Hogarth, Wright, Greuze, Fuseli

Genre Painting: satire “Aren’t the upper classes stupid?”

William Hogarth

William Hogarth A Scene from the Beggar’s Opera1728-1729 oil on canvas

William HogarthMarriage à la Mode

1743 oil on canvas

William HogarthMarriage à la Mode

1743 oil on canvas

William HogarthAn Election Entertainment

1754 oil on canvas

Genre Painting:“Science is really, really cool!”

Joseph Wright

Joseph Wright A Philosopher Lecturing with a Mechanical Planetary1766 oil on canvas

Joseph Wright An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump 1768 oil on canvas 6’ x 8’

Genre Painting: drame bourgeois “middle-class drama”

Jean-Baptiste Greuze

Jean-Baptiste Greuze Filial Piety1763 oil on canvas

Jean-Baptiste Greuze L'Accordée de Village1763 oil on canvas

Jean-Baptiste Greuze The Father's Curse: The Ungrateful Son 1777 oil on canvas

Jean-Baptiste Greuze The Father's Curse: The Son Punished1777 oil on canvas

Jean-Honoré Fragonard The Stolen Kiss1787-89 oil on canvas

Jean-Baptiste Greuze Septimius Severus and Caracalla1769 oil on canvas

Romanticism

John Henry Fuseli

Romanticism is a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe.

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, and was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but can be detected even in changed attitudes towards children and education.

The movement validated strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, terror, horror and awe—especially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities, both new aesthetic categories.

Romanticism

In European painting, led by a new generation of the French school, the Romantic sensibility contrasted with the neoclassicism being taught in the academies. In a revived clash between color and design, the expressiveness of color, as in works of Turner, Gericault, and Delacroix, was emphasized in the new prominence of the brushstroke and impasto and in the artist's free handling of paint, which tended to be repressed in neoclassicism under a self-effacing finish.

In literature—among others—Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and John Keats.

Romanticism

John Henry Fuseli The Nightmare 1781 oil on canvas

John Henry Fuseli The Shepherd’s Dream 1793 oil on canvas

John Henry Fuseli Silence 1799-1801 oil on canvas

John Henry Fuseli Lady MacBeth 1784 oil on canvas

John Henry Fuseli The Artist Moved by the Grandeur of Antique Fragments1778-79 red chalk on sepia wash