Romantic Era: Preferences and Perspectives

 As someone who has read a considerable amount of romanticism literature--likely stemming from first reading Pride and Prejudice in high school which gave way to British literature classes and world literature courses set in the 19th-20th centuries--I naturally took to seeing the visual arts aspect of the Romantic period. I've always appreciated an author's ability to make or find something extraordinary in rather ordinary things for the effect of evoking unsettling mental imagery and emotional stimulation. And when I read William Blake was also a painter, I was interested and obligated.

The Ghost of a Flea (1819-1820), according to the website and British art gallery Tate, was something of a hallucination for Blake, that told him "fleas were inhabited by the souls of bloodthirsty men," (Tate, 2021). According to Jonathan Jones in a Guardian article, Blake's Flea was a "riposte" to the dominating form of art at the turn of the 19th century in Europe: Portraiture. Blake had loathed this mode of visual arts and the artists who created them, and in turn created his own portrait. This tempera on wood panel image of a flea in the form of man is nightmarish, haunting and a product of an artist and poet's personal experience with the upper echelons of society that overindulged in an anti-intellectual form of art that was the English Portrait. 

The flea is anthropomorphically man and represents the souls of avaricious and bloodthirsty men. While the flea itself--between the legs of the monstrous figure--is small and inconsequential, representing the physical beings of the same men. The painting is just 9.4 by 6.3 inches, with gold leaf/white gold embedded in the stars, the flesh of the flea, and the edges of the curtains. The use of an impure gold such as white gold could also be a reflection of Blake's about wealth and materialism at the time. 

An "unsettling portrayal of reality," (Artstory, 2021), Theodore Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa started just a year before the Flea finished in 1819, is also a story of man's uglier, more selfish side, though that of the French government. Depicting a tragic event that occurred in 1816, Gericault's utilization of a contemporary event made his painting all the more powerful, as it was still relevant to the society, and transitionary government, it strongly effected. It was this utilization, intricate detail, scale, and the glorification of well over a hundred seamen who are left to their deaths upon a makeshift raft, that makes Gericault's work identifiable with the Romantic era in artwork. 

Presented as a historical painting with a grand size, as well as tragic and heroic elements to assist in elevating an otherwise harrowing and awful event, the painting is ominous and gruesome in detail. Abandoned and marooned on a raft, it appeals to the ordinary middle class man and brought attention to "the incompetent captain... who fought to save himself and senior officials while leaving lower ranks to die," (Wikiart, 2020), who might otherwise represent here the Bourbon Government following Napoleon. 

Realism, realistic paintings of everyday life, overlapped somewhat with the Romantic era, beginning in the 1840s and lasting until the 1880s. It strongly juxtaposed history paintings and grand paintings or "higher art," that dominated for centuries prior, and gave the margins of society a place in the arts world. This movement is also considered a precursor to modern art, with the philosophy that everyday life was worthy of being illustrated and examined. Most of the artwork from this movement can tell tales of economic hardship and cultural or societal differences, as subject matter are often of the lower classes and peasantry. At such a level, it is not so surprising depiction of such subjects is gritty, naturalistic, and honest. 

Gustave Courbet's The Stonebreakers (1849), shows such honesty and grittiness. With an unrefined style that contradicts the polished minute detail of the preceding romantic and neoclassicist styles, Courbet captures hard labor and all it entails--the intensiveness and dirtiness--on a low hill countryside. While there are no faces. Short and rough brush strokes are evident throughout the composition, "like the stones themselves," (Smarthistory, 2015). The dominating shadow of a cloud against the hill, and the severe lack of blue sky, illustrates the isolation of a boy who seems to young for such work, and a man perhaps too old. Their torn and repaired clothes speak to their humble livelihoods. All of this was in strong visual opposition to what prevalent in middle-upper class societies and gave way to the social injustices experienced by ordinary people. 

Societal inequality was a primary driving force for realism painters. It allowed the political climate and the consequences of monarchal governments and their  hostile treatment toward the everyday individual to be seen in a vastly different light. Honore Daumier's Rue Transnonain (1834), was directly inspired by such an event. The "April 1834 Insurrections" were born out of maltreatment by the bourgeoisie, French goverment, and King Phillipe, who had slowly instigated the riots with lies to the public, and favors to those higher up on the ladder of society. Governmental actions eventually dissolved labor unions, and allowed for despicable labor treatment laws that repressed workers, paving the way for an insurrectionist acts that led to the death of a policemen. 

In retaliation, the police and government led an onslaught in one particular apartment building in a working-class neighborhood from which the policemen had been shot. With abandon, 19 women, men, children and elderly were killed. In Rue Transnonian, three of the victims are shown in sleeping garments from lithographic stone. Daumier's focus creating this piece lay with the accuracy of illustrating ordinary experiences in very tumultuous and unstable times, this particular one very profound and dark. Regimes and monarchs came and went, and revolts were common place. 

Personally, I do not prefer one style of painting over the other. They both have great value--I definitely gained more from learning and reading about realism and its place in history than I did about Romanticism. I did not know William Blake was also a painter--among other things about him. I loved the idea of paintings causing whole revolts in 19th century France honestly, and wish art carried as much weight as it once did. 

William Blake, The Ghost of a Flea c.1819-20, in Nigel Llewellyn and Christine Riding (eds.), The Art of the Sublime, Tate Research Publication, January 2013, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime/william-blake-the-ghost-of-a-flea-r1105542, accessed 09 July 2021

“The Ghost of a Flea, William Blake (c1819-20).” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 19 Apr. 2003, www.theguardian.com/culture/2003/apr/19/art.williamblake.

“Théodore Géricault Artworks & Famous Paintings.” The Art Story, www.theartstory.org/artist/gericault-theodore/artworks/

Géricault, Théodore. “The Raft of the Medusa, 1818 - 1819 - Théodore Géricault.” Www.wikiart.org, 1 Jan. 1970, www.wikiart.org/en/theodore-gericault/the-raft-of-the-medusa-1819

Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, "Gustave Courbet, The Stonebreakers," in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed July 9, 2021, https://smarthistory.org/courbet-the-stonebreakers/

Anonymous. “Rue Transnonain, April 15, 1834.” Cleveland Museum of Art, 29 Mar. 2021, www.clevelandart.org/art/1924.809.