France
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France, too, produced artists and works in the eighteenth
century that seemed to anticipate Romanticism proper, for
instance the dramatic seascapes of a Vernet, several of the
history paintings of Francois-Andre Vincent (1746-1816), or
a few of the depictions of ruins by Hubert Robert
(1733-1808).
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Francois-Andre Vincent
(b Paris, 30 Dec 1746; d Paris, 3 or 4 Aug 1816).
French painter and draughtsman. He was one of the principal
innovators in French art of the 1770s and 1780s, in the field of
both Neo-classical subjects and themes from national history.
Despite the fact that he worked in a variety of styles, his
sense of purpose appears to have been coherent at a time of
profound change. His stylistic sources lay in the art of
Classical antiquity and such masters as Raphael, the great
Bolognese painters of the 17th century and Charles Le Brun; yet
he also studied reality in a quasi-documentary way. His work,
too often confused with that of Jean-Honoré Fragonard,
Jacques-Louis David or Louis-Léopold Boilly, is of a high
standard, even though the completed paintings do not always
uphold the promise of energy of his drawings and oil sketches.
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Francois-Andre Vincent
Portrait presume de
Madame Boyer-Fonfrede et de son fils
1796
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Francois-Andre Vincent
Belisarius
1776
Musée Fabre, Montpellier
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Francois-Andre Vincent
The Ploughing Lesson
1798
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Francois-Andre Vincent
Zeuxis et les filles de Crotone
1789
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Francois-Andre Vincent
Henri IV faisant entrer des vivres dans Paris
1783
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Francois-Andre Vincent
L'Assomption de la Vierge
1771
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Francois-Andre Vincent
Portrait de la
baronne de Chalvet-Souville, née Marie de Broutin
1793
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Francois-Andre Vincent
Portrait de trois
hommes
1775
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Hubert Robert
(b Paris, 22 May 1733; d Paris, 15
April 1808). French painter, draughtsman, etcher and landscape
designer. He was one of the most prolific and engaging landscape
painters in 18th-century France. He specialized in architectural
scenes in which topographical elements derived from the
buildings and monuments of ancient and modern Italy and of
France are combined in often fantastic settings or fictitious
juxtapositions. The fluid touch and rich impasto employed in his
paintings, also shared by his friend Jean-Honoré Fragonard, are
matched by the freedom of his numerous red chalk drawings and
the few etchings that he is known to have produced.
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Hubert Robert
Avenue in a Park
1799
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Hubert Robert
The Finding of the Laokoon
1773
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond
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Hubert Robert
Imaginary View of the Grande Galerie in the
Louvre in Ruins
1796
Musée du Louvre, Paris
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Hubert Robert
Italian Park
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Hubert Robert
The Pont du Gard
1787
Musée du Louvre, Paris
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The writings and novels of the philosopher Jean-Jacques
Rousseau exerted an enormous influence on European thought.
Rousseau argued that with the advance of civilization,
humanity had let itself in for continually worsening
symptoms of decay and degeneration. His famous cry, "Back to
Nature," did not mean returning to man's primitive
beginnings, but it did draw fresh attention to everything
primitive and archaic. And it basically implied the same
thing as the widespread appeal to overcome the alienation of
man from nature, an alienation described and decried by
Denis Diderot, Enlightenment philosopher and co-editor of
the Encyclopedia. It was precisely its emphasis on reason
that enabled the French Enlightenment to arrive at new
insights into individual psychology on the one hand and
nature on the other. Besides advances in empirical science,
it helped paved the way for new sensibilities in the arts.
This development in the direction of Romantic attitudes,
however, was interrupted in 1789 by the French Revolution.
The artists who served it could not, or would not,
countenance any journey into the mysterious depths of the
individual mind, for it was more important to champion the
victorious republican ideals and supply visual propaganda
for collective political goals. In terms of content, this
painting adopted the ancient Roman catalogue of virtues, and
conveyed these in formal terms by means of a rigorously
composed neoclassicism and in the medium of history
painting. When Napoleon launched into his campaign to
vanquish all Europe, teeming history works or allegories
continued to be employed to celebrate the triumphs of the
commander, and subsequent emperor, and his armies. Although
this celebratory intent occasionally led to a sort of
romanticizing of the image of Napoleon, the beginnings of
French Romanticism shortly after 1800 developed in
opposition to the emperor and to the neoclassical, Empire
style officially propagated by him.
