From the Age of Reason to the Rise of Romanticism

• Watch out Enlightenment, here comes a “spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion!!!” And it’s headed right your way!!

From Reason to Romanticism

• approx. 1820 (another shift in values, styles)• Independent nation…check. Independent

government…check. Cultural independence? Artistic independence? Umm…we’ve gotta get on that…

• What does this new nation need in order to establish itself culturally?– its own art– its own history– its own mythology/folklore

• Well, what do we have that separates us from Europe? And can we base our “distinctly American” art on that? What’s “distinctly American”?

In Your Notebook…

Compare and contrast the following paintings, one Neoclassical and the other Romantic: – What do they have in common? – How are they different? – Look at each painting as a window

into a whole world. What kind of world does each painting reveal?

John Singleton Copley, Portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Mifflin, 1773 Asher B. Durand, Kindred Spirits, 1849

Thomas ColeFalls of

Kaaterskill (1826)

Thomas ColeThe Oxbow (1836)

Looking Down on Yosemite Valley. Albert Bierstadt, 1865

Landscape Scene from Thanatopsis. Durand, 1850

Frederic ChurchTwilight in the Wilderness

(1860)

Thomas DoughtyIn Nature’s Wonderland (1835)