Compare and contrast two works from two different movements in this module: realism, Romanticism, Impressionism, NeoClassicism or another that you are interested in. Think about these artists in relat

European and American Art in the 18th and 19th Centuries

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Neoclassicism and Romanticism

Romanticism

Romanticism, fueled by the French Revolution, was a reaction to the scientific rationalism and classicism of the Age of Enlightenment.

Learning Objectives

Discuss the political and theoretical foundations of Romanticism

Key Takeaways

Key Points

• The ideals of the French Revolution created the context from which both Romanticism and the Counter- Enlightenment emerged.

• Romanticism was a revolt against the aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and also a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature.

• Romanticism legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority, which permitted freedom from classical notions of form in art.

• The Industrial Revolution also influenced Romanticism, which was in part about escaping from modern realities.

• Romanticism was also influenced by Sturm und Drang, a German Counter-Enlightenment movement that emphasized subjectivity and intense emotion.

Key Terms

• Romanticism: 18th century artistic and intellectual movement that stressed emotion, freedom, and individual imagination.

• Sturm und Drang: “Storm and Stress,” a German proto-romantic movement signifying turmoil and emotional intensity.

• Counter-Enlightenment: A movement that arose primarily in late 18th and early 19th century Germany against the rationalism, universalism, and empiricism commonly associated with the Enlightenment.

Overview

Romanticism was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century. In most areas the movement was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 CE to 1840 CE. Romanticism reached beyond the rational and Classicist ideal models to elevate a revived medievalism.

The Influence of the French Revolution

Though influenced by other artistic and intellectual movements, the ideologies and events of the French Revolution created the primary context from which both Romanticism and the Counter-Enlightenment emerged. Upholding the ideals of the Revolution, Romanticism was a revolt against the aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and also a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature. Romanticism elevated the achievements of what it perceived as heroic individualists and artists, whose pioneering examples would elevate society. It also legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority, which permitted freedom from classical notions of form in art.

The Passion of the German Sturm und Drang Movement

Romanticism was also inspired by the German Sturm und Drang movement (Storm and Stress), which prized intuition and emotion over Enlightenment rationalism. This proto-romantic movement was centered on literature and music, but also influenced the visual arts. The movement emphasized individual subjectivity. Extremes of emotion were given free expression in reaction to the perceived constraints of rationalism imposed by the Enlightenment and associated aesthetic movements.

Sturm und Drang in the visual arts can be witnessed in paintings of storms and shipwrecks showing the terror and irrational destruction wrought by nature. These pre-romantic works were fashionable in Germany from the 1760s on through the 1780s, illustrating a public audience for emotionally charged artwork. Additionally, disturbing visions and portrayals of nightmares were gaining an audience in Germany as evidenced by Goethe’s possession and admiration of paintings by Fuseli, which were said to be capable of “giving the viewer a good fright.” Notable artists included Joseph Vernet, Caspar Wolf, Philip James de Loutherbourg, and Henry Fuseli.

The Shipwreck by Claude Joseph Vernet, 1759: Vernet participated in the proto-Romantic Sturm und Drang movement.

The Industrial Revolution also had an influence on Romanticism, which was in part an escape from modern realities of population growth, urban sprawl, and industrialism. Indeed, in the second half of the 19th century, “Realism” was offered as a polarized opposite to Romanticism.

Painting in the Romantic Period

Romanticism was a prevalent artistic movement in Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries.

Learning Objectives

Discuss Romanticism as seen in the paintings from this period

Key Takeaways

Key Points

• ” History painting,” traditionally referred to technically difficult narrative paintings of multiple subjects, but became more frequently focused on recent historical events.

• Gericault and Delacroix were leaders of French romantic painting, and both produced iconic history paintings.

• Ingres, though firmly committed to Neoclassical values, is seen as expressing the Romantic spirit of the times.

• The Spanish artist Francisco Goya is considered perhaps the greatest painter of the Romantic period, though he did not necessarily self-identify with the movement; his oeuvre reflects the integration of many styles.

• The German variety of Romanticism notably valued wit, humor, and beauty.

Key Terms

• Romanticism: 18th century artistic and intellectual movement that stressed emotion, freedom, and individual imagination.

• Neoclassicism: The name given to Western movements in the decorative and visual arts, literature, theater, music, and architecture that draw inspiration from the “classical” art and culture of Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome.

