Romantic Painting in other European Countries

 

BELGIUM

Belgian Romanticism, as far as one can speak of such, was limited entirely to the field of history painting. Its leader, Gustave Wappers (1803-1874), whose works caused waves of enthusiasm not only in his homeland, was content with a patriotic concentration on the history of Flanders, unlike, say, the painters of early German Romanticism, who attempted to combine national consciousness with universalistic aims. Accordingly, Wappers had no qualms about imitating Rubens. He was surpassed in this by Antoine Wiertz (1806— 1865), whose admiration for the great Flemish master took on veritably pathological character. In the Netherlands, too, the work of Wijnand Jaan Joseph Nuyen (1813-1839), to name only one, documented the extent to which Romantic tendencies in the Lowlands were linked with a recurrence to national painting of the Baroque.

Gustave Wappers

(b Antwerp, 23 Aug 1803; d Paris, 6 Dec 1874). Belgian painter and teacher. He studied at the Antwerp Academie under Mathieu Van Brée, from whom he gained a taste for large-scale history painting and an admiration of Peter Paul Rubens. His first subjects were strictly classical (e.g. Regulus, 1823) and, like Van Brée, he illustrated episodes from the life of the great Flemish painters (e.g. Van Dyck and his Model, 1827; Amsterdam, Rijksmus.). He also painted a few portraits (e.g. Portrait of a Lady, 1828; Antwerp, Kon. Mus. S. Kst.). He exhibited his first work at the Salon of 1822 in Ghent. In 1824 he went to the Netherlands to look at works by the Old Masters, and from 1826 to 1829 he lived in Paris, during which time he ceased to exhibit at the Belgian Salons. In Paris he frequented the studios of such Romantic artists as Paul Delaroche and Horace Vernet but felt intimidated by the more audacious manner of Eugène Delacroix. When he reappeared at the Salon of 1830 in Brussels, his Sacrifice of the Burgomaster van der Werff (Utrecht, Cent. Mus.) was received enthusiastically. Although the subject had already been treated by Van Brée, Wappers cast it in a new Romantic light that reflected his time in Paris. This appealed to his Brussels audience, but the weighty, patriotic content of the work also encouraged claims that Wappers was a genius who had rediscovered a distinctively Belgian national art. Since July of that year Paris had been in the throes of revolution, and in Brussels unrest was brewing that finally broke out in September. In this tense atmosphere it was perhaps understandable that even such a mediocre work should have been so enthusiastically misinterpreted as leading the contemporary Belgian revolt against foreign artistic influences. For the same reason François-Joseph Navez, the head of the Belgian Neo-classical school and a disciple of Jacques-Louis David, was widely attacked when his Athalia Questioning Joash (Brussels, Mus. A. Anc.) was hung opposite Wappers’s picture at the Salon of 1830 in Brussels. In the following months Wappers hardened his anti-classical stance and turned Navez (by now his sworn enemy) and his followers into objects of derision.
 

Gustave Wappers
Anthonie van Dijck verliefd op zijn model

Gustave Wappers
Boccace lisant le Decameron a la reine Jeanne de Naples

 

Gustave Wappers
Episode des Journées de septembre 1830 sur la Place de l'Hôtel de Ville de Bruxelles

 

Gustave Wappers
Charles Ier, roi d'Angleterre, allant a l'echafaud
 

SPAIN

It is a strange phenomenon that Spain and Italy remained largely unsusceptible to the Romantic attitude, which would seem to support the argument that the movement was largely a "Nordic" one after all. At the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, Spain possessed, with Francisco de Goya (1746—1828), one of the most outstanding figures in the history of European art. Only in its Rococo beginnings is Goya's work classifiable in stylistic terms, for its later phases are marked by sovereign originality. Nor can Goya be called a Romantic by any stretch of the term. Still, the way in which, in paintings and prints, he pilloried human stupidity and superstition, the clerical narrow-mindedness of his countrymen, the degeneracy of the Spanish royal family, the barbarian depths to which both individuals and fanatic masses sank in the war against Napoleon's troops, and the visions and nightmares with which Goya filled his Madrid house around 1820 - all of these exist in an orbit not unfamiliar to Romanticism. Yet obviously Goya's views about the world and humankind were too merciless, too harsh, to trigger any merely pleasurable sense of horror. By comparison to his attitude, Romantic "Weltschmerz" has the look of superficial cant.
Spanish artists such as Leonardo Alenza (1807—1845) and Eugenio Lucas y Padilla (1824-1870) subsequently exploited Goya and romanticized him, whereas Francisco Lameyer (1825-1854) and Jenaro Perez Villaamil (1807-1854) took their cues from the landscape painting of English Romanticism.
 

