Revolution in German and French

German and Scandinavian Romantic

After the magnificent originality of Baroque decorators had worked with brilliant virtuosity in an international tradition.

Runge

The artist's parents and his children, 1806

Philipp Otto Runge's (1777-1810) work is overtly dense with symbolism. His portraits are perhaps his most successful surviving works: that of his parents, whose wooden vigor in the relentless light ins contrasted with the dewy but also merciless innocence of the grandchildren, is one of the most extraordinary and monumental portraits of the early nineteenth century.

The cool light mercilessly exposes the figures--the suspicious gaze of the old couple, stiffened by age, contrasts with the children's pure absorption with the bright flowers.

Andrei Rublev The Holy Trinity, c. 1411

Delacroix was the one who painted the spirit of revolution. His voyage to North Africa in 1832 provided him with a source of exotic sense of image and of glowing color. The impact is summarized in his small, famous and influential painting, Woman of Algiers. The floating color and light creates a half-asleep, drowsy effect.

"The Valpinon Bather", 1808

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) is famous for his female nudes.

The effect of suspension of time and gravity is achieve by the diffusion of light, the insistent verticals and the refined contour of the sitter's untroubled repose.

The angelus, 1855-57

Jean-Francois Millet (1841-75) turned his attention to subjects drawn from the life of the peasantry. In his densely-worked oils, featuring a single peasant, or a small group, at work in a dimly defined apprently infinite landscape. Millet created a rural, peasant version of heroic painting.

The religious element is now more explicit. Warm color of sunset strengthen the sentiment, casting solemnity to the prayer bathing in the light.

Manet suppressed the traditional rendering of form in chiaroscuro, with modeling by gradation of tone, in favor of a method that seemed, at first, flat--in fact it caught the effect of unfiltered daylight, simplifying detail, sharpening silhouettes and kindling color.

"Le Deeuner sur l'Herbe" (The picnic), 1863

A sun-dappled, relaxed bourgeois picnic treated on the heroic scale, life-size, painted from nature, with the interest shifting markedly to the effects of light.