• history painting: A a genre in painting defined by its subject matter rather than artistic style. These paintings usually depict a moment in a narrative story, rather than a specific and static subject.

Romanticism

While the arrival of Romanticism in French art was delayed by the hold of Neoclassicism on the academies, it became increasingly popular during the Napoleonic period. Its initial form was the history paintings that acted as propaganda for the new regime. The key generation of French Romantics born between 1795–1805, in the words of Alfred de Vigny, had been “conceived between battles, attended school to the rolling of drums.” The French Revolution (1789–1799) followed by the Napoleonic Wars until 1815, meant that war, and the attending political and social turmoil that went along with them, served as the background for Romanticism.

History Painting

Since the Renaissance, history painting was considered among the highest and most difficult forms of art. History painting is defined by its subject matter rather than artistic style. History paintings usually depict a moment in a narrative story rather than a specific and static subject. In the Romantic period, history painting was extremely popular and increasingly came to refer to the depiction of historical scenes, rather than those from religion or mythology.

French Romanticism

This generation of the French school developed personal Romantic styles while still concentrating on history painting with a political message. Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa of 1821 remains the greatest achievement of the Romantic history painting, which in its day had a powerful anti-government message.

The Raft of the Medusa by Jean Louis Theodore Gericault, 1818–21: This painting is regarded as one of the greatest Romantic era paintings.

Ingres

Profoundly respectful of the past, Ingres assumed the role of a guardian of academic orthodoxy against the ascendant Romantic style represented by his nemesis Eugène Delacroix. He described himself as a “conservator of good doctrine, and not an innovator.” Nevertheless, modern opinion has tended to regard Ingres and the other Neoclassicists of his era as embodying the Romantic spirit of his time, while his expressive distortions of form and space make him an important precursor of modern art.

Achilles Receiving the Envoys of Agamemnon by Ingres, 1801: Ingres, though firmly committed to Neoclassical values, is seen as expressing the Romantic spirit of the times.

Delacroix

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) had great success at the Salon with works like The Barque of Dante (1822), The Massacre at Chios (1824) and Death of Sardanapalus (1827). Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830) remains, with The Medusa, one of the best known works of French Romantic painting. Both of these works reflected current events and appealed to public sentiment.

Liberty Leading the People, by Delacroix, 1830: The history paintings of Eugene Delacroix epitomized the Romantic period.

Goya

Spanish painter Francisco Goya is today generally regarded as the greatest painter of the Romantic period. However, in many ways he remained wedded to the classicism and realism of his training. More than any other artist of the period, Goya exemplified the Romantic expression of the artist’s feelings and his personal imaginative world. He also shared with many of the Romantic painters a more free handling of paint, emphasized in the new prominence of the brushstroke and impasto, which tended to be repressed in neoclassicism under a self-effacing finish. Goya’s work is renowned for its expressive line, color, and brushwork as well as its distinct subversive commentary.

The Milkmaid of Bordeaux by Goya, ca. 1825–1827: Though he worked in a variety of styles, Goya is remembered as perhaps the greatest painter of the Romantic period.

German Romanticism

Compared to English Romanticism, German Romanticism developed relatively late, and, in the early years, coincided with Weimar Classicism (1772–1805). In contrast to the seriousness of English Romanticism, the German variety of Romanticism notably valued wit, humor, and beauty.

The early German romantics strove to create a new synthesis of art, philosophy, and science, largely by viewing the Middle Ages as a simpler period of integrated culture, however, the German romantics became aware of the tenuousness of the cultural unity they sought. Late-stage German Romanticism emphasized the tension between the daily world and the irrational and supernatural projections of creative genius. Key painters in the German Romantic tradition include Joseph Anton Koch, Adrian Ludwig Richter, Otto Reinhold Jacobi, and Philipp Otto Runge among others.

The Hulsenbeck Children by Phillip Otto Runge, oil on canvas: Runge was a well-known German Romantic painter.

Landscape Painting in the Romantic Period

Landscape painting in Europe and America greatly increased in prominence during the 18th and particularly the 19th century.

Learning Objectives

Describe the emergence of landscape painting in France, England, Holland, and the United States during the years of the Enlightenment

Key Takeaways

Key Points

• The decline of explicitly religious works, a result of the Protestant Reformation, contributed to the rise in the popularity of landscapes.

