Class 1: the Wild Within

Class 1: The Wild Within A. The Noble Beast 1. Title Slide 1 (Stubbs: Horse Attacked by a Lion) This course is about the movement in the arts known as Romanticism, which came into prominence in the first quarter of the 19th Century, though began in the middle of the 18th, and lingered on in some media well into the 20th. This extended period, roughly 1750–1925, is sometimes referred to as The Long Nineteenth Century. The main point of this opening class is to enlarge on this statement—or rather to replace it with a series of questions that we can address in future weeks. I have to say that the course is very much a work in progress. Partly this is a matter of time; there is an enormous amount of material to organize, which was not helped by a total computer crash last month which set me back by several weeks. But mainly it is the nature of the subject. Virtually every book on Romanticism begins with a chapter showing the author reeling with the difficulty of pinning it down in date, place, or meaning. True, I have issued a syllabus, dividing everything into neat packages, but I have little expectation that it will stay like that. I have resigned myself to thinking of Romanticism as a grab bag of fascinating ideas; the only possibility is to take hold of one of them and follow it where it leads. 2. Romanticism 1 (walled city in Malta) 3. Romanticism 2 (steam train) 4. Romanticism 3 (tourist map of Arizona) If I may offer an analogy: Romanticism cannot be defined as an enclosed territory, still less as a linear journey from point to point, but only as a collection of points of interest, each of which exists within Romanticism, but cannot be said to define it, except collectively. So for the rest of this class and each of the eleven that follow, I shall pick on some point that interests me and just go for it. Sometimes I will be in control of the material; more often, it will take control of me. That is how Romanticism works. 5. Title slide 1 (repeat) My title slide is a case in point. Originally, I had intended to call this first class “What’s in a Name?” But looking for something to make an arresting beginning, I settled on this picture by George Stubbs (1724– 1806), A Lion Attacking a Horse. But when I came to type, I found that “What’s in a Name?” just didn’t look right; the picture virtually dictated a new title, “The Wild Within,” which sort of works for me. In the first hour, we will look at “the Wild;” “Within” will come after the break. 6. George Stubbs: A Lion Attacking a Horse (1770, Yale) 7. George Stubbs: Horse paintings 8. George Stubbs: Plates from The Anatomy of the Horse (1770, Royal Academy, London) — 1 — Let’s look at the Stubbs more closely. What are its ingredients? It is a dialogue, I think, between the landscape at top left and the terrified horse at bottom right, with the looming rocks somehow mediating between them. Now Stubbs was a painter who specialized in horses. He would do horse portraits for wealthy patrons, two of which are shown here; the landscapes are pretty, but quite conventional. However, Stubbs was deadly serious about his profession. In 1756, he rented a farmhouse and began almost two years of study dissecting horses; and in 1770, he published a set of engravings, The Anatomy of the Horse. In this respect, Stubbs was a citizen of the Age of Reason, when everything was the province of cataloguing and scientific study. 9. Thomas Gainsborough: Mr and Mrs Andrews (c.1750, London NG) All these come from the middle of the century. Perhaps the loveliest English landscape of that time comes in the portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Andrews by Thomas Gainsborough (1727–88). Beautiful indeed, but there can be no doubt about the purpose of the picture if you look at its full title: Robert Andrews of the Auberies and Frances Carter of Ballingdon House After Their Marriage. Clearly, it is all about property—very much like Stubbs’ normal horse portraits. 10. Thomas Gainsborough: Landscape with the Village of Cornard (1750s, Edinburgh) 11. George Stubbs: Grey Hunter with Groom and Greyhound (1772, London, Tate) Now Gainsborough did paint quite a few more rugged landscapes, such as this Landscape with the Village of Cornard, as did Stubbs in his Grey Hunter with a Groom and a Greyhound at Creswell Crags, whose title nonetheless suggests that it too is a property picture. Both of these could be described as Picturesque, a term that came into vogue in the later 18th century, and is certainly a prelude to Romanticsm, but Stubb’s Horse Attacked by a Lion is something else. How does it differ from the others we have seen? I suggest that the importance is its combination of noble qualities—horse and lion— together with an outbreak of violence that has an animal, rather than a human wildness. 