when I was young...

All By Myself (Eric Carmen) Lyrics:  (v1) When I was young, I never needed anyone, and makin' love was just for fun...those days are gone. (v2) Livin' alone, I think  of all the friends I've known, but when I dial the telephone, nobody's home.  (chorus) All by myself....don't wanna be...all by myself...any more. All by myself....don't wanna live...all by myself...any more. (v3) Hard to be sure, sometimes I feel so insecure, and love so distant and obscure, remains the cure. (repeat v 1 & chorus)

....so what do you do when you don't wana be all by your self?

van gogh

from: http://www.vangoghgallery.com/misc/bio.html
Born: March 30, 1853
Died: (suicide "for the good of all") July 29, 1890

Vincent van Gogh, for whom color was the chief symbol of expression, was born in Groot-Zundert, Holland. The son of a pastor, brought up in a religious and cultured atmosphere, Vincent was highly emotional and lacked self-confidence. Between 1860 and 1880, when he finally decided to become an artist, van Gogh had had two unsuitable and unhappy romances and had worked unsuccessfully as a clerk in a bookstore, an art salesman, and a preacher in the Borinage (a dreary mining district in Belgium), where he was dismissed for overzealousness. He remained in Belgium to study art, determined to give happiness by creating beauty.The works of his early Dutch period are somber-toned, sharply lit, genre paintings of which the most famous is "The Potato Eaters" (1885). In that year van Gogh went to Antwerp where he discovered the works of Rubens and purchased many Japanese prints.

In 1886 he went to Paris to join his brother Théo, the manager of Goupil's gallery. In Paris, van Gogh studied with Cormon, inevitably met Pissarro, Monet, and Gauguin, and began to lighten his very dark palette and to paint in the short brushstrokes of the Impressionists. His nervous temperament made him a difficult companion and night-long discussions combined with painting all day undermined his health. He decided to go south to Arles where he hoped his friends would join him and help found a school of art. Gauguin did join him but with disastrous results. Near the end of 1888, an incident led Gauguin to ultimately leave Arles. Van Gogh pursued him with an open razor, was stopped by Gauguin, but ended up cutting a portion of his own ear lobe off. Van Gogh then began to alternate between fits of madness and lucidity and was sent to the asylum in Saint-Remy for treatment.

In May of 1890, he seemed much better and went to live in Auvers-sur-Oise under the watchful eye of Dr. Gachet. Two months later he was dead, having shot himself "for the good of all." During his brief career he had sold one painting. Van Gogh's finest works were produced in less than three years in a technique that grew more and more impassioned in brushstroke, in symbolic and intense color, in surface tension, and in the movement and vibration of form and line. Van Gogh's inimitable fusion of form and content is powerful; dramatic, lyrically rhythmic, imaginative, and emotional, for the artist was completely absorbed in the effort to explain either his struggle against madness or his comprehension of the spiritual essence of man and nature.

____

Van Gogh's Mental and Physical Health

Hundreds of physicians and psychiatrists have tried to define Van Gogh's medical conditions over the years. The following are some of the more probable mental and physical diagnoses.

Temporal Lobe Epilepsy

Van Gogh suffered from seizures which doctors, including Dr. Felix Rey and Dr. Peyron, believed to be caused by temporal lobe epilepsy. Van Gogh was born with a brain lesion that many doctors believe was aggravated by his prolonged use of absinthe causing his epileptic condition. Dr. Gachet, another of Van Gogh's physicians, was thought to have treated his epilepsy with digitalis. This prescription drug can cause one to see in yellow or see yellow spots. This may have been one of the reasons why Van Gogh loved this color.

Bipolar disorder

Due to Van Gogh's extreme enthusiasm and dedication to first religion and then art coupled with the feverish pace of his art production many believe that mania was a prominent condition in Van Gogh's life. However, these episodes were always followed by exhaustion and depression and ultimately suicide. Therefore, a diagnosis of bipolar disorder or manic depression makes sense with the accounts of these episodes in Van Gogh's life.

