Origins of the Romantic Movement Fine Arts. A. 1960

Today we shall concern ourselves with the origin of the romantic movement. Now the romantic movement is like a tree with many roots, it is not only difficult but indeed impossible to trace its history back to a single source. But one of the most important sources of was, undoubtedly, the new emphasis placed upon the role of feeling, upon emotion, and upon imagination in the process of artistic creation, a new emphasis which increases steadily throughout the eighteenth century. The Eighteenth century is often called the Age of Reason. Classicism and Neo-Classicism as we have seen emphasised the importance of symmetry, fitness, proportion, clarity and control, in art. Concern with a rational and intellectual order is a hallmark of classical perfection. ‘Reason’ wrote Sir in 1776is in his 7th Discourse, ‘must ultimately determine our choice upon every occasion’. But long before 1776 other writers had been directing attention to the role of the emotions both in taste and in artistic creation. One of the first to do so was Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftsbury, who in 1711 published his Characteristics of Men, Manners and Opinions. Shaftsbury sought to create a natural system of moral values in which the affections and passions were controlled by reason rather than by divine grace.

Shaftsbury’s natural morality placed a new emphasis upon the affections. His doctrines were translated and were read widely upon the Continent, both in France and Germany. He influenced such German men of letters as Goethe and Herder, and in France, Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau. Indeed in 1745, Diderot translated Shaftsbury’s Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit and presented a copy to Rousseau. And Rousseau in such works as his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754) and, his Social Contract (1762) and Emile (1762) placed the greatest importance on the role of sentiment and the affections in the good life. His doctrine that evil was due not to sin but to the excesses of civilisation became a view greatly cherished by the romantics and Rousseau is one of the great sources of romanticism To return to the simplicity of childhood, to the naturalness of rural life (as it seemed to him), the simplicity of primitive societies, became a new ideal in thought, literature, and art. Rousseau championed sentiment above reason. Natural compassion is to him the primary moral force, he calls it the pure emotion of nature, and believed it ‘prior to all kinds of reflection’. From the force of his writings a new vouge of sentimentalism emerged in the late eighteenth century both in literature and art.

[Jean Baptiste Graize: Village Betrothal (humble life and sentiment); Punished son. Sir Brock Bosth?? By Joseph Wright of Delfsey]

The new emphasis upon feeling was felt in the field of aesthetic theory. The enjoyment of a new kind of beauty, sublime beauty, became increasingly fashionable. Sublime beauty was associated with great height, vastness, strangeness, the awe- inspiring, the horrible, the terrifying. In England, the discussion on the sublime was given currency by the translation of a text on classical rhetoric called De Sublimita. It is now ascribed to an unknown first century writer. But in the 17th and 18th century it was commonly ascribed to a writer called Longinus. The treatise was concerned with defining the nature of the appeal of he lofty and elevated style often adopted by classical orators. ‘We are led by nature’ the pseudo-Longinus wrote ‘to admire, not our little rivers, for all their purity and homely uses, as much as he Nile, Rhine and Danube, and, beyond all, the sea. Nor do we revere that little fire of our own kindling, because it is kept ever brightly burning, as we do the heavenly fires that are often veiled in darkness; nor is it so marvellous in our eyes as the gulfs of Etna, whose outbursts bring up from their depths rock and whole mountains and our fourth rivers of subterranean elemental fire. What is useful or needful is homely, but what is strange is a marvel.’ Fabris (8). Now as taste turned more to the strange and marvellous the sublime acquired increasing significance as an aesthetic category. In 1757 distinguished precisely between the idea of beauty and the idea of sublimity in his Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. For Burke, beauty was created by smallness, smoothness, absence of angularity, brightness of colour; the sublime was excited by the vastness, darkness, solitude, terror. ‘The sublime,’ wrote Sir Joshua Reynolds, impresses the mind at once with one great idea; it is a single blow. The sublime in painting, he added, so overpowers and takes such possession of the whole mind that no room is left for minute criticism.’ Reynolds cited the work of Michelangelo, such as “the Mosses”* and the “Sybils”* in the Sistine chapel,* as masterpieces of the sublime. And Michelangelo became a great inspiration to such romantic artists as Fuseli and Blake. For eighteenth century taste, the world and rocky landscapes of Salvator Rosa were often cited as examples of the sublime, and Rosa became another source of Romantic inspiration.

