performing one of his famous surgeries here and you have this room full of students getting to observe this. You also have the mother of the patient here just recoiling in disbelief and again, Eakins not afraid to show a weaker side of the woman as compared to the men who are going right in and performing the surgery on this patient. This painting feels very strong It feels as if this man, again, very capable and very well showing what he can do. It's a real event. It's real figures. It's not idealized but at the same time, it is showing something in the very real way that was seen as something very important in the American world and certainly in the world of science at this time. And this also reveals Eakins own fondness for science and for that study of anatomy that I mentioned.

Tanner (American), The Annunciation, Realism, 1898

I love his Annunciation scene. Simply because it's way out of the box of what we're used to thinking of realist painting but at the same time, he doesn't show the angel. So you can take this right back to Courbet's quote of show me an angel and I'll paint one. Well whether Tanner knew about that or had -- we know that he knew the work of Courbet very well but whether he was thinking that when he painted this, we don't know. But here he's showing Mary. You know being visited by the angel but the angel is just really represented by this bold, very striking almost [inaudible] like light that you see here. So as you think about Tanner, I want you to understand that an artist can

Jean-François Millet (French, 1814 - 1875), The Gleaners, Realism,1857

Millet is a contemporary of Courbet and also lived much of his life in rural France, and it's reflected in his paintings. This one is The Gleaners, one of his most famous works, and again, you see anonymous laborers. We don't really see their face. Even in this detail of this figure, here you can see by painting the face, you can see that Millet has this simply had a darker outline over this more skincolor tone, and that's the only detail that there is. So what a gleaner is is someone who comes long after the harvest has been collected and is allowed to pick up the scraps of wheat that were not picked up in the larger harvest and take those home for their own meager sort of addition or bonus you could say. They are very large, the gleaners here, in comparison to the other figures on the canvas that you see off in the distance. It makes them feel monumental, and in many ways, that's how Millet heroicized his works. Courbet made the paintings very large. Millet does not make the paintings essentially very large. These are rather normal-sized works of art, 3 and 4 feet, but the figures within them are very large and feel very commanding. So the arrangement does give them a sense of dignity, and it contrasts their hard work with the meager rewards that they're getting. When you look at the abundant harvest in the distance, and you see what they are taking home, it feels very depleted and then a little sad. Again, Millet, like Courbet, was not very well received during his time. 6 His paintings were seen as glorifying the lower class. The middle-class, the bourgeois, at the time were very suspicious of. This was a time when socialism was beginning to have rumblings throughout Europe, thanks to Karl Marx, and France was not oblivious to those, and the middle and the upper classes were very suspicious of any rumblings that gave power to lower classes

Frederick Edwin Church (American, 1826 - 1900), Twilight in the Wilderness, Romanticism, 1860

Now Church paints a little bit differently in that he uses light to an even greater extent than Cole does. And his most famous works, I'll show you the two that I consider the most famous really deal with light in this luminescent quality head-on. He's very much in line with someone like Turner who often used a bright sun or the element of the bright sun as the centerpiece of this paintings. So you see that here immediately. And the name of the painting Twilight in the Wilderness, of course, also gives us that immediate concern. Now we know that this is romantic because of this vast landscape and the beautiful and unique way that he makes America look. This does have, and you probably notice it with Cole as well, but I think it's more pronounced with Church, the very precise and more linear brushstroke So more in line with someone with Frederick in that sense, not having the loose brushstrokes of a lot of the other European romantic painters

Goya (Spanish), Charles IV of Spain and His Family, Romanticism, 1800

Now here with Charles's family, the King that he was working for, you automatically might think back to Velazquez, and his Baroque painting of Las 4 Meninas, and Velazquez included himself, and here Goya includes himself, as well, but the painting, this has been said, and your textbook talks about it more at length then I will that this family doesn't seem very powerful. The figures seem rather disorganized. We're not really sure who the leader is, though, ostensibly, it was Charles IV here you see here. Goya put his wife in the center, and she was really thought to have more power, that's Luisa. Again, the figures seem a little bit disorganized There's these odd shadows seem to be creeping across the floor. You're not really sure if Charles would have preferred the painting to be more organized and more formal looking, but nevertheless, that's not what he got with Goya, who by this point is beginning to really step away from the idea of neoclassicism and boldly step into the romantic world.

