Romanticism
ESSAY TWO “Noble be man, Helpful and good! For that alone sets him apart from every other creature on earth.” Goethe, from the Divine, 1783. Romanticism was an art movement and style that flourished in the early nineteenth century. It emphasized the emotions painted in a bold, dramatic manner. Romantic artists rejected the cool reasoning of classicism-the established art of the times—to paint pictures of nature in its untamed state, or other exotic settings filled with dramatic action, often with an emphasis on the past. Classicism was nostalgic also, but Romantics were more emotional, usually melancholic, even melodramatically tragic. Paintings by members of the French Romantic school include those by Theodore Gericault (French, 1791-1824) and Eugene Delacroix (French, 1798-1863), filled with rich color, energetic brushwork, and dramatic and emotive subject matter. In England, the Romantic tradition began with Henry Fusieli (Swiss-English, 1741-1825) and William Blake (1757-1827), and culminated with Joseph M. W. Turner (1775-1851) and John Constable (1776-1837). The German landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) produced images of solitary figures placed in lonely settings amidst ruins, cemeteries, frozen, watery, or rocky wastes. And in Spain, Francisco Goya (1746-1828) depicted the horrors of war along with aristocratic portraits. To understand the artists, writers and philosophers of this period, you must first examine the life of each of them. Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), French deistic philosopher and author led a somewhat tragic life. His mother died at his birth leaving him with his violent –tempered father who paid very little attention to him. Rousseau found solace in reading and examining nature as an escape. Later, when his father deserted him, Rousseau ran away to escape rigid discipline of the coppersmith who took him in. He wandered for several days until some Roman Catholic priests took him in. Rousseau had a brush with the law after being accused of theft as a young man.