From the beginning, however, the romantic taste drew its inspiration from literature. The word romantic derives from the French roman, tales of chivalry, knights of valour, the medieval French epics, chanson de geste, such as the Song of Roland in which the deeds of an ancient national hero are sung and glorified, or late medieval romances, such as Tristan and Isolde. Meanwhile the epics of the Northern mythology of Scandinavia and Iceland were being translated into the modern European languages. While many travellers like the Frenchman Le Roy and the Englishmen Stuart and Revett went to Greece to make accurate drawings of Greek temples, others visited Lapland and Iceland. However, the medieval epic which captivated the whole of cultivated Europe was a fake. This was James Macpherson’s Ossian published in 1762-3. Everyone read it. Here is a typical example of its highly elevated romantic rhetoric.

Father of heroes! O Trnmoor! High dweller of eddying winds! Where the dark-red thunder marks the troubled clouds! Open thou thy story halls. Let the bards of old be near. Let them draw near, with songs and their half-viewless harps. No dweller of misty valley comes! No hunter unknown at his streams! It is the car borne Oscar, from the fields of war. The vast folds thee in its skirt and rustles through the sky.’

Such writing was generally accepted by contemporary taste as being in the sublime. Much of Fuseli’s drawings and paintings, with its exaggerations, ad highly dramatic emphasis will give us a clear idea of what the sublime in the visual arts amounted to. Take his bard,* for example, which is an illustration to Grays Ode “The Bard”.

[John Moreir 1817 “The Bard” (14); John Reincemir “King Leer” (16)]

Grey wrote:

On a rock, whose haughty brow Frowns o’er old Conway’s foaming flood, Robed in the sable garb of woe, With haggard eyes the poet stood; Loose his beard and hoary hair Screamed like a meteor, to the troubled air.

[Girodet: Ossian Receiving ’s Generals. Romantic classicist follower of David]

The men of the Renaissance, we know, found new inspiration in the art of classical antiquity. The great romantic writers and artists referred with equal zest and keen enjoyment to the art of the middle age. We must not think o this return to medieval literature, art and architecture simply as an escape into the past. Prior to the emergence of the romantics there was, in the end, only one court of appeal in matters of taste and artistic perfection. Classical antiquity had established certain rules which artists ignored at their peril. That was the opinion of the Renaissance critics, of the seventeenth century classicists and the eighteenth century neo-classicists. But the new relish for the sublime, closely associated with the rediscovery of medieval art, created an alternative standard. One could, it came to be admitted, create great masterpieces without adhering to the standards of classical antiquity.

That was an enormous advance and out of the alternatives there emerged a new conception of the personal freedom of the artist to choose his own standards and create his own style. We may study the effect of the alternative, which the enthusiasm for the middle ages provided, in the history of English architecture in the 18th century.

The revival of an interest in , one of the hallmarks of romantic taste, may be traced back to Sir John Vanbrugh. Take his Blenheim Palace*, built between 1705 and 1724. Although its architectural motifs derived from classical architecture, through the very high attic storey, the irregular skyline, and the tower- like pavilions, Vanbrugh gave the Palace a castle-like air that reveals his enjoyment of the medieval castle. This is more obvious in his Seaton Devlaval, in Northumberland (1720-29)* which possesses a fortress like character. Or consider his own house, Blackheath Castle,* at Greenwich built between 1717 and 1726 with its high chimneys, and rounded and castellated turrets.

But the early taste for the Gothic which we find in Vanbrugh’s houses is certainly not a return to medieval methods of building. It is still essentially baroque classicism with a faintly medieval air about it. Vanbrugh’s medievalism was probably patriotic in origin, he wanted his buildings to have an English look. And here I might stress the very close relation between romantic sentiment and national sentiment. The romantic was almost invariably a patriot. Further, the taste for the Gothic, like romanticism in general, had a strong literary flavour about it. This may be seen in the work of , the son of Sir Robert Walpole, and one of the greatest letter-writers in the language. Walpole was a prodigious collector and antiquary, and a man greatly in love with medieval romance. His novel the Castle of Otranto of 1764 created a new vogue for what is called the Gothic novel. The gothic novel was quite artificial and unreal in every sense. It concerned itself with evoking sensations of terror, mystery and the supernatural, all interests subsumed under the new delight in the sublime. The Castle of Otranto is set in medieval Italy; it revels in gloomy castles, secret passages, skeletons in monkish habits, and portraits that drip with blood. True to his taste for the Gothic, Horace Walpole built his own house Strawberry Hill from 1748 in a curious Gothic style, in which Gothic motifs are applied to a Georgian exterior,* and in the interior* the light surface tracery of Gothic Motifs might best be described as rococo- gothic.