Thujone poisoning

In order to counter act his attacks of epilepsy, anxiety, and depression, Van Gogh drank absinthe, a toxic alcoholic drink popular with many artists at the time. Thujone is the toxin in absinthe. Unfortunately, the Thujone worked against Van Gogh aggravating his epilepsy and manic depression. High doses of thujone can also cause one to see objects in yellow. Various physicians have differing opinions on whether or not this is what caused Van Gogh's affinity with yellow.

Lead poisoning

Because Van Gogh used lead based paints there are some who believe he suffered from lead poisoning from nibbling at paint chips. It was also noted by Dr. Peyron that during his attacks Van Gogh tried to poison himself by swallowing paint or drinking kerosene. One of the symptoms of lead poisoning is swelling of the retinas which can cause one to see light in circles like halos around objects. This can be seen in paintings like The Starry Night.

Hypergraphia

Hypergraphia is a condition causing one to need to write continuously; this disorder is commonly linked to mania and epilepsy. Some believe that the massive collection of over 800 letters Van Gogh wrote during his lifetime could be attributed to this condition.

Sunstroke

Because Van Gogh strived for realism in his paintings he was often painting outdoors especially during his times in the South of France. Some of his episodes of hostility and the nausea and "bad stomach" he refers to in his letters may have been the effects of sunstroke.

______________

as heard on Dennis Prager....yesterday 3/14

"a real problem is the "jew" hatred in the Arab world.  To them Jew equals one who should be tortured - that's why it is nothing to them to kill an infant girl - or 200 men stripping and beating an American reporter as they called her "Jew.""  (it sickens me)

"hug the people in your daily life"

"march on because the world is not a good place.  Humans are OK - Humanity is not."

these are quips I jotted down as I listened - I was going through a pretty low day yesterday - and these just spoke to me.

Scariest video of a Japan Tsunami (2011)

sad

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Obamateurism of the Day

posted at 8:05 am on March 15, 2011 by Ed Morrissey

We got a number of e-mails complaining about Barack Obama’s golf outing on Sunday in the middle of crises in Japan, Libya, and on Capitol Hill, where the federal budget due last October still hasn’t received any Presidential attention.  Good news, readers — the White House has heard your complaints, and we can guarantee next weekend that you won’t find Obama on the links.  Instead, he plans on, er, heading to Rio for some public adulation (via the Weasel Zippers):

President Barack Obama will take his first official trip to Brazil this weekend where he will speak in the popular Cinelandia Square in downtown Rio de Janeiro.
The Obama family will also take in the sights in Rio. A trip to Corcovado mountain, where the Christ the Redeemer statue stands (France gave us Lady Liberty, gave Brazil Jesus) is supposedly on the itinerary. What trip to Rio would be complete without it?

As the nuclear situation in Japan hits a nightmare scenario, as freedom fighters in Libya get annihilated, and as the continuing resolution funding the US government runs out and the government possibly shuts down, Obama will head for the carnivale in Rio.  What better way to show leadership than to run out of town when the money stops, and to go to Brazil for a hero’s welcome while Europe wonders when America will decide to engage on North Africa?

Can’t a man just eat his churrasco?

http://hotair.com/archives/2011/03/15/obamateurism-of-the-day-470/

Staying a While

75 Geese Running Down The Street

slow loris with a tiny umbrella

Zombie Love Song - (Your Favorite Martian music video)

CIub Villain

Romanticism (1790-1850)

Beginning with the late -18th to the mid -19th century, new Romantic attitude begun to characterize culture and many art works in Western civilization. It started as an artistic and intellectual movement that emphasized a revulsion against established values (social order and religion). Romanticism exalted individualism, subjectivism, irrationalism, imagination, emotions and nature - emotion over reason and senses over intellect. Since they were in revolt against the orders, they favored the revival of potentially unlimited number of styles (anything that aroused them).
   Romantic artists were fascinated by the nature, the genius, their passions and inner struggles, their moods, mental potentials, the heroes. They investigated human nature and personality, the folk culture, the national and ethnic origins, the medieval era, the exotic, the remote, the mysterious, the occult, the diseased, and even satanic. Romantic artist had a role of an ultimate egoistic creator, with the spirit above strict formal rules and traditional procedures. He had imagination as a gateway to transcendent experience and spiritual truth.
   The German poets and critics August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel first used the term 'Romanticism' to label a wider cultural movement. For the Schlegel brothers, it was a product of Christianity. The culture of the Middle Ages created a Romantic sensibility which differed from the Classical. Christian culture dealt with a struggle between the heavenly perfection and the human experience of inadequacy and guilt. This sense of struggle, and ever-present dark forces was allegedly present in Medieval culture.
   While this view partly explains Romantic fascination with the Middle Ages, the actual causes of the Romantic movement itself correspond to the sense of rapid, dynamic social change that culminated in the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era.