• English painters, working in the Romantic tradition, became well known for watercolor landscapes in the 18th century.

• Artists in the Barbizon School brought landscape painting to prominence in France, and were inspired by English landscape artist John Constable. The Barbizon school was an important precursor to Impressionism.

• The glorified depiction of a nation’s natural wonders, and the development of a distinct national style, were both ways in which nationalism influenced landscape painting in Europe and America.

• The Hudson River School was the most influential landscape art movement in 19th century America.

Key Terms

• Romanticism: 18th century artistic and intellectual movement that stressed emotion, freedom, and individual imagination

• plein air: En plein air is a French expression that means “in the open air,” and refers to the act of painting outdoors. In the mid-19th century, working in natural light became particularly important to the Barbizon School and Impressionism.

Dutch and English Landscape Painting

Landscape painting depicts natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests, in which the main subject is typically a wide view and the elements are arranged into a coherent composition. During the Dutch Golden Age of painting of the 17th century, this type of painting greatly increased in popularity, and many artists specialized in the genre. In particular, painters of this era were known for developing extremely subtle, realist techniques of depicting light and weather. The popularity of landscape painting in this region, during this time, was in part a reflection of the virtual disappearance of religious art in the Netherlands, which was then a Calvinist society. In the 18th and 19th centuries, religious painting declined across all of Europe, and the movement of Romanticism spread, both of which provided important historical ingredients for landscape painting to ascend to a more prominent place in art.

In England, landscapes had initially only been painted as the backgrounds for portraits, and typically portrayed the parks or estates of a landowner. This changed as a result of Anthony van Dyck, who, along with other Flemish artists living in England, began a national tradition. In the 18th century, watercolor painting, mostly of landscapes, became an English speciality. The nation had both a buoyant market for professional works of this variety, and a large number of amateur painters. By the beginning of the 19th century, the most highly regarded English artists were all, for the most part, dedicated landscapists, including John Constable, J.M.W. Turner, and Samuel Palmer.

The Hay Wain by John Constable, 1821: Constable was a popular English Romantic Painter.

French Landscape Painting

French painters were slower to develop an interest in landscapes, but in 1824, the Salon de Paris exhibited the works of John Constable, an extremely talented English landscape painter. His rural scenes influenced some of the younger French artists of the time, moving them to abandon formalism and to draw inspiration directly from nature. During the revolutions of 1848, artists gathered in Barbizon to follow Constable’s ideas, making nature the subject of their paintings. They formed what is referred to as the Barbizon School.

During the late 1860s, the Barbizon painters attracted the attention of a younger generation of French artists studying in Paris. Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille among others, practiced plein air painting and developed what would later be called Impressionism, an extremely influential movement.

In Europe, as John Ruskin noted, and Sir Kenneth Clark confirmed, landscape painting was the “chief artistic creation of the 19th century,” and “the dominant art.” As a result, in the times that followed, it became common for people to “assume that the appreciation of natural beauty and the painting of landscape was a normal and enduring part of our spiritual activity.”

Nationalism in Landscape Painting

Nationalism has been implicated in the popularity of 17th century Dutch landscapes, and in the 19th century, when other nations, such as England and France, attempted to develop distinctive national schools of their own. Painters involved in these movements often attempted to express the unique nature of the landscape of their homeland.

The Hudson River School

In the United States, a similar movement, called the Hudson River School, emerged in the 19th century and quickly became one of the most distinctive worldwide purveyors of landscape pieces. American painters in this movement created works of mammoth scale in an attempt to capture the epic size and scope of the landscapes that inspired them. The work of Thomas Cole, the school’s generally acknowledged founder, seemed to emanate from a similar philosophical position as that of European landscape artists. Both championed, from a position of secular faith, the spiritual benefits that could be gained from contemplating nature. Some of the later Hudson River School artists, such as Albert Bierstadt, created less comforting works that placed a greater emphasis (with a great deal of Romantic exaggeration) on the raw, terrifying power of nature.

The Oxbow by Thomas Cole, 1836: Thomas Cole was a founding member of the pioneering Hudson School, the most influential landscape art movement in 19th century America.

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Dr Dinah Roe introduces the unique band of artists, poets and designers known as the Pre-Raphaelites, charting their formation and evolution from the 1850s to the late 19th century.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's painting La Ghirlandata (1873) depicts women playing musical instruments, as many of his paintings did.

