Romanticism emerged in Europe between 1775-1830 in response to industrialization and rise of democratic ideals. It valued emotion, nature, medievalism, individualism and nationalism. Major European Romantic artists and philosophers included Goethe, Wordsworth, and Kant. American Romanticism was influenced by these ideals and emerged through Transcendentalism and the Hudson River School of landscape painting. Famous American Romantic artists included Copley, Leutze, Hicks, Stuart, and Bierstadt who depicted American landscapes, history, and ideals of individualism.

1. ROMANTICISM
1775 – 1830:
• American Revolution
• emergence of the United States
• French Revolution
• Napoleon
• spread of democratic and egalitarian ideals
throughout Europe and America
• Sentiment of national identity
• Industrial revolution

2. (1)
• In contrast to the rational order, regularity, and
generalization that were said to characterize
neoclassical art, the Romantic, largely
suggested the irregular, picturesque, wild, and
distant as it was associated with the literature
and art of the middle ages (gothic). [ . . .] it was
also concerned, in a new and vital way, with the
concrete and directly familiar.
• (2) Idealistic, empirical, historical and
psychological

3. In 1798 the word “Romantic” was used by the German
critics Friedrich and August Wilhelm von Schlegel
• The Romantic refuses to recognize
restraints in subject matter or form and so
is free to represent the abnormal,
grotesque, and monstrous and to mingle
standpoints, genres, modes of expression
( such as philosophy and poetry) and
even the separate arts in a single work.

4. (9)
• Friedrich Von Schiller: the poet in the modern world does
not depict nature for its own sake but to convey the
“ideal.”
• Étalage du moi =display of the self” = in a teleological sense )
• Use of names for the emotions, together with
descriptions of emotional states, and a tendency through
not so much to sequence of logical argument or of
narration but rather the evolution and turn of feeling.

5. Immanuel Kant / from Critique of Judgment (1790)
(504) Judgment in general is the ability to think
the particular as contained under the universal.
If the universal (the rule, principle, law) is given,
then judgment, which subsumes the particular
under it, is determinative as transcendental
judgment it states a priori the conditions that
must be met for subsumption under the
universal to be possible.

6. (504)
• What is merely subjective in the presentation of
an object, i.e., what constitutes its reference to
the subject and not to the object, is its aesthetic
character; but whatever in it serves, or can be
used, to determine the object is its logical
validity. In the cognition of an object of sense
these two references [to the subject and to the
object ] occur together.
• That subjective feature of a presentation of
which cannot at all become an element of
cognition is the pleasure and displeasure
connected with that presentation.

7. European Romantics:
• Germany: Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Immanuel Kant, Johann
Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schelling
• Britain: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
William Blake, John Keats
• French: Victor Hugo and Stendhal
• Russia: Alexander Pushkin
• America: Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper,
Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, H. D. Thoreau,
R. W. Emerson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickonson,
Herman Melville

8. Influence of European Romanticism on
American Writing
• Early 19th century
• Moral enthusiasm
• Faith in the value of individualism
• Intuitive perception
• Nature as source of goodness and human society is
source of corruption
• American politics, philosophy and art
• It appealed to the revolutionary spirit, nationalism
• Breaking the ties with Puritanism, opposing Calvinism
and rationalism
• Emergence of Transcendentalism in New England

9. Transcendentalism:
• (15)German Idealism: In the philosophy of
Kant “transcendental” refers to the a priori
element in experience – that is, the way in
which the mind determines and orders its
own contents through its own laws – and
the term “transcendent” refers to ideas,
such as freedom of will, God, and
immortality that cannot be objects of
knowledge.

10. (15) Transcendentalism is the belief in the existence of a timeless realm of
being beyond the shifting, sensory world of common experience.
• Neoplatonism
• (17)Plato and Descartes:
• According to Descartes, reality is comprised of three
principles or substances – matter, mind, and God –
• Dualism of matter and mind = the real and the ideal
• (17-18) ORGANICISM: It abandons these dualisms by
conceiving the cosmos (reality) as a process rather than
as a substance, an activity in which the material world,
the mental or ideal, and the Divine mutually involve or
interpenetrate each other.

11. Romanticism in American Art
Artist :John Singleton Copley (1738 - 1815)
Painting :The Death of Major Pierson on the 6th of January of 1781

12. Artist :John Singleton Copley (copley15.jpg)
Painting :The Three Youngest Daughters of George III

13. Artist :John Singleton Copley (copley16.jpg)
Painting :Watson and the Shark

14. Artist :Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze (1907 -1954)
Painting :Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way

15. Artist :Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze (leutze9.jpg)
Painting :Washington Rallying the Troops at Monmouth

16. Artist :Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze (leutze2.jpg)
Painting :Washington Crossing the Delaware

17. Artist :Edward Hicks (1780 - 1849)
Painting :The Peaceable Kingdom

18. Artist :Edward Hicks (hicks4.jpg)
Painting :The Landing of Columbus

19. Artist :Edward Hicks (hicks5.jpg)
Painting :Penn's Treaty with the Indians

20. Artist :Gilbert Stuart (1755 - 1828)
Painting :George Washington (Athenaeum Washington),
detail

21. Artist :Gilbert Stuart (stuart11.jpg)
Painting :Miss Dick and her Cousin Miss Forster

22. The Hudson River School:
• 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...

23. Artist :Albert Bierstadt (1830 - 1902)
Painting :The Rocky Mountains, Landers Peak

24. Artist :Albert Bierstadt (bierstadt15.jpg)
Painting :Valley of the Yosemite

25. Artist :Albert Bierstadt (bierstadt14.jpg)
Painting :White Mountains, New Hampshire

26. Artist :Albert Bierstadt (bierstadt11.jpg)
Painting :Sunlight and Shadow