French Romanticism:

• Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
• Eugene Delacroix
• Theodore Gericault
• Jacques-Louis David
• Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson
• Antoine-Jean Gros
• Adelaide Labille-Guiard
• Marie-Louise-Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun
• Francois Rude
• Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux
• Antoine-Louis Barye

Hudson River School (1835 - 1870)
   Hudson River School was the first American school of landscape painting active from 1835-1870. The subjects of their art were romantic spectacles from the Hudson River Valley and upstate New York. The artist Thomas Cole is synonymous with this region and first leader of the group. Other famous artists of the group are George Caleb Bingham, Asher B. Durand, Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, George Inness, John Frederic Kensett, Martin Johnson Heade...

• American Romanticism:
• John Singleton Copley
• Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze
• Edward Hicks
• Gilbert Stuart
• John James Audubon
• George Catlin
  
  
  The Hudson River School:
• Albert Bierstadt
• Thomas Cole
• George Caleb Bingham
• Asher B. Durand
• Thomas Moran
• Frederic Edwin Church
• George Inness
• John Frederick Kensett
• Martin Jonson Heade

Inundated Ruins of a Monastery, ca. 1824
Karl Blechen (German, 1798–1840)
Pen and black ink, watercolor washes, sgrafitto

Source: Karl Blechen: Inundated Ruins of a Monastery (2008.109) | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Romanticism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 38.58 × 29.13 inches, 1818, Oil on canvas, Kunsthalle Hamburg

Romanticism (or the Romantic Era) was a complex artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution.^[1] In part, it was a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature.^[2] It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography,^[3] education^[4] and natural history.^[5]
The movement validated strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror and terror and awe—especially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities, both new aesthetic categories. It elevated folk art and ancient custom to something noble, made of spontaneity a desirable character (as in the musical impromptu), and argued for a "natural" epistemology of human activities as conditioned by nature in the form of language and customary usage.
Romanticism reached beyond the rational and Classicist ideal models to elevate a revived medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived to be authentically medieval, in an attempt to escape the confines of population growth, urban sprawl, and industrialism, and it also attempted to embrace the exotic, unfamiliar, and distant in modes more authentic than Rococo chinoiserie, harnessing the power of the imagination to envision and to escape.
The modern sense of a romantic character may be expressed in Byronic ideals of a gifted, perhaps misunderstood loner, creatively following the dictates of his inspiration rather than the mores of contemporary society.
Although the movement was rooted in the German Sturm und Drang movement, which prized intuition and emotion over Enlightenment rationalism, the ideologies and events of the French Revolution laid the background from which both Romanticism and the Counter-Enlightenment emerged. The confines of the Industrial Revolution also had their influence on Romanticism, which was in part an escape from modern realities; indeed, in the second half of the 19th century, "Realism" was offered as a polarized opposite to Romanticism.^[6] Romanticism elevated the achievements of what it perceived as heroic individualists and artists, whose pioneering examples would elevate society. It also legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority, which permitted freedom from classical notions of form in art. There was a strong recourse to historical and natural inevitability, a zeitgeist, in the representation of its ideas.

Théodore Chassériau, Othello and Desdemona in Venice, 1850, oil on wood, 25 x 20 cm, in the Louvre, Paris, (inspired by Shakespeare). Chassériau was an influence on the Symbolists.