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The Pre-Raphaelites were a loose and baggy collective of Victorian poets, painters, illustrators and designers whose tenure lasted from 1848 to roughly the turn of the century. Drawing inspiration from visual art and literature, their work privileged atmosphere and mood over narrative, focusing on medieval subjects, artistic introspection, female beauty, sexual yearning and altered states of consciousness. In defiant opposition to the utilitarian ethos that formed the dominant ideology of the mid-century, the Pre-Raphaelites helped to popularise the notion of ‘art for art’s sake’. Generally devoid of the political edge that characterised much Victorian art and literature, Pre-Raphaelite work nevertheless incorporated elements of 19th-century realism in its attention to detail and in its close observation of the natural world.

Driven by, as Oscar Wilde put it, ‘three things the English public never forgives: youth, power and enthusiasm’, Pre-Raphaelitism found itself paradoxically poised between nostalgia for the past and excitement about the future.[1] 19th-century disagreements over whether their art was forward-thinking or retrogressive set a precedent for current critical debates about the extent to which their work should be considered ‘avant-garde’.

As typical of many Pre-Raphaelite artworks, William Holman Hunt's The Awakening Conscience (1853) displays meticulous attention to detail and is full of symbolism.

Pre-Raphaelitism began in 1848 when a group of seven young artists banded together against what they felt was an artificial and mannered approach to painting taught at London’s Royal Academy of Arts. They called themselves the ‘Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’ (PRB), a name that alluded to their preference for late medieval and early Renaissance art that came ‘before Raphael’. The painters were: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, James Collinson and Frederic George Stephens. The non-painters were sculptor Thomas Woolner and Brotherhood secretary William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s brother. Inspired by the work of old masters such as Van Eyck, Memling, Mantegna, Giotto and Fra Angelico, and following a programme of ‘truth to nature’, the artists advocated a return to the simplicity and sincerity of subject and style found in an earlier age. Their aims were vague and contradictory, even paradoxical, which was only to be expected from a youthful movement made up of strong-minded individuals who sought to modernise art by reviving the practices of the Middle Ages.

The Blue Closet (1857) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti is a prime example of the Pre-Raphaelites's use of Medieval imagery.

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Characterised by flattened perspective, sharp outlines, bright colours and close attention to detail that flouted classical conventions of symmetry, proportion and carefully controlled chiaroscuro, early PRB paintings of religious subjects such as Hunt’s A Converted British Family’, Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents and Rossetti’s Ecce Ancilla Domini (1850) shocked critics with a hyper-realism perceived to be at odds with the sacred events portrayed. The 1850 Royal Academy Exhibition inaugurated what would remain an antagonistic relationship between establishment critics and the Pre-Raphaelites. Critics were particularly dismayed at the hints of Tractarianism and Romishness[2] they detected in the detailed, ecclesiastic symbolism of Millais’ picture. They were further horrified by the painter’s blasphemous depiction of the Christ child as a red-headed member of an unidealised labouring-class family. Both Hunt’s and Millais’s paintings hinted at the breakdown of the social order, a worrying subject during a period where recent revolutions in Europe threatened to spread to Britain.

John Everett Millais's Christ in the House of His Parents (1849-50) shocked critics when it was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1850.

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Like Millais's Christ in the House of His Parents, Ecce Ancilla Domini (1850) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti provoked strong opinions from critics for its depiction of a religious subject. His sister, the poet Christina Rossetti, was the model for Mary, right.

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Though the Brotherhood was vilified in the press by such notables as Charles Dickens, who detected in Millais’s painting ‘the lowest depths of what is mean, odious, repulsive and revolting’[3], from 1851, the painters were vigorously defended by critic and Pre-Raphaelite patron John Ruskin, from whose Modern Painters I & II (1843, 1846) Hunt later claimed that the group had derived its ideas about the importance of truthfully representing nature.

A damning review of the Pre-Raphaelites’s artworks on display at the 1850 Royal Academy exhibition.