12. Giambologna: Lion Attacking a Horse (1580s, Walters Art Gallery) Here’s a strange bit of serendipity. In the middle of writing this class, I took my grandchildren to that marvelous Cabinet of Wonders at the Walters Art Museum. And glancing down at a small bronze lying on one of the tables, I saw it was of this exact same subject—only not of the Romantic era at all. In fact, it is one of several versions of the subject done by the Flemish-Italian sculptor Giambologna (1529– 1608). Researching this further, I learnt that the subject is found even in Roman and Greek art. This is one of the curious things about Romanticism: many of its qualities can be found in other centuries also; it is not the originality but the obsession that makes it Romantic. 13. Blake: “The Tyger,” video reading by Tom O’Bedlam 14. Delacroix: Tiger Attacking a Snake (Washington, Corcoran Gallery) 15. Delacroix: comparison of Tiger to Self-Portrait Artists around 1800 were fascinated by the image of the lion or tiger as symbol of savage power. One only has to look at William Blake’s (1757–1827) famous poem “Tyger, tyger, burning bright” from his Songs of Experience (1794), where the very existence of the Tiger is part of the magnificent mystery of — 2 — God. And both tigers and lions feature prominently in the work of Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), the most quintessentially Romantic artist of all. Indeed, one might speculate that he saw himself as a tiger. In the words of Frederick the Great (1712–86), “Every man has a wild beast within him.” But it is the horse that became a Romantic symbol par excellence. To prove my point, here is a quick montage of horse pictures, going into the next century; many of these will come back in later classes. 16. Liszt: Mazeppa (orchestral excerpt, with horse pictures) 17. Delacroix and Vernet Mazeppas The last two paintings I showed, one by Delacroix and the other by Horace Vernet (1789–1863), both illustrate the legend of Mazeppa; the background music came from by the symphonic poem of the same name by Franz Liszt (1811–86), both based on a narrative poem by George Gordon Lord Byron (1788– 1824), another key figure in the Romantic movement. 18. Thomas Phillips: Lord Byron (1812, London NPG), with Vernet Mazeppa Byron, who will be a major subject of my third class, became an overnight superstar with the publication of his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, in 1812; he will be a featured artist in my third class. So, when he published Mazeppa in 1819, it was immediately translated into French and several other languages. And that translation, in turn, triggered the spate of paintings and musical settings that we have already sampled. His subject is an historical legend, that is to say a probably fictional story growing up around a real person. Ivan Mazeppa (1639–1709) became the leader of the Ukrainian armies in the later 17th century. In his youth, so the legend goes, he had an affair with the wife of a Polish Count. Discovering this, the Count had him tied naked to the back of a wild horse, which he then whipped into the forest. Mazeppa lives to tell of his ordeal; when Romantic narratives are not outright tragedies, they tend to celebrate human endurance. To show you the style, here are some lines from the passage that Vernet paints, when Mazeppa and his horse are pursued by wolves. 19. Byron: Mazeppa (text excerpt) B. Bravura 20. Horace Vernet: Mazeppa and the Wolves (1826, Avignon), with sketch You may have noticed that I switched between Vernet’s finished painting of Mazeppa and a preliminary sketch. Let’s now look at the two side by side: what differences do you see between them? The final version has more clarity and detail, yes, but there is a sense of action in the sketch that comes solely from the way the artist handles his brush, as a visceral response to a visceral subject. It is an example of something that crops up again and again in Romanticism—bravura. These reproductions are not the best, so let’s go back on a couple of the pictures I have already shown you to see it better. 21. Horace Vernet: Rome, Race of Riderless Horses (1826, NY Met) 22. Eugène Delacroix: Combat between the Giaour and the Pasha (1835, Paris, Petit Palais) — 3 — The first of these is another Vernet, the start of the annual race of riderless horses in Rome.

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