In European painting, led by a new generation of the French school,^[16] the Romantic sensibility contrasted with the neoclassicism being taught in the academies. In a revived clash between color and design, the expressiveness and mood of color, as in works of J.M.W. Turner, Francisco Goya, Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix, emphasized in the new prominence of the brushstroke and impasto the artist's free handling of paint, which tended to be repressed in neoclassicism under a self-effacing finish.
As in England with J.M.W. Turner and Samuel Palmer, Russia with Orest Kiprensky, Ivan Aivazovsky and Vasily Tropinin, Germany with Caspar David Friedrich, Norway with J.C. Dahl and Hans Gude, Spain with Francisco Goya, and France with Théodore Géricault, Eugène Delacroix, Théodore Chassériau, and others; literary Romanticism had its counterpart in the American visual arts, most especially in the exaltation of an untamed American landscape found in the paintings of the Hudson River School. Painters like Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church and others often expressed Romantic themes in their paintings. They sometimes depicted ancient ruins of the old world, such as in Fredric Edwin Church’s piece Sunrise in Syria. These works reflected the Gothic feelings of death and decay. They also show the Romantic ideal that Nature is powerful and will eventually overcome the transient creations of men. More often, they worked to distinguish themselves from their European counterparts by depicting uniquely American scenes and landscapes. This idea of an American identity in the art world is reflected in W. C. Bryant’s poem, To Cole, the Painter, Departing for Europe, where Bryant encourages Cole to remember the powerful scenes that can only be found in America. This poem also shows the tight connection that existed between the literary and visual artists of the Romantic Era.^{[citation needed]}
Some American paintings promote the literary idea of the “noble savage” (Such as Albert Bierstadt’s The Rocky Mountains, Landers Peak) by portraying idealized Native Americans living in harmony with the natural world.
Thomas Cole's paintings feature strong narratives as in The Voyage of Life series painted in the early 1840s that depict man trying to survive amidst an awesome and immense nature, from the cradle to the grave (see below).

Thomas Cole, 1842, The Voyage of Life
Childhood

Thomas Cole, 1842, The Voyage of Life
Youth

Thomas Cole, 1842, The Voyage of Life
Manhood

Thomas Cole, 1842, The Voyage of Life
Old Age

Romanticism, first defined as an aesthetic in literary criticism around 1800, gained momentum as an artistic movement in France and Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century and flourished until mid-century. With its emphasis on the imagination and emotion, Romanticism emerged as a response to the disillusionment with the Enlightenment values of reason and order in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789. Though often posited in opposition to Neoclassicism, early Romanticism was shaped largely by artists trained in Jacques-Louis David's studio, including Baron Antoine-Jean Gros, Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. This blurring of stylistic boundaries is best expressed in Ingres' Apotheosis of Homer and Eugène Delacroix's Death of Sardanapalus (both Museé du Louvre, Paris), which polarized the public at the Salon of 1827 in Paris. While Ingres' work seemingly embodied the ordered classicism of the David in contrast to the disorder and tumult of the Delacroix, in fact both works draw from the Davidian tradition but each ultimately subverts that model, asserting the originality of the artist—a central notion of Romanticism.

In Romantic art, nature—with its uncontrollable power, unpredictability, and potential for cataclysmic extremes—offered an alternative to the ordered world of Enlightenment thought. The violent and terrifying images of nature conjured by Romantic artists recall the eighteenth-century aesthetic of the Sublime. As articulated by the British statesman Edmund Burke in a 1757 treatise and echoed by the French philosopher Denis Diderot a decade later, "all that stuns the soul, all that imprints a feeling of terror, leads to the sublime." In French and British painting of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the recurrence of images of shipwrecks (2003.42.56) and other representations of man's struggle against the awesome power of nature manifest this sensibility. Scenes of shipwrecks culminated in 1819 with Théodore Gericault's strikingly original Raft of the Medusa (Louvre), based on a contemporary event. In its horrifying explicitness, emotional intensity, and conspicuous lack of a hero, The Raft of the Medusa became an icon of the emerging Romantic style. Similarly, J. M. W. Turner's 1812 depiction of Hannibal and his army crossing the Alps (Tate Britain, London), in which the general and his troops are dwarfed by the overwhelming scale of the landscape and engulfed in the swirling vortex of snow, embodies the Romantic sensibility in landscape painting. Gericault also explored the Romantic landscape in a series of views representing different times of day; in Evening: Landscape with an Aqueduct (1989.183), the dramatic sky, blasted tree, and classical ruins evoke a sense of melancholic reverie.

