Welcome back. In today’s blog post, let us take a break from engineering entirely and learn about the art of the Romantic Era in Europe and North America. This is an essay that I wrote as a high school sophomore in AP European History class, which to this day is the most difficult class I have ever taken. This class taught me to study hard and I owe my success in university to my outstanding AP European History teacher, who prepared me for college.
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Romantic Era Painting, Architecture, and Sculpture
The late 18th century witnessed the growth of industrialization throughout Western Society, spreading from England to continental Europe and the United States. Men, women, and children left their countryside homes to work alongside machines to produce textiles and metal works in cities. By the early 19th century, the backlash against the massive changes brought about by the industrial economy found artistic and intellectual expression through Romanticism.
Romantic and Neoclassical art co-existed and challenged each other before 1830. Neoclassicism had emerged in 1780 as a modern alternative to the Baroque perspective of a divinely-orchestrated universe (Thacker 3). It meshed well with industrialization, supporting a forward-thinking, mechanized society. Emphasizing human advancement and empirical thinking, Neoclassical art blended modern scientific discipline with classical motifs to show humanity in a predictable world. For example, Neoclassical pieces depicted Ancient Greek scientists and scholars such as Socrates, and projected scientific advancement through structured geometrical shapes (Palmer 73). Romanticism, however, rejected industrialization and the exactitude of objective thought. It highlighted the enduring presence of an emotional, subjective, and natural world. Romantic painters and sculptors favored nature, beauty, and flexibility, rather than artificial constructs and the pursuit of ways to completely describe the world around them. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1762 book Émile inspired the Romantic movement through its tale of a young man whose education stressed the importance of emotion over empiricism. Seeking clarity and confidence in a period of dramatic change, Romantic architects in Germany, Great Britain, and America revived the Gothic style of the Middle Ages, with its focus on religion, faith, and irregularity, in contrast to the order and symmetry of Ancient Greek architecture and modern engineering (Schneider xiii).
Romanticism grew in popularity throughout the 1800s, and by 1830, it had overtaken Neoclassicism as the leading style in painting, architecture, and sculpture across Europe. Romantic pieces of the early 1800s became indicators of the growth of the industrial economy, which their creators wished to stifle. They would dominate Western society until 1875, reflecting the intellectual backlash to urbanization and industrialization. Thus, Caspar David Friedrich’s painting The Solitary Tree displayed the shift from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy, while Alexander Davis’ Lyndhurst Mansion illustrated a renewed admiration of Medieval architecture and culture, and Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s Neapolitan Fisherboy sculpture reflected the Romantics’ value of nature.
Caspar David Friedrich was born in Greifswald, Germany in 1774. As a student in Copenhagen, Friedrich developed an interest in Dutch landscape painting. By 1820, he had become one of the most prominent early Romantic painters. He believed that nature was a beautiful product of divine creation and that nature most fully revealed God’s glory (Palmer 93). The landscape, oak trees, and Riesenberg mountains surrounding his mother’s home in Neubrandenburg, Germany, captivated Friedrich from a young age. These elements set the scene in his 1822 work, The Solitary Tree. At the same time, his work depicted the shift from an agricultural economy to industrial economy that would overtake Europe and America in the 19th century (Schmied 102).
With the rise of industry came the rise of economic prosperity in cities. This development made agricultural life unattractive to many Europeans and Americans, who gradually uprooted from their age-old homes and made their way to cities. The percentage of Western Europeans living in urban settings increased from 21% to 41% from 1800 to 1900 (Ritchie, Roser 1). In The Solitary Tree, Friedrich created a contrast by showing a battered and lonely tree sheltering a single shepard in a vast countryside while a growing city loomed over the horizon, pointing to the future. It demonstrated the rapid decline in agricultural life experienced in the 19th century and the allure of city life. Aside from a few houses in the middle of the piece, all other humans in the painting had moved to the city situated in the distance (Siegel 108). Additionally, the smoke rising from the city alluded to the pollution of urban life, and foretold the smoke-stacks of factories that would become common in Europe’s growing industrial cities (Schmied 102).