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Literature was always as important as fine art to the Pre-Raphaelites; their paintings are often inspired by subjects from the bible, medieval romances, Arthurian legends, Ovid, Chaucer and Shakespeare. However, it is in their relationship to contemporary poetry that their avant-garde spirit is indisputably evident. In 1848, Rossetti and Holman Hunt drew up a list of ‘Immortals’, or artistic heroes, which included not only canonical writers such as Homer, Dante Alighieri and Boccaccio, but also recent predecessors and contemporaries such as Byron, Keats, Shelley, Longfellow, Emerson, Poe, Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, Robert Browning and Thackeray.

Ophelia (1851-52) by John Everett Millais, inspired by Shakespeare's Hamlet. Shakespeare was admired by the Pre-Raphaelites and was on their list of ‘Immortals’.

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The Pre-Raphaelite passion for modern writing was reflected in the PRB journal The Germ (1850), which contained not only pictures, but also reviews, essays and original poetry. Interested in the beauty and sound of language, Pre-Raphaelite verse experimented with forms such as the ballad, lyric and dramatic monologue. The Germ only survived for four issues, but this experimental periodical is an important forerunner of the Modernist ‘little magazine’. Its eagerness to explore the interactions between words and images set a precedent for subsequent high-profile Pre-Raphaelite projects; Rossetti’s, Millais’s and Hunt’s illustrations for an edition of Tennyson’s poems brought a collaborative spirit and a new respectability to the commercial art of book illustration.[4]

Front cover of Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ, 1850, which set out the group’s vision and included art, poetry and essays.

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William Holman Hunt’s illustration to ‘The Lady of Shalott’ from the Moxon edition of Tennyson’s Poems, 1857. Hunt later turned the image into a painting.

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Though its goals were ‘serious and heartfelt’, the PRB was founded in a spirit of waggish male camaraderie which expressed itself in pranks, late-night smoking sessions and midnight jaunts around London’s streets and pleasure gardens. Yet the formative female presence in the group’s early years should not be overlooked. Artists’ model and Rossetti’s wife Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal not only posed for many Pre-Raphaelite works, but also produced them herself. Patronised by Ruskin, she painted, drew and wrote poetry. Other women artists associated with the Pre-Raphaelites include: photographer Julia Margaret Cameron and painters Rosa Brett, Barbara Leigh Smith, Anna Mary Howitt, and Marie Spartali Stillman. Significant Pre-Raphaelite female models include: Annie Miller, Fanny Cornforth, Jane Morris and Marie Zambaco, among others. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sister Christina was the only woman to publish with the group, contributing poems to The Germ (1850). Her sonnet, ‘In an Artist’s Studio’ (1856) sounded a prescient note of caution about the dangers of Pre-Raphaelite worship of the female muse. Christina Rossetti would become one of the greatest poets of her age.

Manuscript copy of ‘In an Artist’s Studio’ by Christina Rossetti, copied into one of her notebooks, 1856. A comment on the female muse, the poem remained unpublished during her lifetime.

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Pre-Raphaelitism survived the Brotherhood’s dissolution in the early 1850s, resurfacing in 1857 when Oxford undergraduates William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones teamed up with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and painters Arthur Hughes, Valentine Prinsep and others to decorate the Oxford Union debating chamber with Arthurian murals. In London, Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Ruskin, Prinsep and painter Ford Madox Brown taught art classes at the Working Men’s College, a Christian Socialist institution that sought to give working class men access to a liberal education. These adventures put the wind back in the sails of the Pre-Raphaelite movement; in 1861, Ford Madox Brown and architect Philip Webb (among others) joined Morris, Burne-Jones and Rossetti in founding a decorative arts firm which would become Morris & Co. As a protest against mass-production in the industrial era, the firm’s designers revived hand-crafting and old techniques in order to emphasise the unique qualities and the beauty of natural materials, inaugurating the Arts and Crafts Movement.

