Romanticism and Realism in 19th-century Anglo-American Art

This course takes a look at the developments of painting and sculpture in the English and early American context: the related yet distinct manifestations of these Romanticism and Realism in the British Empire, the other pole to Europe's balance of powers from the rise and fall of Napoleon's French Empire and beyond. England and the formerly English colonies which had only recently been established as the United States shared the same language and indeed initially belonged to the same milieu of artistic and cultural currents; English painters who distinguished themselves first in Europe often made the ocean passage to this new idea of America, and they counted among those whose expansions westward have concretized the early cultural history of the United States. These attitudes towards painting from the close of the eighteenth century through the late nineteenth which we see coalesce in England and Northern Europe will be the bedrock upon which a nascent American Art History can be constructed.

Here, we see such types as the individual portrait, the group portrait, the landscape, the historical painting and other conventions adapted first to the distinct sensibilities of the British Empire and then to the emergent American Republic. Romanticism and Realism, two styles which we have encountered in previous courses on French painting, drive the production of images which expressed very different experiences of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, Romantic landscapes played a problematic role in advertising the West as an uninhabited, idyllic land to European settlers, but on the other, Romantic treatments of the tragedies of slavery and other social injustices awakened the viewers' conscience with their emotional appeals.

Realism too played a major role in the exposition of the brutal realities of the American Civil War or documenting the advances in medical and experimental science, whether as paintings or in the new medium of photography. Both styles here are explored in-depth through the major artists and their works of the nineteenth century. Romanticism and Realism in English and American painting in the nineteenth century clung in some respects to the formal, academic style of painting whose rules had been set out by the French Academy; however, the ultimate use of these conventions of composition, of brushwork, of subject, and of emotional content were fundamentally altered in order to communicate the experience first of the British Empire and then of the nascent United States.

The English, American, and to an extent German painterly traditions are all linked by the constant exchange of artists and styles made possible by an unprecedented era of access and transportation across the Atlantic Ocean, and these early influences brought ideas about the Enlightenment, about Science, about Rationalism, as well as more Romantic impulses: mystery about the unknown, but in the case of the United States, an optimistic entitlement about man's expansion into the unknown natural world. With the Civil War came an extreme disillusionment with Romanticized notions about war, as the battle-field photographs lifted the veil from the unmitigated horror of its mass casualties from the public eye, and we see both a shift towards Realist works, like Tanner's and Homer's, which refocus the painted image upon the small experiences of the every-day.