Manet (French), Olympia, French, Realism, 1863

One of Manet's most famous works, Olympia. You see in both of these paintings. Lunch on the Grass and Olympia, these very dark/light contrasts. So this is another thing that critics really disliked about Manet's work. There aren't any really smooth gradations between the colors, but they actually feel very shocking. He also has crude lines. You actually see the lines that he uses as he paints, especially around her body. That was something else that critics didn't like. The paint seems to be handled in a very rough manner and not a very smooth and finished and polished look. The traits, these traits are really not conducive to academic painting, which we'll talk about in a few lectures, which was the more accepted salon style of this time. Of course, we can recall Titian's Venus of Urbino or Ange's [inaudible] as we look at this, but again, this is a modern woman. She's not meant to represent anything allegorical. She's not meant to be foreign. She is a French Parisian citizen who boldly looks out at her viewers in a way almost as if to challenge them. It's thought that she probably was a prostitute. Here she is receiving a gift that her maid is delivering, probably from one of her suitors, and here's the black cat, may be indicating some idea of sin or evil or even something that is just not wholly embraced. Again, she stares at us really with indifference. There's very little modesty. There's no embarrassment. At least the woman in Luncheon on the Grass is a little coy. This one, Olympia, feels much more bold and brazen in how she's presenting her nudity to us. Critics complained about everything about her, from the expression on her face of indifference, to her lack of modesty, even to the fact that her feet appeared to be dirty. Now whether this is a shadow or whether Manet did paint the bottom of her feet to have a little bit of a grayish tint is beside the point The fact is that critics had to tear this painting apart because they were so uncomfortable with that

Courbet (French), Two Girls on the Banks of the Seine, Realism, 1856

So another work by Courbet. Again, the figures are not idealized, and the canvas is very large. This one was about almost 7 feet wide by about 5-1/2 feet tall. The women are not respectable. They are, in a sense, he's depicting prostitutes here for us. So they don't have a high place in society. They are not the kind of figures that people who would have been attending the high-class salons, the art exhibitions in Paris in the middle part of the 19th century would have wanted to see so prominently and largely displayed, but the fact that the salons didn't embrace Courbet's work made it almost more successful because people sort of had a clamoring to see it and to see what it was all about. It made the upper crust of Paris very uncomfortable. They didn't want to acknowledge or to have to look at the seedier side of their city

Gustave Courbet (French, 1819 - 1877), The Stone Breakers, Realism, 1849

So he often depicted workers of a very lowly class. Here you see one of his most famous works, The Stone Breakers. We'll talk a little bit more about it in a minute. He painted them on a grand scale. Most of the realist paintings, especially those by Courbet, are very large in size. He wanted to embrace the new. It's essentially also a way of saying he's rejecting the old. He doesn't feel a need to paint mythology and paint great heroes from Greece or Rome. He doesn't feel the need to paint things that, essentially, he can't reach out and touch himself. We will also talk about American realists in the next lecture, but again, and this one, we will focus on France. So here Gustave Courbet's Stone Breakers a little bit larger. This painting was actually destroyed during World War II. So it doesn't exist anymore. We only have images of it, prints and photographs. It was located in Germany during the war and was bombed. At any rate, as I said, he liked to depict his figures on a very monumental scale. This painting is about 8-1/2 feet wide and about 5 feet tall, and note that the figures are anonymous. We don't actually see the entirety of their faces. So it's basically a huge painting of no one in particular. There's no biblical hero, no mythological god, no great heralded King. It's an accurate depiction of drudgery, of hard work, and it differs from Dutch genre scenes. We can say, well, they painted everyday doing everyday things because the Dutch really value to beauty, and they also had deeper messages than the realists might have. It's not that the realists are being shallow, but their essential message is to show something that we might not essentially or originally see as beautiful as, in fact, rather beautiful. So here we have two workers, the stone breakers, that was a type of labor that you would see at this time where someone would go along the road or the path and break up these very large stones into smaller ones, and then someone would follow behind to pick up the smaller stones for them to be used in roads and other projects. So Courbet's goal with this is not to dramatize or romanticize, beautify or idealize hard work but just to depict it accurately . The revolution of 1848 would have happened just right before Courbet painted this work, and it would have really been significant because that revolution was about the laborers in France, and it really put laborers and low-class citizens, lower-class citizens on a central stage. The painting at the time, like most realist works, was criticized for championing these lower classes and being critical of capitalism, which was really beginning to bloom and blossom in France. Both of these facts really made the upper and the middle class in France very uncomfortable, and realism, in a sense, was not a stylistic movement that was truly embraced during its own time.

