The Art World of the 1830s

The art world of the 1830s was at the height of the Romantic movement. The nature of society was also changing, at different rates in different places. Britain was well into the Industrial Revolution, which was also having an effect in the United States. The way people saw themselves and their relationship to the world had changed considerably in the previous century with the various revolutions that had brought democracy to America and to Europe, and democratizing influences were also felt in the art world with more art for the masses and less reliance on patronage by the wealthy or the titled.

The Romantic movement affected all the arts and was a break from the classical traditions that preceded it. Changes in the styles of artistic expression throughout history have reflected not only developments in materials and shifting patters within the art world itself but have also reflected changing circumstances in society at large, including political changes, historical movements, altered social conditions, changed economic circumstances, shifts in religious thinking, and so on. In the nineteenth century, the prevailing artistic style for the first part of the century was romanticism, an art based on a form of "disorder," but a disorder seen as the emblem of the unfettered processes of the imagination:

In historical terms, fully developed Romanticism is the successor to the cults of nature and of feeling which sprang up in the course of the eighteenth century. . . Ro

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e as worthy subjects. Daumier was dedicated to being an artist of his time. His superb draftsmanship and style were based on older art. In the nineteenth century, there was an increase in the practice on the part of artists of adapting pictorial designs previously reserved for religious themes to the service of more mundane values, in part a refection of the growing secularization of religion and also producing a new and viable spiritual art at the same time. This is reflected in the works of Daumier and Gustave Courbet, among others (Elsen, 1967, 279). There was also a counter-revolution taking place in the 1830s that would gain power as the century progressed. It was under the leadership of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, a man with nothing revolutionary in his nature and whose influence on art was ultraconservative. He was the head of the Academy, and under his tutelage that body began to turn out paintings that were precise, colorless, and cold. His own works showed an understanding of subtlety that his own followers never grasped, though he also decried the use of color. Delacroix was the leader of the opposite movement, and as such he and his followers were the first rebels against art dictatorship and the Academic

Category: Arts - T