The Gothicism of Vanbrugh and Walpole is little more than the application of low gothic motifs and decoration to a classicist plan. But the interest in medieval architecture was soon to affect architecture in a more fundamental way. I said earlier that the existence of the alternatives, classical or medieval, provided the artist with a new awareness of this own freedom. Until the second half of the eighteenth century the tacit assumption of all architectural planning whether classical, Romanesque, gothic, baroque, and so forth, was a symmetrical ordering of the parts. If buildings became, by additions over the years or because of the geographical nature of the site, asymmetrical, justification of such asymmetry was not to be found in the theory of architecture. Architects did not build asymmetrically if they could avoid it. The whole idea of asymmetry provided architects with quite a new freedom in planning—but the idea does not appear to have arisen in architecture itself. Asymmetry can be traced back to a statement alleged by one of his contemporaries, Lomazzo, to have been made by Michelangelo. Michelangelo, Lommazzo claimed, discovered a new principle of composition in the torso of an antique statue.

‘It is reported,’ writes Lomazzo, ‘that Michelangelo gave this observation to the Painter Marcus de Sciena, his scholar, that he should always make a figure pyramidal, serpent-like, and multiplied by one, two and three. In which precept (in my opinion) the whole mystery of the art consisteth. For the greatest grace and life that a picture can have, is, that it express motion, which the painters call the spirit of the picture: Now there is no form so fit to express this motion, as that of the flame of fire, which according to Aristotle and the other philosophers, is an element most active of all other: because the form of the flames thereof is most apt for motion: for it hath a Conus or sharp point wherewith it seemeth to divide the air, that so it may ascend to its proper sphere. So a picture having this form will be beautiful.’

Now we have seen in previous lectures how this asymmetrical principle was applied bot in baroque and rococo in its oblique vistas and recessions and serpentine lines. Michelangelo claimed that the serpentine lines. Michelangelo claimed that the serpentine flame-like curve would endow pictures with grace and life. Of course, literally speaking, pictures and buildings are not living things. But they are often compared metaphorically, because of the effect which they produce on the beholder, with living things. Literally speaking, the only living things are organisms, so that we might call the attribution of life to pictures and buildings the organic analogy or the organic metaphor. Of the organic analogy was very dear to romantic taste. Works of art were not thought of as conforming to a mathematical order of perfection; by the romantics they were thought more of in the manner of plants which gestate first in the artist’s imagination and take their life from his personality. But how does this apply to architecture? We can apply the organic analogy to architecture if we think f it not simply in its visual relationships as it comes from the drawing board of the architect— and this after all was the essence of the classical approach to perfection in architecture—but as a building existing like a plant over a period of time, carrying on certain functions, and finally, like a plant, crumbling into decay. It was painters like Claude and Adam Elsheimer who first appear to have applied this approach to buildings. Claude’s paintings reveal a new delight I ruins. The buildings which he introduced into his paintings such as the Enchanted Castle belong to no one style. Often they were classical buildings of the Roman campagna which had been added to in the middle ages, and later fallen into ruin. But the romantic appeal of their history was strong, and Claude’s paintings were very popular with English collectors of the eighteenth century, because he appealed both to their classical interests and their romantic enjoyment of the classical antiquity. One such collector and connoisseur was Richard Payne Knight who owned many paintings by Claude. Between 1774 and 1778 Payne Knight built himself a great house called in the west country of England on the borders of Shropshire and -a region, it must be stressed, where many medieval fortresses still existed and gave a romantic, medieval atmosphere to the countryside. Payne Knight argued that classical buildings were appropriate only to a Mediterranean climate, they were out of place in the colder and more sullen climate of England. For English houses a Tudor style was more appropriate. Notice here the typically romantic appeal to national sentiment. But a notable advance had been made: the notion that a building should be suited to its environment. In another way, too, Payne Knight made an even more notable advance: he planned his building in an asymmetrical fashion—the first deliberately planned asymmetrical building in Europe, according to Nicholas Pevsner. And it would seem that he derived the inspiration for his building from the buildings which he found in the paintings of Claude Lorrain, such as the Enchanted Castle. Downton became his own Downton Castle. The interior,* oddly enough, in contrast to the interior of Strawberry Hill, revealed a strong neo-classical preference in the Adam manner. This is but one indication of the very close relation between the romantic and the neo- classic.