Chateaubriand and Germaine de Stael were among Napoleon's
most outspoken critics. Madame de Staël advocated taking
German Romanticism as the model of a universalism that
transcended all petty power politics and, in the artistic
field, as a way to overcome "anemic" neoclassicism. How
difficult this proved to be, however, is shown by the long
and successful career of the foremost neoclassicist,
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780—1867). On first view, his
1862 painting The Turkish Bath may appear to
bear traces of exotic, oriental romance. Yet the extreme
precision of its graceful lineatures, the smoothness of the
cool surfaces of color, and the formal purism of the whole,
would seem to exclude any deeply felt emotion, any tendency
to Romanticism in the narrower sense.
The Salon exhibition of 1827 was extolled in France as
marking the victory of true Romanticism over neoclassicism.
Yet the extent to which the French version differed from
those of Germany or England may be seen from the work of its
two main protagonists, Gericault and
Delacroix. Both were
profoundly painterly painters, and both were brilliant
geniuses who, like all greats in art history, are by nature
difficult to categorize in terms of any one style. And both
bypassed the landscape genre so preferred throughout the
rest of Europe, and turned instead to the history painting.
The pathos of their compositions built on color and light,
but unlike early history paintings, theirs often focussed on
the nameless hero, the individual involved in fateful events
or disastrous circumstances. Especially
Delacroix, with his
liberated, sensitive paint application, with coloristic
pictorial symphonies which largely baffled contemporary
audiences, achieved an intensity whose effects were still
felt among the Impressionists, and ultimately by Vincent van
Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Paul Cézanne. Even in his highly
dramatic subjects, set in the distant past,
Delacroix was
not concerned with mere fantasy or theatricality, but solely
with human passions, which he believed were the catalyst
behind historical developments.
The accusation of empty posing, sentimentality, and pathetic
national pride can be aimed with more justification at the
history paintings of Eugene Deveria (1805-1865) or
Paul Delaroche
(1797-1856), which well served the
taste of the petty bourgeois masses for "the interesting,"
for an escape from the drudgery of everyday life. The orientalism which was concurrently the fad in France, as
well as the genre of Italian folk scenes, produced in their
finest examples a new, painterly transformation of subject
matter which bore a certain affinity to the discoveries made
in English landscape painting, though the weaker examples
did not go beyond a superficial sentimentalism.
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Eugene Deveria
(b Paris, 22 April 1805; d Pau, 3 Feb
1865). Painter, brother of Achille Devéria. He was a pupil of
Anne-Louis Girodet and Guillaume Lethière but was greatly
influenced by his brother. Despite differences of taste and
temperament—Eugène had an official career and painted on a grand
scale—the brothers remained close until Eugène went to Avignon
in 1838. He first exhibited at the Salon of 1824 and had his
first success with the Birth of Henry IV (1827; Paris,
Louvre). He approached this well-worn subject (made fashionable
by the Restoration and usually portrayed in engravings or
small-scale works) with unusual panache. The ambitious scale,
the crowds of people painstakingly depicted in period costume
and the rich colours revealed his desire to raise the subject to
the rank of history painting. With Delacroix and Louis Boulanger,
Devéria was hailed as a champion of the Romantic movement and
the successor to Veronese and Rubens.
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Eugene Deveria
Portrait of Marie-Luche de Selle de Beauchamp
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 Eugene Deveria
Scène des Fourberies de Scapin
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Eugene Deveria
Le Christ portant sa croix
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Eugene Deveria
L'Inondation
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Eugene Deveria
La Reine Thomyris d'apres Rubens
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Landscape became a central concern of nineteenth-century
French painters only belatedly, but with all the more
impact. The School of Barbizon, led by Camille Corot
(1796—1875), often populated their gauzily rendered slices
of the natural scene with mythological figures, intended to
embody both an archaic and a utopianly envisaged unity of
man and nature. These were counterimages to touristically
accessible, more or less fleetingly viewed scenic
attractions, as well as standing in opposition to nature
ravaged by economic exploitation and development. Employing
the means of plein air, open air or outdoor, painting, the
Barbizon landscapes represented more an overture to
Impressionism than a form of Romanticism, despite their
evocation of the moods and atmospheric changes in nature.
At the same time, French painting was dominated by a
sociopolitically oriented Realism in which a distant echo of
Romanticism could occasionally be heard, as in Jean-François
Millet's (1814—1875) Angelus, which struck
contemporary critics as the quintessence of sentimental
melodrama. In fact, if a comparison be sought, one finds
closer parallels to this peasant family at its evening
prayers in the Biedermeier work of
Ludwig Richter than in
the universal-ism of early Romanticism around 1800. The
great Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) cannot be accused of
sentimentality, but perhaps it was something of the late
Romantic heritage that led him to place at the very center
of his grand allegory on his political, cultural, and
artistic environment, The Painter's Studio, a
moody landscape on which he is just working, watched by a
small boy and a nude model, personifications of unspoiled
natural life.
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Gustave Courbet
The Painter's Studio
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