Leonardo Alenza

(b Madrid, 6 Nov 1807; d Madrid, 30 June 1845). Spanish painter and illustrator. He studied at the Real Academia de S Fernando, Madrid, under Juan Antonio Ribera y Fernández and José de Madrazo y Agudo. He worked independently of court circles and achieved some fame but nevertheless died in such poverty that his burial was paid for by friends. He is often described as the last of the followers of Goya, in whose Caprichos and drawings he found inspiration for the genre scenes for which he became best known. Of these scenes of everyday life and customs the more interesting include The Beating (Madrid, Casón Buen Retiro) and Galician with Puppets (c. 1835; Madrid, Casón Buen Retiro). Alenza y Nieto’s numerous drawings include the illustrations for Alain-René Lesage’s Gil Blas (Madrid, 1840), for an edition of the poems of Francisco de Quevedo published by Castello and for the reviews Semanario pintoresco and El Reflejo. The painting Triumph of David (1842; Madrid, Real Acad. S Fernando, Mus.) led to his election as an Académico de mérito at the Real Academia de S Fernando in 1842, and he produced such portraits as that of Alejandro de la Peña (Madrid, Real Acad. S Fernando, Mus.) and a Self-portrait (Madrid, Casón Buen Retiro). His two canvases entitled Satire on Romantic Suicide (Madrid, Mus. Romántico) are perhaps the most characteristic of his works.
 

Leonardo Alenza
Le picador

Eugenio Lucas y Padilla

(1824-1870)
 

Eugenio Lucas y Padilla
The Defence of Saragossa
1850-1855

 

Eugenio Lucas y Padilla
The Garrotte

Jenaro Perez Villaamil

(1807-1854)
 

Jenaro Perez Villaamil
View of the City of Fraga
1850
 

Jenaro Perez Villaamil
Inauguration of the Langreo Railway by the Queen:
Arrival of Train in Gijón
1852
 

ITALY

Italy, the prime land of Romantic yearnings, was like Spain in only very gradually opening itself to the movement. In the first place, the classical heritage, including poets like Dante and Tasso, who were elsewhere considered "anti-classical," still carried too much weight there. And second, Italian painting had long lost its international rank by around 1800. Nevertheless it had still had artists like Tommaso Minardi (1787-1871), whose brilliant early work combined harsh realism with empathy, and Francesco Hayez (1791 —1881), whose accomplished neoclassical figure paintings were suffused with restrained emotion. Those were roughly the poles between which Italian Romanticism, including an artist like Giovanni Migliara (1785-1837), moved. Then there were the "Purists," with Luigi Mussini (1815-1888) at the helm. Orienting themselves among other models to the German Nazarenes, this group published a manifesto in Rome in 1843 in which they advocated a return to quattrocento painting. Another indication that in Italy, as throughout Europe in the nineteenth-century, Romantic tendencies surfaced again and again and suffused a great variety of other developments.
 

Giovanni Migliara

(b Alessandria, 5 Oct 1785; d Milan, 18 April 1837). Italian painter and teacher. He began his career as a scene painter with Gaspare Galiari (1761–1823) in Milan, working at the Teatro Carcano in 1804 and at La Scala from 1805 to 1809. Owing to illness, after 1810 he turned to small-scale works in watercolour or oil using various supports, including silk and ivory. At this date Milanese painting was dominated by Andrea Appiani and Luigi Sabatelli, both leading Neo-classical artists. However, Migliara remained aloof from this dominant movement and instead drew on medieval and historical subjects with Romantic undertones. His precise, jewel-like technique and choice of subject-matter found favour with aristocratic patrons in Milan. His figures are generally stilted and burdened by their costumes, though the crowd in Sacking of Minister Prina’s House (1814; Milan, Gal. A. Mod.) is depicted with unusual fluency. In 1822 Migliara was appointed Professor of Perspective at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Milan, and in 1833 he was nominated painter to the court of Charles-Albert, King of Sardinia (reg 1831–49). More typical of his historical scenes is Entrance to the Castle of Plessis de la Tour (Turin, Gal. Civ. A. Mod.), which was exhibited at the Brera in 1833. He also produced many topographically precise pictures of church interiors in which he combined his training as a scene painter with his knowledge of intaglio techniques. In such pen-and-wash studies as Church and Gothic Tomb (1831; Turin, Gal. Civ. A. Mod.) he displayed a greater sensitivity to light and tone than in his oil paintings (e.g. Vestibule of a Convent, 1833; Alessandria, Pin. Civ.). He particularly excelled as a painter of small medieval church interiors, as did several of his pupils, including his daughter Teodolinda Migliara (1816–66), Frederico Moja (1802–85), Pompeo Calvi (1806–84), Luigi Bisi (1814–86) and Angelo Inganni (1806–80).
 