Another facet of the Romantic attitude toward nature emerges in the landscapes of John Constable, whose art expresses his response to his native English countryside. For his major paintings, Constable executed full-scale sketches, as in a view of Salisbury Cathedral (50.145.8); he wrote that a sketch represents "nothing but one state of mind—that which you were in at the time." When his landscapes were exhibited in Paris at the Salon of 1824, critics and artists embraced his art as "nature itself." Constable's subjective, highly personal view of nature accords with the individuality that is a central tenet of Romanticism.

This interest in the individual and subjective—at odds with eighteenth-century rationalism—is mirrored in the Romantic approach to portraiture. Traditionally, records of individual likeness, portraits became vehicles for expressing a range of psychological and emotional states in the hands of Romantic painters. Gericault probed the extremes of mental illness in his portraits of psychiatric patients, as well as the darker side of childhood in his unconventional portrayals of children. In his portrait of Alfred Dedreux (41.17), a young boy of about five or six, the child appears intensely serious, more adult than childlike, while the dark clouds in the background convey an unsettling, ominous quality.

Such explorations of emotional states extended into the animal kingdom, marking the Romantic fascination with animals as both forces of nature and metaphors for human behavior. This curiosity is manifest in the sketches of wild animals done in the menageries of Paris and London in the 1820s by artists such as Delacroix, Antoine-Louis Barye, and Edwin Landseer. Gericault depicted horses of all breeds—from workhorses to racehorses—in his work. Lord Byron's 1819 tale of Mazeppa tied to a wild horse captivated Romantic artists from Delacroix to Théodore Chassériau, who exploited the violence and passion inherent in the story. Similarly, Horace Vernet, who exhibited two scenes from Mazeppa in the Salon of 1827 (both Musée Calvet, Avignon), also painted the riderless horse race that marked the end of the Roman Carnival, which he witnessed during his 1820 visit to Rome. His oil sketch (87.15.47) captures the frenetic energy of the spectacle, just before the start of the race. Images of wild, unbridled animals evoked primal states that stirred the Romantic imagination.

Along with plumbing emotional and behavioral extremes, Romantic artists expanded the repertoire of subject matter, rejecting the didacticism of Neoclassical history painting in favor of imaginary and exotic subjects. Orientalism and the worlds of literature stimulated new dialogues with the past as well as the present. Ingres' sinuous odalisques (38.65) reflect the contemporary fascination with the exoticism of the harem, albeit a purely imagined Orient, as he never traveled beyond Italy. In 1832, Delacroix journeyed to Morocco, and his trip to North Africa prompted other artists to follow. In 1846, Chassériau documented his visit to Algeria in notebooks filled with watercolors and drawings, which later served as models for paintings done in his Paris studio (64.188). Literature offered an alternative form of escapism. The novels of Sir Walter Scott, the poetry of Lord Byron, and the drama of Shakespeare transported art to other worlds and eras. Medieval England is the setting of Delacroix's tumultuous Abduction of Rebecca (03.30), which illustrates an episode from Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe.

In its stylistic diversity and range of subjects, Romanticism defies simple categorization. As the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1846, "Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in a way of feeling."

Source: Romanticism | Thematic Essay | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

http://www.discoverfrance.net/France/Art/romanticism.shtml

Art Periods: ROMANTICISM

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An intellectual movement that flourished in Europe between the middle of the 18th and 19th centuries, romanticism was complexly implicated in the history of its age, an age in which philosophers, artists, writers, and composers responded with fervor to the forces of nationalism that were sweeping Europe, but rejected the notions of the Enlightenment that had dominated European thought since the early 18th century.

The European Enlightenment, stressing the normative role of reason in the conduct of social life, and universal standards for excellence in the arts, was cosmopolitan. Romanticism may be thought of as a counter-Enlightenment movement, or perhaps as an oppositional phase of Enlightenment that was grounded in difference rather than uniformity. Where Enlightenment thinkers and artists assumed that humankind is essentially similar across all ages and geographic origins (hence their emphasis on the imitation of the best of the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome), romantics generally believed in the uniqueness of individual expression as it is constituted by life experience, an important dimension of which is frequently national character.

