7.2 Romanticism, Realism & Early Photography

Romanticism (c. 1780–1850)

As the 18th century drew to a close, a profound cultural reaction emerged against the cold, calculated rationalism of Neoclassicism and the traumatic industrialization of European society. This movement, Romanticism, prioritized intense personal emotion, intuition, subjective imagination, and the wild unpredictability of nature. Rather than seeking civic order and classical restraint, Romantics were captivated by the exotic, the macabre, the medieval past, and above all, the sublime—an aesthetic concept articulated by philosopher Edmund Burke as a thrilling mix of awe, wonder, and terrifying power experienced when contemplating untamable forces like tempestuous oceans, volcanoes, or infinite skies.

Key Romantic Masters in Europe

In Spain, Francisco Goya chronicled both royal power and human depravity. Goya transitioned from light Rococo tapestry cartoons to dark, visceral critiques of war and tyranny. His masterwork, The Third of May 1808, depicts the execution of Spanish resistance fighters by Napoleon’s faceless firing squad. Goya utilized dramatic chiaroscuro, placing a glowing lantern at the feet of a central peasant in white whose outstretched arms evoke a crucifixion. In his late years, living isolated in the Quinta del Sordo, Goya painted his infamous Black Paintings directly onto his house walls—including Saturn Devouring His Son—exploring psychological terror, madness, and existential dread.

In France, Théodore Géricault shocked the 1819 Salon with The Raft of the Medusa, a monumental history painting depicting the tragic aftermath of a contemporary French naval shipwreck left to perish by an incompetent aristocratic captain. Géricault constructed a powerful double-pyramidal composition filled with writhing, decaying bodies, elevating contemporary political scandal and human suffering to the scale of heroic history painting. Following Géricault's premature death, Eugène Delacroix became the undisputed leader of French Romanticism. Delacroix favored vibrant color, fluid brushwork, and emotional energy (rubénisme) over strict line drawing (poussinisme). In Liberty Leading the People (1830), Delacroix personified Liberty as the allegorical figure of Marianne, leading a diverse barricade of workers, students, and street urchins during the July Revolution.

In England, Romanticism flourished through landscape painting. J.M.W. Turner captured the violent, sublime power of nature in works like The Slave Ship (1840) and Rain, Steam, and Speed. Turner dissolved solid forms into turbulent, swirling vortices of light, steam, and color, pioneering an atmospheric approach that anticipated Impressionism. Conversely, John Constable painted nostalgic, deeply observed scenes of the English countryside (The Hay Wain, 1821). Constable used broken strokes of white paint ("Constable's snow") to capture glistening moisture and dappled sunlight, reacting against industrial urban encroachment.

Realism (c. 1840–1880)

By the mid-19th century, driven by the social upheavals of the 1848 Revolutions, the rise of industrial capitalism, and socialist political theory (Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto), a new artistic movement rejected both Neoclassical idealization and Romantic emotional escapism. Realism insisted on depicting modern life, working-class labor, and physical reality objectively, without idealization, sentimentality, or mythological gloss.

Champions of the Realist Movement

Gustave Courbet was the confrontational pioneer of Realism, famously declaring, "Show me an angel and I will paint one." Courbet asserted that art should consist solely of the representation of things real and existing. In The Stone Breakers (1849), he depicted an old man and a young boy breaking rocks beside a road—backbreaking, unheroic labor rendered on a monumental canvas size traditionally reserved for kings and generals. Courbet applied paint coarsely with a palette knife, emphasizing the gritty materiality of stone and canvas.

Jean-François Millet focused on the French rural peasantry, depicting agrarian dignity amidst poverty. In The Gleaners (1857), Millet showed three impoverished women bending over harvested fields to gather leftover grain scraps, highlighting rural class divisions. Meanwhile, Honoré Daumier used the new mass medium of lithography to publish sharp political satires in newspapers, while producing oil paintings like The Third-Class Carriage to document the cramped, anonymous conditions of modern urban transit.

Early Photography: Technology and Art

The 19th-century obsession with capturing physical reality culminated in the invention of chemical photography. For centuries, artists had used the camera obscura (a dark chamber projecting an inverted image through a lens) to trace outlines, but permanent chemical capture remained elusive until the 1820s.

Milestones in Photographic Processes

• Heliography (1826): Nicéphore Niépce produced the world's first surviving permanent photograph (View from the Window at Le Gras) using a pewter plate coated with bitumen of Judea, requiring an 8-hour exposure time.
• The Daguerreotype (1839): Niépce's partner, Louis Daguerre, refined the chemical process using silver-plated copper sheets exposed to iodine vapor and developed with heated mercury vapor. Publicly announced in Paris in 1839, the daguerreotype yielded razor-sharp, astonishingly detailed images. However, it was a direct-positive process—producing a unique metallic image without a negative, making direct reproduction impossible.
• The Calotype (1841): In England, William Henry Fox Talbot patented the calotype (or talbotype), exposing paper coated with silver iodide to produce a translucent paper negative. By contact-printing the negative onto sensitized paper in sunlight, Talbot created a negative-positive process that allowed unlimited positive copies from a single exposure, establishing the foundation of modern photographic technology.
• Wet-Collodion Glass Plates (1851): Frederick Scott Archer introduced the wet-collodion process, coating glass plates with light-sensitive collodion. This combined the razor-sharp detail of the metallic daguerreotype with the unlimited reproducibility of the paper calotype. However, plates had to be exposed and developed in a darkroom within 10 minutes while wet, requiring photographers like Mathew Brady and Timothy O'Sullivan to haul wagon-sized darkrooms onto American Civil War battlefields.
• Motion Studies: In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge positioned a series of trip-wire cameras along a racetrack to capture The Horse in Motion, proving conclusively that a galloping horse momentarily lifts all four hooves completely off the ground. Muybridge's sequential locomotion studies laid the direct technological and conceptual foundation for motion pictures (cinema).