Friedrich (German), The Wreck of the Hope, Romanticism, 1823 - 1825

So here's The Wreck of the Hope, another important work by Friedrich, and it's funny when you first look at this painting, I probably looked at it several times before I even noticed the ship here, which is the cause of the tidal. This is a shipwreck. When you look at it initially, you're really just seeing the shards of ice, of this violent and dangerous iceberg. You don't see that you can actually see what's left of the ship as it has wrecked. So he's taking something from a contemporary situation and he's painting it in a way that feels very violent, feels very alone, feels very frightening, very sublime, but if you look up here at the sky, you see this just tiniest peak of blue sky coming through, and again, it gives you some sense of hope. Surely not coincidental, considering the name of the ship that he's focusing on. One thing that I will point out about Friedrich that separates him from other romantics is his brushstrokes. He uses a very tight, linear brushstroke, much more in line with what a neoclassical artist would have done rather than a romantic, and that just goes to show you that there are really no hard and fast rules. We can look at tendencies of stylistic periods, but there will be exceptions, and Friedrich's brushstrokes are one of those.

Goya (Spanish), Third of May, 1808, Romanticism, 1814

So in 1814, Ferdinand VII, who's one of the sons featured in the portrait that we just saw, commissions Goya to paint the Third of May and also The Fourth of May 1808. This was in 1814, and he wanted these paintings to commemorate the horrors of the French troops who were attacking Spanish citizens, the French being led by Napoleon at the time, and so we see going into painting a horrific historical scene. It's contemporary, actually. It's not six years earlier, but in the scheme of things, that is a contemporary scene, something that the Spanish were still feeling very strongly about. What I want to really talk about with this painting is this idea of Romanticism, because now he has firmly stepped into this quality. So there's a dark sky in the background. It feels very ominous. It feels very heavy on this painting. We also have this idea of the diagonal line. We talked about the X composition in Raft of Medusa, and we see that again here. We also see it in the man who is about to be executed. Goya doesn't hold back on showing the blood and tragedy and the violence that's happening. We also see what appears to be this row of soldiers. We don't see their faces. They feel anonymous to us, which actually makes it even scarier, even more frightening. He uses the chiaroscuro a little more so than a lot of romantic artists do, but he uses it very effectively to, again, draw our eye to this next victim that we see here. So there are lots of romantic qualities in this painting that we can talk about. The loose brushstrokes. We began to see those in Goya's royal portraits, but here we see them even stronger, especially as you look at the victims who are sprawled on the ground.