Romantic thought often features an organic conception of individual life, society, and the interconnections of humanity, nature, and divinity. Such a view stresses origins. For a romantic political thinker like Edmund Burke, whose Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) opposed the Enlightenment rationalism of the French political experiment, society is an organic growth, nurtured and formed over centuries of practice in ways indigenous to a nation. For a critical romantic thinker like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a poem should aspire to the fullness and wholeness of a living thing. The notion of the individual imagination as the only significant interpreter of nature and humankind motivates writers as profoundly different as William Wordsworth and George Gordon, Lord Byron.

LITERATURE

Despite having been both the country whose political events most clearly shaped European romanticism and the working home of the movement's philosophic progenitor, Swiss-born Jean-Jacques Rousseau, France experienced a late flowering of romanticism, which did not reach its height until the 1830s and 40s, when its force had weakened in England and Germany. Reasons for this lie in France's having been the center of Enlightenment thought and its having served throughout the Revolutionary period as a test bed for progressive ideology.

Bitter controversies involving political and religious loyalties accompanied the emergence of romanticism in France. The main strife took place in the theater. It included disruptions of performances of William Shakespeare's plays in 1822 and culminated in the notorious battle between the warring factions on the opening night of Victor Hugo's drama Hernani (1830). Hugo, Alexandre Dumas pere, and Alfred de Musset all used Shakespeare as a model to effect their departure from prescribed classical practices. The lyric poetry of Alphonse de Lamartine, Musset, and Hugo was romantic in its pronounced personal emotionality, and led, inevitably, to Charles Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal (1857), perhaps French romanticism's most extreme expression.

ART

As they are in literature, the hallmarks of romantic painting are nationalism and the power of individual perception. In France, J. A. Gros glorified Napoleon's victories, while in Spain, Francisco de Goya showed the horrors of war in such canvases as The Third of May, 1808 (1814). France, long dominated by the strict neoclassicism of Jacques Louis David, became the home of an impassioned school of history painting, exemplified in such powerful works as Théodore Géricault's The Raft of Medusa (1819). Géricault strongly influenced Eugène Delacroix, whose flamboyant canvases on historical and literary subjects, such as The Death of Sardanapalus (1827-28), probably best exemplify the common notion of romantic art.

Eugene Delacroix – Girl Seated in a Cemetery

http://www.shoshone.k12.id.us/romantic/art.htm

Romantic Characteristics:

Increased Nationalism and Exoticism

More interest in Nature and the Supernatural

Individuality

Change in the style of Artists

Heroism

Increased Nationalism and exoticism:

Artist used their works for highlighting national identity. Thomas Gainsborough painted many pictures of royalty, as did Jacques-Louis David, who was Napoleon's official artist.

Nationalism also includes the notion of national spirit embodied most clearly in the works of John Constable

Francisco Goya also displayed nationalism in his work The Third of May, 1808.

The artist displayed exoticism by painting new and foreign things, including far away places and odd objects. This idea is illustrated in the Lion Hunt, by Eugene Delacroix.

More interest in Nature and the Supernatural:

Nature- during the Romantic Period, many artists painted landscapes that usually showed either nationalism in painting and sketching the land near them, or the exoticism and adventure of far-away places. Also, artists often used nature to convey emotions.

The natural world was considered less a model of perfection and more a source of mysterious powers.

Romantic artists painted from many supernatural texts and stories.

Supernatural- The romantic period was a time of surging emotions, and the supernatural represented love (cupids), fear (demons), and many other characteristics.

Horror of the supernatural- the scary creatures and such often see in romantic artwork. Goya is a supreme example of this. Among his works, Los Caprichos are some of the most noted, and they have to do with the horrors of the supernatural (Los Caprichos, published in 1799, deal with such themes as the Spanish Inquisition, the abuses of the church and the nobility, witchcraft, child rearing, etc... The supernatural part of theses pictures include goblins, witches, animals acting like human fools and aristocrats, and many others.)