Important literary developments of this period included a volume of William Morris’s poems, The Defence of Guenevere (1858), and George Meredith’s Modern Love (1862), a scandalous sonnet sequence about marital breakdown. Christina Rossetti’s poetry collection, Goblin Market (1862), was the first unqualified Pre-Raphaelite literary success. Illustrated by her brother Dante Gabriel in a style that would become widely imitated, it was also a landmark publication in terms of Victorian book illustration. Critical reaction against Algernon Charles Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads 1866, whose subjects included necrophilia, sado-masochism and blasphemy, caused the publisher to withdraw the volume. Championed first by the Pre-Raphaelites and later by the Aesthetes of the fin-de-siècle, Swinburne’s controversial ideas about poetry’s purpose evolved into an aesthetic philosophy that elevated artistic quality over moral, political or social content.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Poems, 1870 attracted the critical ire of Robert Buchanan. His excoriating review, entitled ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’, attacked Pre-Raphaelite poetry for its eroticism, medievalism and general rebellion against cultural norms.[5] The very qualities derided by Buchanan attracted influential critic Walter Pater, who took over from John Ruskin as defender of the Pre-Raphaelites. Pater’s essays praising the art and poetry of Morris and Rossetti would become seminal works of Aestheticism. They were reprinted in various versions and editions from 1868 to the late 1880s, including Appreciations: With An Essay on Style (1889). Proto-aesthetic qualities were also evident in Pre-Raphaelite paintings of the 1870s and 1880s which featured striking, sensual figures in narratively ambiguous situations. Examples include Rossetti’s and Astarte Syriaca (1877) and The Day-Dream (1880) and Burne-Jones’s Laus Veneris (1875) and The Golden Stairs (1880), works which anticipated Symbolist art.

During the 1880s, the Arts and Crafts Movement’s celebration of natural forms, artisanal craftsmanship and collaboration informed Morris’s developing socialism. In publications, lectures and addresses to striking workers, he called for a social revolution, arguing that industrial capitalism had exploited labourers by alienating them from their work and from each other. In 1884 Morris founded The Socialist League and become editor of its journal, The Commonweal, where his utopian novel News from Nowhere (1890) was initially serialised. The novel imagines a post-revolutionary England that has returned to the simplicity of a pre-industrial era, where class distinctions have been abolished, and mankind has been reconnected with the natural world. Today this novel is seen as a foundational text of the environmental movement.

News from Nowhere by William Morris, 1890. Frontispiece illustration depicts a Socialist ideal of freedom, equality and fraternity across the globe.

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Examining the interactions of word, image and design remained a preoccupation of late Pre-Raphaelitism. In 1891, William Morris founded the Kelmscott Press where he designed and manufactured beautifully illustrated books. The Press’s crowning achievement was The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1896), illustrated by Edward Burne-Jones. Literary Pre-Raphaelitism found new admirers in Aesthetes and Decadents like Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Symons and Ernest Dowson. The spirit of The Germ informed magazines such as The Yellow Book (1894-7) and The Savoy (1896), publications which presented work by Yeats, Beardsley, Symons, Walter Sickert and Joseph Conrad.

Aubrey Beardsley’s cover design for magazine The Savoy, here reprinted in 1897. The Aesthetes and Decadents were strongly influenced by Pre-Raphaelitism.

Though the extraordinary amount of negative criticism they attracted (and still attract) might lead us to think otherwise, it is important to remember that the Pre-Raphaelites were not only dreamers, but also innovators. Though part of a complex and protean movement, the Pre-Raphaelites were united in their refusal to recognise boundaries between literature and fine art, their insistence on experimenting with material, form and technique, and their irrepressible, unrespectable spirit in an age that prized conformity.

[1] Oscar Wilde, ‘The English Renaissance of Art’, Essays and Lectures by Oscar Wilde (London: Methuen, 1908), p.120.

[2] Tractarianism grew out of the Oxford Movement (1833-41), which advocated, among other things, the restoration of religious rituals long abandoned by the Church of England. Its views were widely regarded as uncomfortably sympathetic to Roman Catholicism.

[3] Charles Dickens, ‘Old Lamps for New Ones’, Household Words, 12 (15 June 1850), p.12.

[4] The ‘Moxon illustrated edition’ of Tennyson’s Poems (London: Moxon, 1857).

[5] Robert Buchanan, ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr D G Rossetti’ first published in The Contemporary Review, 18 (August-November 1871).

Written byDinah Roe

Dr Dinah Roe is a Senior Lecturer in 19th century literature at Oxford Brookes University. She specialises in Victorian poetry, specifically that of the Pre-Raphaelites and is planning a book on the interactions of literary and visual arts in Pre-Raphaelite art.

The text in this article is available under the Creative Commons License.

POE

Published by Melanie on 12th October 2020

Edgar Allan Poe, one of my favourite writers, deserves more than one post. He had an extortionary and miserable life, a mysterious death, wrote detective fiction, gothic horror, gothic romance and an early form of sci-fi.