Henry Ossawa Tanner (American,1859 - 1937), The Thankful Poor, Realism, 189

So one of Eakins most famous students at the Philadelphia Academy of Art was Henry Ossawa Tanner. And his painting, The Thankful Poor, you see here is very similar to the Banjo Lesson which was Tanner's painting that's in your textbook. And I like to talk about The Thankful Poor. It's interesting because it is part of the Cosby collection. It's owned by Bill Cosby who has a large number of paintings by African American artists. This one shows this quiet scene. It shows real people. It shows his really fondness with these loose brush strokes that really give the painting almost a sense of warmth and a sense of a circular nature that surrounds these two figures. That though appearing poor are thankful for what they do have. Not unlike Millet's farmers in The Angelus who may be poor and may be working the fields but they don't -- it's not that they don't have time to stop and say a pray for the departed and be thankful for what they have. So you see a similarity between these two. Almost even in the arrangement of the two figures here Courbet or Tanner is somebody who though trained in America, he left the United States and went to France in the late 1890s or the mid-1890s. And would stay there for the rest of his life. 5 He changed his style a little bit after he left the United States in that his realist tendencies faded just a bit but he was such a well-traveled person. He traveled to North Africa. He traveled to the Middle East. All over France and England. And he really just was reflecting what he saw everywhere. So he has a lot of more exotic images that reflect what he saw in North Africa, in the Middle East.

Bierstadt (American), Cathedral Rocks, Yosemite Valley, Romanticism, 1872

So one other work by Bierstadt is Cathedral Rocks, though also in Yosemite Valley. And again, he uses very monumental elements and then closer to us very small elements to make those monumental elements like all the larger. This is another painting that is very large. And I like it, especially just because the way that he depicts these beautiful reflections in the water.

Goya Heads in a Landscape and Judith and Holofernes, Romanticism, 1819 - 1823

So two other famous works from this Black Painting series are Heads in a Landscape, very simple and in odd title, and then his account of Judith, which we saw plenty of during the Baroque Period. If we look first at Heads in a Landscape, I want you to think about the complete asymmetrical quality of this painting, how he crowds these heads down here in this landscape. They don't really seem to fit with the rest of it. Nature seems very powerful. There is a beautiful, luminescent sunset or sunrise can see coming around this mountain, but overall, it feels very frightening. Now his Judith is really rather hard to depict, but what we see here is Judith with the knife and it's hard to decipher and the maidservant here, and the rest of it is somewhat hard, again, to completely decipher, but you get this idea of a sense of movement and a sense of fear. It's thought this painting was somewhat Goya's interpretation of an adult male's castration, and you can see that it would have very dark and very frightening connotations with it. So hopefully, you see from Goya how an artist can really develop and change throughout his life, whether it's because of his own personal issues or because the world around him is completely changing, but he's always an interesting artist to look at when considering that fact.

Thomas Cole (American, 1801 - 1848), View on the Catskill, Early Autumn, Romanticism, 1837

So we begin by looking at a couple of works by Thomas Cole. This one is one that you've seen before. We use it when we talk about atmospheric perspective, which he does beautifully here depicting the mountain in the background. But other than that, we need to think about it as a romantic painting. So as I said, when there are figures included, they are very small. So you see here, you would hardly even notice the three figures in this painting until they're pointed out to you. Actually, there's four. Here's a small one here who's commanding these horses, which feel very wild despite their very small size. Oh, here's one more figure there in the boat. At any rate, this is what the Hudson River School was all about. It was about exploring what then, even though this is just in the Catskills in New York. This is not really that vast western America that we think of now. But to the people in the United States in the 1830s, this still felt very wild and very far away from the big cities that were immediately on that Eastern Seaboard. So we immediately see that Cole is an incredible landscape painter. He has a beautiful way of rendering trees, of rendering skies, of rendering distances, and making it feel not only very large and very powerful but very beautiful as well. .

Alexandra Cabanel (French, 1823 - 1899), Birth of Venus, Academic art, 1863

So we look at a couple of examples of academic art. First we have Kevin [inaudible] Birth of Venus. So if you look at this painting, it, of course, is a mythological figure. She is not a real person unlike Manet's Olympia which you see here. This nude is meant to be something that is a mythological creature that is not real to us. The exact opposite of Manet's person who is actually meant to be a real person. Also look at the way that Cavanaugh paints. It has a beautiful polished look to it. You can't see the brush strokes. It feels very symmetrical and harmonious as the cupids of the Venus are welcoming her into this world as she comes in on this crashing wave. It's very beautiful. It's very elegant, and it's very dramatic.