Indeed, neo-classicism is sometimes called romantic classicism, and the gusto Greco, the taste for Greek art, and Greek literature may be taken as a special form of romanticism rather than its antithesis. The Epic of Homer, the Iliad and Odyssey were enjoyed by the very people who waxed enthusiastic over Ossian. Homer was the prototype of all blind Romantic bards who composed border ballads about tribal heroes. The Doric Order was enjoyed by the men of the eighteenth century for its spare and simple nobility, it was produced by men who lived at the dawn of civilisation. Piranesi’s drawing of a Doric Temple from Paestum, published in 1778,* is similar in its gaunt and monumental simplicity to this engraving after William Hodges, published the year before in 1777 of the Monuments of Easter Island.* Indeed the Dilettanti Society which sponsored Stuart and Revett’s travels in Ancient Greece also hoped to send one of their antiquaries on Cook’s third voyage to draw the antiquities of Polynesia. And Richard Payne Knight, who was a close friend and neighbour of Sir Joseph Banks (he lived next dor to him in Soho Square) compared the civilisation of the Greeks in their Golden Age with those stories of the noble savages of the Pacific which he gained from his friend Banks. There was in shot a strong primitivistic, and therefore romantic element in neo-classical taste.

Now in turning to painting for inspiration in building Downton Castle, Payne Knight introduced the into English architecture. The theory and practice of the picturesque is of the greatest importance in English eighteenth century art. It is closely related to, but most be distinguished from, the romantic movement as a whole. Perhaps it is best regarded as a particular aspect of romantic taste and sensibility. One of the most popular writers on the picturesque, the Reverend defined picturesque beauty quite simply as the kind of beauty peculiar to painting. The fact of the matter was that during the eighteenth century the enjoyment of painting was so widespread among cultivated people that it affected and flowed into other arts. It affected poetry. The landscape poet James Thompson in his very popular work the Seasons, written in the late 1720s, introduced descriptions of landscape scenery based directly upon the paintings of Claude and Salvator Rosa. Thompson’s scenes created a vogue for picturesque poetry. It was the same with Gardening. When Vanbrugh was asked to plan the gardens of Blenheim he is said to have exclaimed ‘you must send for a landscape painter’. And throughout the century, as Professor Burke has indicated in a previous lecture, landscape gardeners created their prospects and vistas with the paintings of Claude, Gaspard Oussin and Salvator Rosa very much in mind. The Picturesque affected architecture crucially as we have seen by making the irregular and asymmetrical building fashionable. Downton Castle was Tudor and irregular. introduced asymmetry into an Italianate and classical style in his small villa at Cronkhill built in 1802. Its arcaded veranda, wide eaves, and round towers are very close to the buildings in Laude’s paintings, and it became the prototype of building very common in England during the nineteenth century—and you will still see many o them in the suburbs of Melbourne from Government Hose downwards. The great monument to the picturesque Gothic style however was Fothill Abbey built by the architect James Wyatt for Willam Beckford between 1795 and 1807. Like Walpole, Beckford was a rich man, a litterateur and an eccentric. Beckford’s novel, Vathek, is set in Arabia, and like the Castle of Otranto, it is a tale of terror, phantasy and wonder. Fonthill Abbey was an enormous gothic pile, which reflected the megalomania of Beckford. Its thin and lofty proportions are like a castle in a fairy tale, slightly unreal. It was built rapidly and so poorly constructed that the tower fell down after standing for only twenty years.

Finally, the theory of the picturesque which had originally sprung from painting and had affected the arts of poetry, gardening and architecture I turn became, during the last decades of the eighteenth century, and aesthetic theory, and as it were, boomeranged back and affected the art of painting itself. I have already mentioned how the new taste for the art of the middle ages helped to popularise the vogue for sublime beauty and thus create an alternative to classical beauty. Burke we have seen, had established the sublime as a separate aesthetic category with his Treatise on the Sublime and Beautiful of 1756. During the 1780s and 1790s, a number of writers, notably the Reverend William Gilpin, the travelling landscape painter who roamed over the Welsh and Scottish highlands and the Lake District making picturesque sketches, Humphrey Repton, the landscape gardener, Richard Payne Knight and a friend of his, Sir Uvdale Price, all helped to erect the Picturesque as a third important aesthetic category. Broadly speaking, picturesque beauty lay between the beautiful—a notion grounded in classical precedents—and the sublime—grounded in romantic precedents. Uvdale Price, in his essay on the Picturesque in 1794, perhaps the most important writer on the picturesque followed Edmund Burke closely. He agreed with Burke that beauty consisted in smallness, roundness, gradual variation, delicacy and bright colours. But the enjoyment we gain from the picturesque was quite different. Its appeal lay in rugged rocks, sudden variations, opposing lines, and roughness of texture. It was to be found in such things as old walls, gnarled and blasted oaks, shaggy goats, gothic cathedrals, cart horses, wandering gypsies and the paintings of Salvator Rosa. Sydney Smith, the Edinburgh wit, summed up the debate on the picturesque a little tersely when he pointed out that the Vicar’s horse was beautiful, the curate’s horse was picturesque.