Edgar Allan Poe is a fascinating character of history and I will be returning to him again and again on this blog. But for now, let’s look at his influence on Gothic Horror.

Gothic fiction is a sub-genre of horror and has a very recognizable style. Think dark and moody scenery, bleak and hopeless, often with religious elements and a general downer on life and humanity.

It often combines the intensely realistic characters with the paranormal. Perhaps the example most know is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Edgar Allan Poe is one of the great gothic writers you have to know.

Even just a glance over Poe’s works suggests he had a preoccupation with several themes. His work tends to focus on death, insanity, guilt and is often from the murderer’s perspective.

Poe’s preoccupations were pretty standard for the time. In the Victorian era, they had a somewhat unusual relationship with death. Perhaps most markedly, people would take photographs with recently deceased family members as mementoes.

You can find a lot of these online. They’re sad and a little disturbing to a modern audience. But, back in the Victorian era, death was closer and, if not more accepted, then frequent enough that it was better endured.

And disease was naturally a big killer. There were frequent cholera outbreaks in North American and Europe. Consequently, death seemed always around the corner. And it wasn’t until 1895 that cholera was discovered to pass through water.

That fun fact was discovered by John Snow (no, not that one) and Extra Credits does a great video about it you can watch here.

Presumably, it was the frequent cholera outbreaks which likely inspired the Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death, a short story about a plague wiping out a ball held by Prince Prospero, ending on the upbeat note:

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar is one of Poe’s more interesting stories. The story is really very chilling, even to a modern reader. It’s often described as hoax fiction. In many ways, it’s the same kind of fake fiction thing you’d find randomly posted on the internet for views. Though far better written.

The narrator claims to be giving a true account of his actions, which the public had started gossiping about. A student of mesmerism, the narrator is interested in what would happen if someone was mesmerised at the moment of death. Victorians had too much free time, apparently.

After finding out a friend of his, Ernest Valdemar is dying of phthisis (tuberculosis), he asks him if he can perform the mesmerism. The experiment goes ahead.

What follows is a dead creepy description of a not alive but not a dead man begging to be allowed to pass on. When the mesmerism is lifted, he dies in a pretty gruesome and spectacular way.

The final paragraph, and the one that everyone quotes, is not for the squeamish.

…within the space of a single minute, or even less, shrunk –crumbled –absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome –of detestable putridity.

As incredible as it sounds, may readers took the story as a scientific report. It’s important to remember that mesmerism was terribly in fashion in this era. Many took the article as fact. George C. Eveleth, a medical student, even wrote to Poe saying: “I have strenuously held that it was true. But I tell you that I strongly suspect it for a hoax.”

Sharp man that George.

The Tell-Tale Heart

iT’s TRue! yes, i have been ill,

very ill. But why do you say that I have lost control of my mind, why do you say that I am mad? Can you not see that I have full control of my mind? Is it not clear that I am not mad? Indeed, the illness only made my mind, my feelings, my senses stronger, more powerful. My sense of hearing especially became more powerful. I could hear sounds I had never heard before. I heard sounds from heaven; and I heard sounds from hell!

Edgar Allan Poe Tell Tale Heart

Listen! Listen, and I will tell
you how it happened. You will see, you will hear how healthy my mind is.

It is impossible to say how the idea first entered my head. There was no reason for what I did. I did not hate the old man; I even loved him. He had never hurt me. I did not want his money. I think it was his eye. His eye was like the eye of a vulture, the eye of one of those terrible birds that watch and wait while an animal dies, and then fall upon the dead body and pull it to pieces to eat it. When the old man looked at me with his vulture eye a cold feeling went up and down my

Edgar Allan Poe: Storyteller

back; even my blood became cold. And so, I finally decided I had to kill the old man and close that eye forever!

So you think that I am mad? A madman cannot plan. But you should have seen me. During all of that week I was as friendly to the old man as I could be, and warm, and loving.

Every night about twelve o’clock I slowly opened his door. And when the door was opened wide enough I put my hand in, and then my head. In my hand I held a light covered over with a cloth so that no light showed. And I stood there quietly. Then, carefully, I lifted the cloth, just a little, so that a single, thin, small light fell across that eye. For seven nights I did this, seven long nights, every night at midnight. Always the eye was closed, so it was impossible for me to do the work. For it was not the old man I felt I had to kill; it was the eye, his Evil Eye.

