At the sound of the word romantic, many people think of moonlight, kisses and all the trappings of love. However, Romanticism taps into a much broader spectrum on the range of human emotions. Romanticism was a movement in art, music and literature that emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Romantic painters strove to achieve a subjective depiction of what is felt rather than seen. It is difficult to pinpoint the origin of Romanticism because it was not a movement in art associated with a definite group of artists, like impressionism was. Romanticism was more like a flowering of consciousness that happened in several countries, all at the same time; Germany, Spain, France, England, Switzerland.
In Woman In The Early Morning Sun, a painting by Casper David Friedrich, 1811, we see a woman, her back towards us as she stands with her arms outstretched. She is apparently welcoming the rays of the sun that are appearing over the crest of the hill that she is facing. The dress of the woman; her high, artificial hairstyle and elegant gown are at odds with the untamed remoteness of her surroundings. The painting is unsettling because there is a story to be told, one that we cannot immediately unravel.
Henri Fuseli was born in 1741, in Zurich. His initial profession was that of church minister and writer. In 1763 he travelled to England and met Sir Joshua Reynolds, who encouraged him to paint. Fuseli spent eight years studying in Italy and later on, lectured at the Royal Academy. His best-known painting, The Nightmare, dates from 1791. In it, we see a young woman dressed in white, and thrown across a bed in a sexually submissive manner. The curtains that surround her bed heighten the intimacy of what we are seeing, and we occupy this space with her. Her eyes are shut tight, her nostrils flared, her lips parted in an expression that tells us of the extreme emotion she is undergoing. The disarrayed draperies of her bed emphasize this emotion, as does the contorted fabric of her nightgown, every crease of which says more about her state of mind than bare flesh ever could. Fuseli knew that nudity was not essential to the plot here.
However, the head of a white horse staring through the curtains and a strange, bat-eared beast that sits upon her chest, breach our privacy. This beast is almost superfluous, knowing as we do from her posture and expression something of the extreme/agony ecstasy going on in her mind. The darkly triumphant gaze of the beast is to unsettle us rather than the painted subject. In the same way the sightless, white horse gazing through the curtains is to turn the painting into a visual pun, rather than to violate the young woman. Much has been written about the symbolism inherent in the painting but it is important to remember that the days of Freud and his dream analysis were a long way off when Fuseli was at work.
What's evident is that the female subject is having a bad dream and that the painting is a vehicle for us to share her fear, claustrophobia and helplessness. These elements place the painting in the tradition of Romanticism known as gothic.
In Spain, meanwhile, another artist was creating his own version of gothic. Francisco de Goya was born in 1746, in Spain. A talented artist, he became court painter to the Spanish monarch, Charles III and then to his successor, Charles IV. But the new king was not the progressive monarch that his father had been. Charles III, who had effected agricultural and economic reforms with the help of his minister, Floridablanca, had no doubt been guided by the Enlightenment, an intellectual and philosophical movement led by the philosophes, Rousseau, Voltaire and Diderot. But Charles IV dismissed Floridablanca, while the power of the Inquisition began to increase. Spain risked being thrust back into the dark and superstitious age from which it had just emerged. Goya was not slow to recognize this. In 1799 an advertisement appeared in a Madrid newspaper offering a set of eighty prints for sale, censuring errors and human vices. Goya had already sold four sets of his Caprichos to a nobleman and he sold twenty-seven more sets before the advertising was withdrawn. As a well-known artist and official painter to the royal family, Goya not only did not need to sell the Caprichos to earn a living, in advertising he had taken a personal risk in using an artistic device known as satire. Satire was then being used to brilliant effect by the English artist, James Gillray, and there is no doubt that Goya had seen much of his prolific output. Satire differs from fine art in that it only thrives in a context of social and political turmoil – and Spain of the 1790s was the perfect background.
'What did he die of?'(Caprichos 40) shows a donkey dressed in male clothing checking the pulse of a man lying comatose on a bed. What stops the image being humorous is that the physician is an actual donkey, not a man with a donkey's head. There is something repulsive about the awkward sprawl of the donkey in inappropriate clothing; a repulsiveness added to by the dark tone of the image and the desperate situation of the comatose man. This image could be a metaphor of a sick society receiving inappropriate treatment. It could also be a comment of the two major illnesses of Goya's life, the second of which left him permanently deaf.
Goya's drawing, Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters was originally chosen to preface the Caprichos. Goya had it subtitled; The artist dreaming. His only purpose is to banish harmful vulgar beliefs and to perpetuate in this work of caprices the solid testimony of truth. In it we see 'the artist dreaming'. His face is not visible to us. Around him fly recognisable creatures like bats and owls and a large cat. Despite the title, there are no monsters or even grotesque creatures in this image. So, who is being satirized?
The Sleep of Reason could be interpreted as a warning; a warning that the nation's rulers burying their heads - the sleeper with his head in his arms - could lead to the opening of a Pandora's box of social, political and economic ills that would stymie the progress of Spain in the modern world, for generations. The satire works at different levels, playing with metaphors and meanings. What Goya has given us is the visual metaphor of society as a whole, warning certain groups to take action now or be forever dammed. However, Goya had a grim outlook on life, partly due to the rejection by his lover, the Duchess of Alba, and the illness that left him deaf and personally isolated. Other Romantic artists recognised the pleasure inherent in fear.
Joseph Mallord William Turner was born in London in 1775. His father was a barber who recognised his son's talent early in life and sent him to drawing lessons. Turner's success was meteoric. He had made his first fortune by the age of twenty-one and it is the paintings of Turner, more than any others, which acquaint us with the idea of the sublime. The writer Edmund Burke defined this in 1756 as the principle of pleasurable terror, a premonition of death and disaster while safe in the knowledge that your feet are safe on the ground
Turner enunciated the sublime in paintings such as Shipwreck, 1805, The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons, 1810, and Snowstorm, 1842. What is remarkable about these paintings is the aerial perspective from which they were painted. We are seated on the side of a mountain watching the chaos caused by the avalanche. We are suspended over the sea looking at survivors clinging to the side of a wrecked ship. And we watch a boat being lashed about in a snowstorm as if we were watching from the deck of a nearby boat. Rumour has it that Turner was tied to the rails of a second boat to help him execute this painting but this has never been substantiated. It's evident how the rumour began, however, happening in a time when there was no television or movies, no air travel.
The sublime is still with us today. We readily seek out experiences that frighten and thoroughly enervate us. We look for the most thrilling fairground rides and seek out the scariest of scary movies.
Pablo Picasso painted Guernica in 1937. This was his artistic response to an attack by German planes on the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. Picasso expressed his outrage by employing abstract imagery rather than depicting the situation literally. Much of what we see is symbolical of a suffering Spain and it is this subjection that places the painting within the tradition of the Romantic. It seems that Picasso's compatriot, Goya, in warning the world what might happen if 'reason' was ironed out of contemporary thinking, paved the way for a new type of art, one that stems from the untamed part of the psyche. Ironically, Goya was warning against a psyche that is controlled by emotional urges rather than clear thinking. That he succeeded in part, is demonstrated by the advances made in science and technology ever since. But art has continued untrammelled on its more subjective path, Romanticism giving rise to symbolism, surrealism, and expressionism. This may have enriched the world of art but we have paid the price in an ever-widening chasm between science and art. Whether this price was worth paying, is another debate.