Eakins (American), Realism The Swimming Hole, 1884 - 1885

So we start off by looking at some of Eakins most important early works. And he is a true realist in the sense that he observed nature and anatomy and figures and depicted it as correctly as possible. He wanted human depictions to feel very real on a canvas. And he consulted very often with photographers in order to study motion and muscles and anatomy. He wanted to see figures in action and would often times have photographers come and take photos of his subjects so that he could correctly depict all parts of the anatomy in the paintings. Eakins was a master of detail and if you look at these, you see even the beautiful reflections in the water. The way that the splash comes around the men. The bricks in this bridge that they're passing under but at the same time, he uses that looser brush stroke similar to what we saw with the French realists. So both of these [inaudible] show his relationship with movement and anatomy. And even though they feel an anonymous, these are actually all real people.

American Romanticism

So what is romanticism in America? Again, it's usually associated with the Hudson River School, which is not an actual physical school but rather a group of artists who worked together, studied together and who really found inspiration in and around the Hudson River and what was then still rural New York State. Thomas Cole was their leader. Frederick Church and Albert Bierstadt were two other very prominent American painters that were associated with Cole and the Hudson River School. What American romantic painters did was paint America. They painted beautiful scenery that needed to be seen by Americans. This is a time when America is still a relatively new country. And probably 90 to 95 percent of the population lives along the Eastern Seaboard At the same time, America was growing. It was expanding westward. 2 This is this feeling our doctrine really that is known as Manifest Destiny. That is a widespread belief in the 19th Century that American's logical destiny was westward expansion. And though the paintings don't directly address concerns that might have been associated with Manifest Destiny such as the displacement of Native Americans, potential violence, other dangers in the wild world. The paintings explore this beautiful side of the land that is America and that people had yet to really see. Remember this is happening right at the cusp of the invention of or really the widespread nature of photography. And so a lot of times the way that people saw what the beautiful Rocky Mountains or a Pacific Ocean looked like were through paintings by American romantic painters who had forged their way west on these various trips. What we see in American romanticism is often very monumental elements. And in a whole -- in all elements that made America look very unique and also very large. You'll feel very often that figures in these paintings, if they're depicted at all, are very small, making the land look all the more larger. American Romanticism is linked to the Hudson River School, which was founded by Thomas Cole; Frederick Edwin Church & Albert Bierstadt were also prominent American Romantic painters • Encouraged a curiosity about the American West, therefore encouraging westward expansion; • American Romanticism featured monumental elements of nature that emphasized the vastness of the American West; the result often made viewers feel small

Édouard Manet (French, 1832 - 1883), Luncheon on the Grass, Realism, 1863

So what we see here in his Luncheon on the Grass, a very famous work, is this woman. This is a model that he used frequently -- and she is, of course, nude, but she is sitting with two men who are clothed. There is another woman in the distance is partially clothed, but when you start to really look at this painting, you see that there are all sorts of things that don't really quite match up. For one thing, the perspective is a little off. This woman feels larger than she should be for as far away as he places her in the painting. Of course, the arrangement of the figures feels a little sexual, a little bit scandalous, perhaps. She is looking directly at us as if she's not embarrassed by her nudity at all. Of course, your contrasting her nudity with their clothing, which again, just adds another layer of you're not really sure what's happening in this scene. This was very shocking to the public at time. This painting was rejected for the salon. It was seen as something that was so offensive, and just society was not prepared for this at the time. The nudity that show isn't mythological. It isn't allegorical. She is simply a modern, contemporary woman who Manet has chosen to paint nude and paint nude in the presence of clothed men So there are so many things that really set this painting apart from other works of art, but it also set it on this track toward modernity and toward embracing something that isn't necessarily what tradition would demand. Oddly enough, this painting is taken from -- this is a print after a Rafael painting that has been lost, and the arrangement, as you can see, is almost identical. Of course, he has clothed men. These are Greek gods that Rafael had painted and a goddess, but here, he has clothed men and made the scene, of course, much more modern, but it's funny when we think about it as this being a bold step towards modernity that Manet, in some ways, was looking back in history but rejecting a lot about it.