And every morning I went to his room, and with a warm, friendly voice I asked him how he had slept. He could not guess that every night, just at twelve, I looked in at him as he slept.

The eighth night I was more than usually careful as I opened the door. The hands of a clock move more quickly than did my hand. Never before had I felt so strongly my own power; I was now sure of success.

The old man was lying there not dreaming that I was at his door. Suddenly he moved in his bed. You may think I became afraid. But no. The darkness in his room was thick and black. I knew he could not see the opening of the door. I continued to push the door, slowly, softly. I put in my head. I put in my hand, with the covered light. Suddenly the old man sat straight up in bed and cried, “Who’s there??!”

I stood quite still. For a whole hour I did not move. Nor did I hear him again lie down in his bed. He just sat there, listening. Then I heard a sound, a low cry of fear which escaped from the old man. Now I knew that he was sitting up in his bed, filled with fear; I knew that he knew that I was there. He did not see me there. He could not hear me there. He felt me there. Now he knew that Death was standing there.

Slowly, little by little, I lifted the cloth, until a small, small light escaped from under it to fall upon — to fall upon that vulture eye! It was open — wide, wide open, and my anger increased as it looked straight at me. I could not see the old man’s face. Only that eye, that

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trouble me no more!

Edgar Allan Poe

hard blue eye, and the blood in my body became like ice.
Have I not told you that my hearing had become unusually strong? Now I could hear a quick, low, soft sound, like the sound of a clock heard through a wall. It was the beating of the old man’s heart. I tried to stand quietly. But the sound grew louder. The old man’s fear must have been great indeed. And as the sound grew louder my anger became greater and more painful. But it was more than anger. In the quiet night, in the dark silence of the bedroom my anger became fear — for the heart was beating so loudly that I was sure some one must hear. The time had come! I rushed into the room, crying, “Die! Die!” The old man gave a loud cry of fear as I fell upon him and held the bedcovers tightly over his head. Still his heart was beating; but I smiled as I felt that success was near. For many minutes that heart continued to beat; but at last the beating stopped. The old man was dead. I took away the bedcovers and held my ear over his heart. There was no sound. Yes. He was dead! Dead as a stone. His eye would

So I am mad, you say? You should have seen how careful I was to put the body where no one could find it. First I cut off the head, then the arms and the legs. I was careful not to let a single drop of blood fall on the floor. I pulled up three of the boards that formed the floor, and put the pieces of the body there. Then I put the boards down again, carefully, so carefully that no human eye could see that they had been moved.

As I finished this work I heard that someone was at the door. It was now four o’clock in the morning, but still dark. I had no fear, however, as I went down to open the door. Three men were at the door, three officers of the

Edgar Allan Poe: Storyteller

police. One of the neighbors had heard the old man’s cry and had called the police; these three had come to ask questions and to search the house.

I asked the policemen to come in. The cry, I said, was my own, in a dream. The old man, I said, was away; he had gone to visit a friend in the country. I took them through the whole house, telling them to search it all, to search well. I led them finally into the old man’s bed- room. As if playing a game with them I asked them to sit down and talk for a while.

My easy, quiet manner made the policemen believe my story. So they sat talking with me in a friendly way. But although I answered them in the same way, I soon wished that they would go. My head hurt and there was a strange sound in my ears. I talked more, and faster. The sound became clearer. And still they sat and talked.

Suddenly I knew that the sound was not in my ears, it was not just inside my head. At that moment I must have become quite white. I talked still faster and louder. And the sound, too, became louder. It was a quick, low, soft sound, like the sound of a clock heard through a wall, a sound I knew well. Louder it became, and louder. Why did the men not go? Louder, louder. I stood up and walked quickly around the room. I pushed my chair across the floor to make more noise, to cover that terrible sound. I talked even louder. And still the men sat and talked, and smiled. Was it possible that they could not hear??

No! They heard! I was certain of it. They knew! Now it was they who were playing a game with me. I was suffering more than I could bear, from their smiles, and from that sound. Louder, louder, louder! Suddenly I could bear it no longer. I pointed at the boards and cried, “Yes! Yes, I killed him. Pull up the boards and you shall see! I killed him. But why does his heart not stop beating?! Why does it not stop!?”