Giovanni Migliara
The Scala dei Giganti, Palazzo Ducale, Venice

 

Giovanni Migliara
Untitled

 

Giovanni Migliara
Washerwomen and Gentlemen Among Classical Ruins, a Church Beyond

 

Giovanni Migliara
Mantova, Piazza delle Erbe
 

Luigi Mussini

b Berlin, 19 Dec 1813; d Siena, 18 June 1888). Italian painter and administrator. The son of Natale Mussini, chapel-master at the Prussian court in Berlin, he was sent to Florence, where he was educated in art, music and literature. He first studied art under his older brother Cesare Mussini (1804–79) and later, at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence, he attended courses given by Pietro Benvenuti and Giuseppe Bezzuoli. He was more attracted by a direct study of the great Tuscan masters of the 14th and 15th centuries, whose works he admired for their purity and expressive dignity, than by the practice of copying from classical casts according to Neo-classical teaching. In Saul Anointed by Samuel (1835–6), Mussini already displayed a sensitivity towards the theories of Purismo through his commitment to studying from nature and ignoring the practice of copying. In 1840 he won a scholarship to Rome, where he was introduced to Ingres and painted his first serious work, Holy Music (1842; Florence, Pitti), clearly inspired by Raphael. He returned to Florence in 1844 and, with his friend Franz Adolph von Stürler (1802–81), opened a small art school based on the workshops of the early Renaissance, where they practised a form of ‘free teaching’ in opposition to the strict rules of the academies. He fought in the Revolutions of 1848 and the following year decided to leave for Paris, where he became close friends with Ingres and those of his school, including Hippolyte Flandrin, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Auguste Gendron and the engraver William Haussoullier (c. 1818–1891). His paintings Holy Music and the Triumph of Truth (1848; Milan, Brera) were exhibited at the Salon of 1849 and were so successful that he was commissioned by the Ministry of Fine Arts to make copies of them (e.g. Holy Music, c. 1873–5, priv. col.) as well as to do another painting on a subject of his choice. For this he chose a theme particularly dear to the artists of the Purismo movement: the Commemorative Celebration of the Birth of Plato Held at Lorenzo the Magnificent’s Villa di Careggi (1851; Bourg-en-Bresse, Mus. Ain). In this work he decided to emphasize the importance of the ideals of Neo-Platonism and of Florentine humanism and to render the painting in an austere manner of drawing derived from Ingres. At the same time he employed a rich and luxurious colour inspired by the masters of the 16th century, quite unlike the dry quality in Nazarene painting. In 1851 he became Director of the Istituto d’Arte in Siena. While there he painted modern interpretations of Purismo, responding to the theories of Ingres and to a new faith in the absolute value of form, as in the difficult Eudoro and Cimodoce (Florence, Pitti), inspired by Chateaubriand’s prose epic Les Martyrs (Paris, 1809). It was exhibited at the Salon of 1857 in Paris and later in Florence in 1861 and was admired by critics for its emotional content, formal qualities and deep velvety tones. During the 1860s he executed the Mater dolorosa (1856; Siena, Pal. Pub.), a work painted on panel against a gold background, and produced various copies of the Commemorative Celebration of the Birth of Plato (e.g. 1862; Turin, Gal. Civ. A. Mod.). Other paintings done during these years in Siena include Spartan Education (1869; Montauban, Mus. Ingres), exhibited at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and later bought by the French government for the Musée du Luxembourg, and the characteristic St Crescentio (1867), an altarpiece for Siena Cathedral. He also took part in the artistic and cultural life of Siena, in particular helping to restore the ancient monuments of the city, and he set up a school of Purismo, whose best representatives were Alessandro Franchi, Angelo Visconti (1829–61) and Amos Cassioli (1832–91). His wife Luigia Mussini-Piaggio (1830–65) and daughter Luisa Mussini-Franchi (b 1864 or 1865) were also painters.
 

Luigi Mussini
Sacred Music

 

Luigi Mussini
Torquato Tasso Reading a Poem to Leonora D'Este 

 

Luigi Mussini
La partita a scacchi

 

Luigi Mussini

Odalisque
1862

see collection:

Antoine Wiertz