Manet (French), Bar at the Folies-Bergère, Realism / Impressionism,1882

That last painting that we'll look at by Manet the Bar at the Folies-Bergere, and you can look at the date, 1882. Most of the other realist works that we've looked at have come from the 1850s and 60s. So this is much later, and this is a time when Impressionism has really taken a hold in France, and Manet, being friends with many of the impressionists, began to really experiment with that style, as well. Your book would probably categorize this more as an Impressionist painting, and it certainly has Impressionist qualities. Impressionists focus on light and focus on these sort of very exciting and full-of-life scenes, split-second action, all of these things, and we see that here, but the mood of the figure, the central figure here, is somewhat realist. Her gaze is much like Olympia's, in that she has this indifference to her. There is a realness to her character and to who she is, standing there looking at, here's a reflection of her customer here, as if there is something deeper within her, and that's the realist vibe of it. The Impressionist would not have dealt that much with emotions orpsychology. Again, you see the use of the darks and lights. He doesn't blend the colors as well as a lot of critics would have liked at the time, but Manet, he's interested in the surface. He's interested in how the texture is painted. He's interested in the gaze of the women, and those are the important details to him. Realists are painters that are taking a different, new, bolder approach to art in the 19th century, and for them, we have a lot of things to thank them for as they move us very well into the next movement of Impressionism.

Goya (Spanish), Saturn Devouring One of His Children

The last works of art that we look at from Goya are maybe his most fascinating, and these are some of the last works that he did in his life. Goya went deaf somewhere in the middle of his life, when he was around 40, and at some point after that, he really retreated into himself. He bought a large house outside of Madrid and really lived out the rest of his life within the walls of that house. What was discovered -- well, it was noted about during his life, but after he died, they really began to be studied with these series of paintings referred to as the Black Paintings. There are 14 frescoes painted inside the walls of this home, and at this point, we understand that Goya has really totally rejected the rational world. He is painting completely imaginary creatures, mythological creatures in measurable spaces. He is focusing, a lot of times in these works, on these lack colors, which is why they're called the Black Paintings, but let's look at some of the subject matter that he chose for these. First we see Saturn Devouring One of His Children. 6 So a tale from mythology, and it's one of the most horrendous tales in mythology, and when you think about this large, really monster-like figure and this tiny, small body just being crushed and devoured, it does evoke a sense of fear. What Goya was possibly doing is not only conveying really his dark view of humanity, but also the horrors and the self-destruction of war, which Spain had been engaged in numerous wars for several decades, at this point.

Goya (Spanish) Two Old People Eating Soup, Romanticism, 1819 - 1823, fresco

The last works of art that we look at from Goya are maybe his most fascinating, and these are some of the last works that he did in his life. Goya went deaf somewhere in the middle of his life, when he was around 40, and at some point after that, he really retreated into himself. He bought a large house outside of Madrid and really lived out the rest of his life within the walls of that house. What was discovered -- well, it was noted about during his life, but after he died, they really began to be studied with these series of paintings referred to as the Black Paintings. There are 14 frescoes painted inside the walls of this home, and at this point, we understand that Goya has really totally rejected the rational world. He is painting completely imaginary creatures, mythological creatures in measurable spaces. He is focusing, a lot of times in these works, on these lack colors, which is why they're called the Black Paintings, but let's look at some of the subject matter that he chose for these. Now in this one, Two Old People Eating Soup, we really see that is one old person eating soup and one skeleton sort of resting against the table. It feels very asymmetrical. The brushstrokes are obviously very loose. This is a movement really away completely from Goya's neoclassical style. Again, the scene is frightening. It feels like something from a nightmare.