Individuality:

Classicism, the period before the Romantic age, was quite different from Romanticism. Classicism was objective, and Romanticism was subjective; Classicism was all about balance and definite and distinct formal structure, whereas the Romantic spirit was all about loosing formal constraints, giving way to artists to show their individual ideas and emotions

Many Artist used or based some of the ideas of their art works on other art works or artists, but they also developed their own styles.

Goya became a pioneer of new artistic tendencies, which were commonly used in the 19th century. With the artworks he made in his 60 years of creating art, Goya represented the reaction against previous conceptions of art, a new form of expression.

Another great artist who showed individuality is Joseph Mallord William Turner. The power of individual perception is most evident in his works.

Change in the Style of Artists:

During the eighteenth century, the rococo style was one of the most dominant. However, that changed with the Romantic Era. Through the efforts of Goya and many others, the Romantic Period showed the change from the decadent and courtly rococo styles to the vivid, detailed, and passionate artworks created by Romantic artists.

The new style of art explored the human heart, heroism of a revolutionary age, or sometimes the emotional aspects of life.

From Romanticism, rationalism and realism emerged in the later part of the nineteenth century.

Heroism

During the Romantic Period, heroism became a big thing. Heroism didn't just mean the supernatural (myths, and imaginary people); many people, like Beethoven, believed that the common man could be heroes. Artists painted this idea during the Romantic Age.

Eugene Delacroix's painting, The Lion Hunt, shows the Arabs as the heroes. The painting shows that the common man can be a hero.

Jacques-Louis David, who was Napoleon’s official artist, painted Napoleon in some of his greatest hours. (Bonaparte Crossing the St. Bernard Pass) David also painted many of the heroes of Greek mythology, and Socrates, another hero, in The Death of Socrates.

Rococo (1700 - 1760)

    A term "Rococo" describes a movement in the arts in the early 18th century, in France. Rococo has been born from the Baroque era, during the age of Enlightenment. That was a time when new ideas about human existence were introduced and Rococo art is the visual representation of the optimism people felt in response to that.

   The word "rococo" is derived from "rocaille", meaning "rock work" or "shell work," a favorite motif of the time. It stresses purely ornamental, light, casual, irregular design.

   Rococo is seen both as the climax and fall of Baroque art. After the heavy works created in the Baroque style artists were ready for a change. The Rococo manner was a reaction against the"grand manner" of art identified with the baroque formality and rigidity of court life. The movement toward a lighter, more charming manner began in French architectural decoration at the end of Louis XIV's reign (d.1715) and quickly spread across Europe. During the regency of Duke of Orleans, regent for the minor heir Louis XV, the formalities of the court gave way to a more casual and intimate atmosphere. Rococo art portrayed a world of artificiality, make-believe, and game-playing. Although less formal, it was essentially an art of the aristocracy and emphasized what seem now to have been the unreflective and indulgent lifestyles of the aristocracy rather than piety, morality, self-discipline, reason, and heroism (all of which can be found in the baroque).

   The Rococo style is characterized by pastel colors, gracefully delicate curving forms, fanciful figures, and a lighthearted mood (visually and physically). The essence of Rococo art is light. Extreme highlights are placed on the subject matter and the overall work is light in color, effect, and emotion. Artists paid special attention to fine detail. Form is characterized by delicacy of color, dynamic compositions, and atmospheric effects.

   Antoine Watteau is considered to be one of the first Rococo painters. He often created asymmetrical compositions. This type of aesthetic balance became not only an important part of Rococo art, but of design in general.

   Eventually the Rococo art was replaced by the more serious style, Neoclassicism. Critics condemned it as "tasteless, frivolous, and symbolic of a corrupt society".

Artist : Antoine Watteau (watteau17.jpg)

Painting : Embarkation for Cythera

 Artist : Antoine Watteau (watteau14.jpg)

Painting : Gilles as Pierrot 

Main Representatives 

In France:

Antoine Watteau

Jean-Honore Fragonard

Charles Joseph Natoire

Francois Boucher

Jean-Baptiste Greuze

Jacques Charlier

Carle Andrea van Loo

Louis-Michel van Loo

 In England:

Thomas Gainsborough

Sir Joshua Reynolds

In Italy:

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo