ART UNDER NAPOLEON
❚As Emperor of the French from 1804 to 1815, Napoleon embraced the Neoclassical style in order
to associate his regime with the empire of ancient Rome. Napoleon chose Jacques-Louis David as
First Painter of the Empire. Roman temples were the models for La Madeleine in Paris, which Pierre
Vignon built as a temple of glory for France’s imperial armies.
❚Napoleon’s favorite sculptor was Antonio Canova, who carved marble Neoclassical portraits of the
imperial family, including Napoleon’s sister, Pauline Borghese, in the guise of Venus.
❚The beginning of a break from Neoclassicism can already be seen in the work of some of David’s
students, including Gros, Girodet-Trioson, and Ingres, all of whom painted some exotic subjects
that reflect Romantic taste.
ROMANTICISM
❚The roots of Romanticism are in the 18th century, but usually the term more narrowly denotes the
artistic movement that flourished from 1800 to 1840, between Neoclassicism and Realism. Romantic
artists gave precedence to feeling and imagination over Enlightenment reason. Romantic painters
explored the exotic, erotic, and fantastic in their art. In Spain, Francisco Goya’s Caprichosseries
celebrated the unleashing of imagination, emotions, and even nightmares.
❚In France, Eugène Delacroix led the way in depicting Romantic narratives set in faraway places and
distant times. He set his colorful Death of Sardanapalusin ancient Assyria.
❚Romantic painters often chose landscapes as an ideal subject to express the Romantic theme of the
soul unified with the natural world. Masters of the transcendental landscape include Friedrich in
Germany, Constable and Turner in England, and Cole, Bierstadt, and Church in the United States.
REALISM
❚Realism developed as an artistic movement in mid-19th-century France. Its leading proponent was
Gustave Courbet, whose paintings of menial labor and ordinary people exemplify his belief that
painters should depict only their own time and place. Honoré Daumier boldly confronted authority
with his satirical lithographs commenting on the plight of the working classes. Édouard Manet
shocked the public with his paintings featuring promiscuous women and rough brush strokes,
which emphasized the flatness of the painting surface, paving the way for modern abstract art.
❚American Realists include Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and John Singer Sargent. Eakins’s
painting of surgery in progress was too brutally realistic for the Philadelphia art jury that rejected it.
ARCHITECTURE
❚Territorial expansion, the Romantic interest in exotic locales and earlier eras, and nationalistic pride
led to the revival in the 19th century of older architectural styles, especially the Gothic.
❚By the middle of the century, many architects had already abandoned sentimental and Romantic
designs from the past in favor of exploring the possibilities of cast-iron construction, as in Henri
Labrouste’s Sainte-Geneviève Library in Paris and Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace in London.
PHOTOGRAPHY
❚In 1839, Daguerre in Paris and Talbot in London invented the first practical photographic processes.
In 1862, a French court formally recognized photography as an art form subject to copyright pro-
tection. Many of the earliest photographers, including Nadar and Cameron, specialized in portrait
photography, but others, including Hawes, Southworth, and O’Sullivan in the United States, quickly
realized the documentary power of the new medium. Muybridge’s sequential photos of human and
animal motion were the forerunners of the modern cinema.
THE BIG PICTURE
EUROPE AND AMERICA,
1800 TO 1870
Canova, Pauline Borghese
as Venus, 1808Delacroix, Death of Sardanapalus,
1827Courbet, The Stone Breakers, 1849Labrouste, Bibliothèque
Sainte-Geneviève, Paris, 1843–1850O’Sullivan, A Harvest of Death, 1863