Friedrich’s work employed several sequential layers which progressed from the foreground, representing the past, towards the mountains at the top, symbolizing the future. Starting with marshy land, a small pond edged the central tree’s trunk where it broke free from the earth. Abundant in its lower branches, the tree struggled at the top, with broken branches and sparse growth, resembling a steadfast cross, broken but not defeated. Continuing with the Christian motif, a shepherd, the subject of Christian stories, leaned against the tree and herded his flock in a meadow. A blue pond came next where a sunny field took the scene. In the distance over a hill was a city with a rising church spire. This sequence of picture planes represented the imposition of the march of time on humans. The marsh and pond in the foreground alluded to prehistoric times, the zone containing the shepherd and his flock represented the Ancient era, the sunny countryside described modern history, and the city pointed to the emerging future. The central tree stretched across all four of these phases, but increasingly became bare and mangled toward the top. It signified the decaying power of nature and faith in the lives of humans as they became more enamoured with themselves and science. The loss of strength for such traditional values as religion and rural life corresponded to the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy in the 19th century (Schmied 102-103).
Within a natural scene, Friedrich symbolized the negative effects of urbanization and advocated in favor of an agrarian lifestyle. The shepherd’s relaxed pace of life allowed him to lean against the tree in a contemplative stance, hinting that it and the nature around him had something to teach him, something he could not learn in a large city. This scene supported Friedrich’s belief that nature was divine and mysterious, and only from spending long hours in nature, rather than a laboratory, could one possibly learn its secrets. The tree supported the shepherd’s weight and protected him under its large lower branches, demonstrating that before industrialization, men found solace and tranquility in religion and nature which they could no longer find in bustling cities. At the same time, the landscape in Friedrich’s work could be thought to represent the tangible world, while the tree and the sky represented the spiritual world. The upper branches of the tree, which extended from the ground into the sky, formed a Christian cross, highlighting nature’s spiritual purity as well as industrialization’s threat to faith. The tree’s cross dwarfed the church spire extending from the city in the upper right of the landscape, conveying that those living an agrarian lifestyle would have a closer relationship with God than those living in cities and working in modern factories. This prediction came true as church attendance declined among working-class city dwellers in Europe in the late 1800s. While financial opportunity existed in urban society, Friedrich’s work argued that the spirituality and emotion that existed in the West before the advent of the industrial economy was lost in the process (Siegel 111).
Friedrich’s work fueled the spread of the Romantic movement in Europe and extended it to America in the 1830s (Rewald 39). Born in 1803, Alexander Davis was a prominent Greek-revival architect until 1838, when he shifted his attention to emulating the Gothic style that dominated the Middle Ages, and become a Romantic architect (Kastner 1). In the same year, the former mayor of New York City, William Paulding contracted Davis to construct his countryside retreat. That house, which came to be known as Lyndhurst Mansion, provided Paulding and his family with an outlet away from the bustling life of New York City. Lyndhurst was an embodiment of the Romantics’ fascination with Gothic architecture and the Medieval world as a whole (Greene 167).
Placed in the quiet of the Hudson River Valley’s rolling countryside, Lyndhurst Mansion harkened back to the perceived serenity of the Middle Ages, before city life became rushed and developed. The surrounding trees framed the mansion in the same picturesque style that dominated Gothic architecture. Along with its parapets and embrasures atop its roofs and flying buttresses extending out of its walls, Lyndhurst shared many characteristics of a Medieval castle (Greene 167).
Because the Middle Ages was a period in which faith prevailed over empirical thought, it was attractive to Romantic artists. Lyndhurst reflected the Romantic revival of the Medieval world’s value of religion. The mansion featured large porches and windows, just as traditional Gothic churches did (Seale 88). Lyndhurst’s multiple stained glass windows resembled those in nearly every Medieval church, alluding to God’s close proximity (Moss 154). Examining the interior, Gothic-style vaulted ceilings divided rooms into a living space below and a spiritual space above, affirming the Romantic belief that faith was necessary and spiritual forces were always present, even in the world of the mayor of an industrializing 19th century metropolis (Seale 88). Prior to completion, William Paulding’s son, Philip Paulding, sought to fit his father’s residence with Gothic-style furniture from local New York City warehouses. When those sources failed to meet Paulding’s vision, he commissioned Davis to build custom Medieval-inspired furniture for the house. What Davis created was a metaphor for Romantic and Medieval societies’ unrelenting admiration of religion. Throughout the house there were chairs with tall pointed arched backs or low backs shaped like rose cathedral windows (Seale 91).
Popular piety in the Middle Ages led people to live according to faith and emotion, rather than evidence and logic. Reflecting an emotional world, Gothic architecture sported steeply pitched roofs, ornamented chimneys, and asymmetrical facades, as opposed to the shallow-slanted roofs and symmetrical columns of Greco-Roman architecture (Kastner 1). This permeation of emotion matched the Romantic value of emotion perfectly. Accordingly, Lyndhurst had an uneven design, with a pointed roof separating a 100 ft tall tower on one side, and a much shorter roof on the other. This design depicted the wide range of human emotions, just as Gothic architecture did (Moss 153). The theme of emotional irregularity continued with the multicolored bricks and asymmetrical windows scattered across Lyndhurst’s facade (Seale 88). Additionally, the curved, teardrop shape of Lyndhurst’s stained-glass window panes conveyed human emotions and the power of the surrounding natural world to evoke them (Seale 92). The Romantics found historical basis for their beliefs in Medieval society, and resurfaced its values in their architecture. As Romanticism grew in popularity, the Gothic-Revival style of architecture would rise to become the most popular in America by 1850 (Kastner 1).
One could not speak of Romanticism without mentioning its fascination with nature. Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux emphasised this interest in his mid 19th century works. A generation after Davis, Carpeaux was born to a stone mason in Valenciennes, France in 1827. In 1844 he studied art at École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he met the prominent French sculptor François Rude who sparked his interest in Romantic sculpture. Emphasizing nature through unexaggerated real-world subjects, an approach called academicism, Carpeaux brought new innovations to the expression of traditional Romantic values (Palmer 55).
While studying among artists in Rome in 1858, Carpeaux created his Neapolitan Fisherboy, a statue of a smiling eleven year-old boy crouching down and holding a conch seashell to his ear (Eaton 203). The Neapolitan Fisherboy was a prime manifestation of the Romantics’ love of nature (Draper 97) as it paid tribute to François Rude’s 1833 sculpture of a young fisher boy playing with a tortoise. Showing the intricacies of nature’s masterful work, Carpeaux took special care to sculpt the boy’s body in so much detail that a viewer could visualize his anatomical construction. The boy exalted nature’s ability to create beauty. Unlike a Neoclassical sculpture, where a human would have been the only subject of a piece, the seashell in the boy’s hand plays a central role, diverting the viewer’s attention and demonstrating humanity’s reliance on nature (Eaton 204).
The boy’s Neapolitan fishercap served as an indication of his everyday connection with nature, rather than industrial citylife. With the arrival of the Industrial Revolution, intimate connections with nature declined across Europe. This extended to children as young boys and girls set off to work in factories, first in Britain and then in continental Europe. The Factory Act of 1833 and the Mines Act of 1842 restricted childwork in Great Britain, but the practice was visible elsewhere. After years of being occupied in the Napoleonic Wars of 1800-1815, industrialists in continental Europe did all they could to catch up with Britain’s industrial lead. By focusing on a child, Carpeaux’s sculpture created a contrast with a particularly undesirable aspect of industrialization. In that context, it sought to encourage children, and all Europeans, to have close and regular relationship with nature, rather than a monotonous relationship with machines in factories (Eaton 203).
Holding a seashell to one’s ear, to hear secrets to the course of future tides, was a common play at the beach for children in preindustrial Europe. Resting his feet on a surface that resembled the ocean, the boy’s anticipating expression, careful crouch, and the gingerly way he held the shell, demonstrated his excitement to learn what nature had to teach him (Draper 98). Carpeaux’s work was devoid of any hint of industrialization, squarely affirming the Romantics’ belief in the central role that nature, not industrial machinery, played in human life (Draper 99).
Carpeaux sent the Neapolitan Fisherboy back to the École des Beaux-Arts in France following its completion in 1858. After five years of exhibition, Empress Eugénie of France purchased the work in 1863, demonstrating the appeal of nature and simpler times even to the royal family controlling an industrializing and urbanizing nation. When Napoleon III contracted Georges Haussmann to rebuild Paris in 1850, he recognized the practical importance of large open spaces for sanitation (as well as more effective control of the city). He constructed parks and wide boulevards lined with trees where there had been dirty alleys before. The importance of these natural elements in his reconstruction efforts were a tangible manifestation of Carpeaux’s and the Romantics’ value of the natural world, and the belief that nature continued to benefit humanity amidst a growing world of glass and steel (McQueen 121).
In sum, Caspar David Friedrich’s 1822 painting The Solitary Tree displayed the decline of the agricultural economy in the West and the inevitability of industrialization, while Alexander Davis’s 1838 Lyndhurst Mansion was an embodiment of the Romantics’ revival of Medieval sentiments in a city that was rapidly emerging as a global center of modern life, and Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s 1858 Neapolitan Fisherboy conveyed the Romantics’ belief in the everlasting power of nature. Romanticism did not halt the spread of industrialization and urbanization, which continued to sweep through Europe and America. Industrial economies eventually came into contact with the rest of the world after the new imperialism of the 1870s and 1880s (Smith 5). In the process, human life became more structured and hectic with less room for emotion and nature. While the Gothic style saw a revival in Romantic architecture in the mid 19th century, by the early 20th century, it had almost completely given way to the style of functionalism, which sought to create buildings to serve their purpose only, with no extra grandeur. However, Romanticism was a strong and effective rebuttal to Neoclassicism, and in its time, served as a constant reminder that faith and nature remained unassailable (Rowe 92).
As the positive and negative effects of industrialization became better understood, so grew the confidence and the appetite to focus on the present, rather than the bygone worlds of the Medieval or classical Greek periods. Thus, Realism began after the French Revolution of 1848, and became the dominant style in European and American painting and sculpture after 1875. Realist art employed Carpeaux’s principle of academicism, but instead of using it to depict the beauty of nature, it showcased the harsh realities of lower-class urban life and in some cases, humans’ fundamentally selfish nature in the modern world (McQueen 106).
Throughout history, the arts reflected the dominant realities of intellectual, emotional, and philosophical aspects of life. When the promise of science and industrialization enamored the majority of Europeans and Americans, Neoclassicism showed humans in full control of a predictable world. When they longed for the beauty of nature, the simplicity of subjectivism, and the comfort of faith, Romanticism brought back a focus on Medieval values. And as they accepted the irreversible success of industrialization and scientific thought in the 1870s, Realism replaced Romanticism to investigate the ways which humans survived with machines and each other in cities.
Works Cited
Draper, James David, et al. The Passions of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2014.
Eaton, Daniel Cady. Handbook of Modern French Sculpture. Book On Demand Ltd, 2013.
Greene, Elizabeth B. Buildings and Landmarks of 19th-Century America. ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2017.
Kastner, Joseph. The Architects: Alexander Jackson Davis. American Heritage, 2018.
Levy, Janey. The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright: Understanding the Concepts of Parallel and Perpendicular. PowerKids Press, 2010.
Lovett, Jennifer Gordon. A Romance with Realism: the Art of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, May 6 to August 27, 1989; Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine, October 12 to December 17, 1989. Clark Art Institute, 1989.
McQueen, Alison. Empress Eugénie and the Arts: Politics and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century. Routledge, 2017.
McQueen, Alison. The Rise of the Cult of Rembrandt Reinventing an Old Master in 19th-Century France. Amsterdam University Press, 2003.
Moss, Roger W. The American Country House. H. Holt, 1991.
Palmer, Allison Lee. Historical Dictionary of Neoclassical Art and Architecture. Lightning Source, 2011.
Palmer, Allison Lee. Historical Dictionary of Romantic Art and Architecture. Rowman & Littlefield, 2019.
Rewald, Sabine, and Kasper Monrad. Caspar David Friedrich: Moonwatchers. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001.
Ritchie, Hannah, and Max Roser. “Urbanization.” Our World in Data, University of Oxford , 13 June 2018, ourworldindata.org/urbanization.
Rowe, Peter G. Civic Realism. MIT Press, 1997.
Schmied, Wieland, and Caspar David Friedrich. Caspar David Friedrich. Harry N. Abrams, 1995.
Seale, William. Of Houses & Time: Personal Histories of America’s National Trust Properties. H.N. Abrams, 1992.
Siegel, Linda. Caspar David Friedrich: and the Age of German Romanticism. Branden Press, 1978.
Smith, Thomas C. Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization: 1750-1920. University of California Press, 1989.
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