Romantic Painting in other European Countries
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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.
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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.
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Gustave Wappers
Portrait of the
Marchioness de Louvencourt, née Montaud |
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Gustave Wappers
Anthonie van Dijck verliefd op zijn model |

Gustave Wappers
Boccace lisant le Decameron a la reine Jeanne de Naples
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Gustave Wappers
Episode des Journées de septembre 1830 sur la Place de l'Hôtel
de Ville de Bruxelles
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Gustave Wappers
Charles
Ier, roi d'Angleterre, allant a l'echafaud
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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.
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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.
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Leonardo Alenza
The Suicide
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Leonardo Alenza
Satira del suicidio por amor
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Leonardo Alenza
Le picador
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Eugenio Lucas y Padilla
(1824-1870)
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Eugenio Lucas y Padilla
The Defence of Saragossa
1850-1855
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Eugenio Lucas y Padilla
Women on a Balcony
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Eugenio Lucas y Padilla
The Artist's Children
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Eugenio Lucas y Padilla
Damned by the Inquisition
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Eugenio Lucas y Padilla
A Woman Damned by the Inquisition
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Eugenio Lucas y Padilla
Inquisition Scene, 1851
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Eugenio Lucas y Padilla
The Revolution
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Eugenio Lucas y Padilla
The Bullfight
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Eugenio Lucas y Padilla
Martincho's Other Folly in the Bull Ring at
Saragossa,
after a Painting by Goya
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Eugenio Lucas y Padilla
The Garrotte
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Jenaro Perez Villaamil
(1807-1854)
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Jenaro Perez Villaamil
View of the City of Fraga
1850
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Jenaro Perez Villaamil
Inauguration of the Langreo Railway by the Queen:
Arrival of Train in Gijón
1852
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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.
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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).
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Giovanni Migliara
The Scala dei Giganti, Palazzo Ducale, Venice
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Giovanni Migliara
Untitled
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Giovanni Migliara
Washerwomen
and Gentlemen Among Classical Ruins, a Church Beyond
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Giovanni Migliara
Mantova, Piazza delle Erbe
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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.
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Luigi Mussini
Sacred Music
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Luigi Mussini
Torquato Tasso Reading a Poem to Leonora D'Este
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Luigi Mussini
La partita a scacchi
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Luigi MussiniOdalisque
1862
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see collection:
Antoine Wiertz
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