Cole (American), The Oxbow (View from Mt. Holyoke after a Thunderstorm), Romanticism, 1836

The painting that you watched -- read and watched about in the outside reading is the Oxbow, one of Cole's most famous works. And again, he's using a part of America that looks and feels very unique. The Oxbow in this river feels very different. It's something that, again, is unique to this part of the country. That's what the American romantics liked to focus on. So again, here you see how Cole is very capable of rendering clouds and real feelings of an outdoors sense.

Millet (French), The Angelus, Realism, 1857 - 1859

This is another famous work by Millet, The Angelus, and this is a prayer that's said for the departed at the end of the day When they hear the church bells. So you see the church of the distance. They would have just heard the bells that call for the saying of The Angelus, and they stopped what they're doing to say this prayer for the departed. Like the gleaners, the figures are some anonymous. You see a little bit more detail in the face but not much. They carry monumental size against the rest of the canvas, but again, it's not overly large canvas. This painting eventually came to symbolize really great patriotism in France and pride at the end of the century, and because of that, it has also sort of like Rembrandt's Night Watch has been the subject of vandalism a few times and has to be very heavily protected now. Manet might be the most notorious, we'll say, of the realists, and he is an artist who really branches, reaches over to the Impressionist Movement leader in his career, but these early works are firmly in the realist camp. He embraced Realism. He embraced Modernism. He embraced the idea of really departing from traditional French imagery.

Bouguereau (French), L'Aurore, Academic art, 1881

This is the Bougeureau painting that is part of the Birmingham Museum's collection and it's called L'Aurora which means dawn or aurora is what we typically think of that is. And this painting, if you go to the museum and you see it in real life, you have to get very, very close to it to even be able to see a brush stroke. It is incredible the amount of detail that he put into this painting. Again, you have an allegorical figure. So she's not real so the nudity is accepted. You have the beautiful lyrical way that she is positioned. And if you see this in real life, you notice all of these beautiful specimens of botanicals that probably are really influenced from Leonardo going back that far. This painting was part of a series called the Times of Day, and so, he painted one for each traditional four times a day being morning, day, evening, and night They have never been shown together again since then. Two of these are in private collections and this one, night, is actually in the National Museum of Habana in Cuba. Though there has been an effort to reunite these four paintings and show them all together. The Cuban government will not let theirs leave so needless they can't show - - there's not much use in showing three when we can't show all four. So how best to talk about academic art is a lot of times in comparison to realism. So look over these

Academic Art

This lecture introduces you to academic art, which in many ways is the exact opposite of realism. And these two schools or art, I guess, were happening at the same time in France in the mid to late 19th century. So academic art is exactly what the salons we're looking for. The salons were government-sponsored exhibitions of art and they showed the type of art that was presented or produced in academies at the time. So hence the name academic art. So the academies were also run by the government, and the kind of art that came out of those was typically highly traditional. They rejected anything that was new which we know that realism, very much it took hold of and appreciated, and there was a beautiful sense of finish to these paintings. They come across as very highly polished, as painted in an incredibly linear method, and the subject matter they may seem a little blah to us now. Typically it just addresses historical and mythological academic types of subjects. This is not going to be the type of art where like we did with realism, you see the prostitutes laying on the side of the riverbank. So followers of academic art stood very firm in their beliefs about depicting tradition and they were supported not only by the government in this but also by the general public in France at the time. 2 And it really wasn't until a few decades later that academic art basically fell out of favor in favor of the realism and the post impressionism and these newer movements that finally took hold and people began to actually enjoy. What did the Salons look for? Academic art - art which was in line with French painting traditions, and therefore was accepted in to the Salons in mid- to late-19th century France. It includes highly-polished, colorful scenes of historical, biblical, mythological, or literary events. Academic art rejected both the "new," which was so important to the Realists, as well as the flare for the dramatic, which was utilized frequently by the Romantics. In many ways viewed as an opposing force to Realism. Followers of academic art stood firm in their beliefs in depicting the traditional; a rare stance during a period of historic change within the art world.

Eakins (American), Between Rounds, Realism, 1898 - 1899

This one comes later in his career when he sort of veered away from the sporting type of paintings and did portraiture and in the late 1890s, he comes back to a sporting theme. He had become very interested in boxing because the matches were held just across the street from the Philadelphia Academy of Arts where he taught. And he would attend the matches and you know, be a part of all of that action that he saw there. And he spent an incredible amount of time on these paintings. And that's according to his wife who said that she wanted -- he wanted to make sure every detail was correct and again, even though these figures, some of them seem anonymous. They each sat and posed for Eakins so that he could very accurately depict exactly what they were doing at the time. Whether they're the trainer or the boxer or the constable or the judge or reporter, whichever that is. So he again is very concerned with accuracy in his depictions of realism. And the lighting, the smoke, the dust, everything in it he wanted to be seen as -- wanted it to be depicted as real as possible

Tanner (American), The Seine, Realism, 1902

This one is one of just a simple scene of the Seine in Paris but we see exactly what he saw. He doesn't make more glorifying or anything extra in that. So he's staying with that realism tendency there

Thomas Eakins (American, 1844 - 1916), Portrait of Amelia Van Buren, Realism, ca. 1891

This one of Amelia Van Buren was a student of his at the Philadelphia Academy of Arts. 2 And often when Eakins depicts women in his portraits, he depicts them appearing rather weak or tired. And we know that he had a great deal of respect for women as he had several female students in his classes at the Philadelphia Academy but for whatever reason, this is how a lot of his female portraitures really taken as.

Caspar David Friedrich (German, 1774 - 1840), Abbey in the Oak Forest, Romanticism, 181

This one, Abby in the Oak Forest, is no exception to that. Friedrich's landscapes are also often religious. He focuses many times on sacred places or on once-sacred places, and it conveys, especially this one, often the idea of death. So what you have here is the remnants of a once what must have been a beautiful Gothic cathedral. Here you just see the one portal wall. You know it's surrounded by a cemetery, as you see a grave marker here in a few over here. We also see the dead trees that seem though, to be rising up out of this darkness into this beautiful, luminescent sky that he has included. So what we think about maybe initially with this painting is the sadness of death and winter, but we also have to think about what always follows winter is spring, and so that this painting does have some hope, some hope for a better situation down the road maybe. So the painting, all in all, could definitely maybe be said to have the sublime quality, as there is this beautiful depiction of the sky, but it's countered by something that's rather sad and a little bit frightening.

Goya - Romanticism in Spain

•Largely associated Goya •Goya had many different artistic personas during his life. •His early works (done in his 30s and 40s), such as this royal portrait, can be considered Neoclassical. •Later works embody the Romantic movement in Spain, incorporating horror, the sublime, and imaginative, dream-like scenarios. Now we turn to Spain and Romanticism in that country at this time really focuses on the artist Goya, Francisco Goya, and he was an artist that has a fascinating personal story, rather tragic, and whose style really changed throughout his life. Early on in his career, he worked for the King of Spain, and so his work tended to be more neoclassical, but there always tended to be a little bit of a dark side to these neoclassical portraits that he did. Now his later work really invokes the romantic spirit. It is sometimes horror filled, dreamlike, and very much imaginative. So we'll look at works from his early period and then the transition into what he did later. So this portrait here of Don Manuel, one of the younger artists, or one of the younger members of the royal family at this time, was one of many royal portraits that he did, and though it is elegant and beautiful and feels somewhat neoclassical, it does have this sense of darkness that I mentioned As you see that he's holding the bird on the string, and the cats are looking at it. It has just a little bit of a sense of dark -- not even just darkness, but of mystery to it.