The picturesque created a new vogue for cottage architecture. The noble simplicity of rural life was one of the forms of primitivism which deeply affected romantic taste. In the gardens of Versailles, Marie Antoinette build a hamlet for herself between 1775 and 1785 where as a milkmaid, she was able to enjoy the simple pleasures of the poor and escape the etiquette of the court. And William Wordsworth, in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads of 102, one of the most influential of all romantic documents, sought to reform English poetry both in its subject matter and diction by returning to rural life. ‘Humble and rustic life was generally chosen’, he wrote, ‘ because in that condition the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain maturity, are under less restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language… and because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the great and permanent forms of nature. The language too of these men has been adapted because sch men hourly communicated with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived… and being less under the influence of social vanity, they convey their feelings, and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions.

With such a current emphasis upon, what we might call, the noble peasant, it is not surprising that a vogue for romantic cottages and farm houses became popular at the turn of the century. Here are some plans from John Plaw’s Ferm Ornee or Rural Improvements, published in 1795.

Two dog kennels: a fine residence for a picturesque or romantic dog.

Lugar Roberts: two designs from his architectural sketches for Cottages, Rural Dwellings and Villas of 1805 (1) an ornamented cottage (2) a fancy cottage.

If we turn now to the art of painting we will find that here picturesque theory found expression most fully in the art of watercolour painting, which, during the second half of the eighteenth century, rose from a humble topographical and documentary craft to become one of the most important media in which the romantic taste found expression. Here in our next slide is a drawing by Paul Sandby of .* It combines topographical precision with an interest in light and atmosphere. Picturesque watercolour painting, however, is seen better in the work of Alexander Cozens and his son . Here is a rocky landscape by Alexander Cozens,* a brown was on toned paper. Note the broad and dark foreground treatment; the interest in mountain scenery, the roughness and sudden variation, which Uvdale Price said characterised the picturesque. Here is an even broader treatment of rocks and branches. Alexander Cozens was an inventive painter—William Beckford said that he was almost as full of systems as the universe. One of his systems consisted in inventing landscapes from the use of ink blots. He set out this method in his book A New Method for Assisting the Invention in the Composition of Landscape Painting published in 1785. Here is one of his landscapes derived from blots.* The interesting thing about these accidental landscapes, which were begun quite haphazardly, like a modern psychologist’s Rorschach blot, was that a few strokes of the brush enabled the painter, looking for new landscape motifs, to see in his blot a landscape in the manner of Claude or Rosa.* Despite this, the new method does reveal that, under the influence of new romantic attitudes, watercolour painting was endeavouring to break free, so far as it could, from traditional methods. Alexander’s son, John Robert Vozens produced highly poetic watercolour landscapes. E travelled in Switzerland and Italy first with Richard Payne Knight between 1776 and 1779 and later with William Beckford, of Fonthill Castle fame, between 1782 and 1783. He was one of the first painters to reveal the grandeur of the Swiss Alps, and John Constable had a very high opinion of his work. ‘The greatest genius that ever touched landscape’ he called hi, an on another occasion said, ‘Cozens is all poetry’. Here is J.R. Cozens’s ‘View in the Island of Elba’* with towering mountains covered in mist, a typical exercise in a sublime subject and here is ‘Chasm in Delphi’* where the Romantic emphasis upon the vastness of nature and the littleness of man is convincingly portrayed. Finally, we may look at a watercolour by Francis Towne, a Swiss landscape, in which the enjoyment of mountain scenery is combined with a closer scrutiny of the forms of rock structure. Such watercolourists as Sandby, the two Cozens and Towne prepared the way for England’s two greatest landscape painters, Turner and Constable, whom I shall deal with in a later lecture.

Library Digitised Collections

Author/s: Smith, Bernard

Title: The origins of the Romantic Movement, 1958

Date: 1958

Persistent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11343/56263

File Description: Romantic Movement (part 2)