The Romantic Period

The Zeitgeist

Zeitgeist: a pervasive intellectual climate. The Spirit of

the Age

In the Romantic Period we see an explosive release of artistic energy,

an experimental boldness, and creative power that marks an artistic

renaissance

• Keats had the sense that “great spirts now on Earth are sojourning.”

• In Shelley’s Defense of Poetry he claimed that the literature of his age “has arisen as it were from a new birth,” and that “an electric life burns” within the words of the best writers, which is “less their spirit than the spirit of the age.”

William Hazlitt, in The Spirit of the Age (1825)

Described how the French Revolution seemed “the dawn of a new era, a new impulse had been given to men’s minds.” And he said that the school of Wordsworth “had its origin in the French Revolution.”

Characteristics of the Romantic Period

• (1) Imagination, Emotions, and Intuition. Exaltation of intense feelings.

• Descartes: I think, therefore I am.vs

• Rousseau: I felt before I thought.

• (2) Subjectivity of approach; the cult of the individual; the absolute uniqueness of every individual.

Characteristics of Romanticism

(3) Freedom of thought and expression.• A revolt against authority and tyranny, against the ancien

regime, whether social, political, religious, or artistic.

• Thomas Paine: “The Rights of Man.”• Mary Wolstonecraft: “A Vindication of the Rights of

Woman” (1792)

• Alienation and rebellion: Cult of Youth, Energy, and Idealism

Characteristics of Romanticism

(4) Idealization of Nature• Embracing the uncivilized, the wild, the pre-

civilized.

• Rousseau: “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” In other words, civilization is in part the cause of our corruption.

• The “noble savage,” and James Fennimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels, I.e. The Last of the Mohicans.

But there were 2 views of Nature

• The first viewed nature as peaceful, calm, nurturing, a source for spiritual renewal. It often showed an innocent life of rural dwellers, a world of peace and harmondy which nurtures and comforts the human spirit. This is very much how Wordsworth viewed nature.

John Constable: The Hay Wain

But nature could also be frightening in its power, and

cause a dizzying sense of awe and wonder.

J.M.W. Turner: Avalanche

Edmund Burke defined these two views of nature as:

•The beautiful

and

•The sublime

A BRIEF SERIES OF PAINTINGS FROM THE ROMANTIC PERIOD

Starting with Sir Joshua Reynolds, who was President of the Royal

Academy in England

Blake quit the Royal Academy partly because of Sir Joshua

Reynolds

So, on to some of Blake works

Two Works by Henry Fuseli, a Swiss artist living in England who was friends with Blake

One of the most interesting artists of the period is

J.M.W. Turner

Starting with an early, fairly conventional painting

And then to end on John Constable

Who said, “I try to paint as if I had never seen a painting before.”

And then: Eugene Delacroix

And . . . Caspar David Friedrich