The Romanticism era

The Romanticism era, which began in the early 1800s, ushered in a period of wars and revolutions. This period was interpreted by artists as one of intense emotions and thoughts. They emphasize the expressions of their art subjects to convey specific feelings. The musicians were distrustful of humans and believed that connecting with nature was safe and peaceful for humans (King 114). The majority of the portraits, for example, depicted a man standing alone in nature, such as David Friedrich's "The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog." Other great paintings of the Romanticism are Francisco Goya’s painting of ‘The Second of May’ and ‘The Third of May’. Goya expresses the Spanish rebellion, showing deep emotions in the subjects of his art (Goulart 47).

In ‘The Third of May 1808’, Goya used the Christ iconology to portray the violence in the massacre. The center subject of the art, who is a peasant man of the Spanish rebels, raises his hand like the way Christ did on the cross of crucifixion. The man accepts his fate of death. His face show deep emotions of sadness. Instead of being terrified by death, the man is sad because he knows even after he and the others are killed, nothing will change. The lantern between him and the soldiers illuminates him and not the soldiers, to show symbolize his openness, truth and purity. On the other hand, the soldiers faces are hidden, the stand motionless lean towards the man. This shows their lack of emotions, hence nothing will stop them from killing the man and the other rebels; symbolism of a never ending brutality (Goulart 50).

Impressionism and post impressionism are similar in that they both preferred to point outdoor visual and used short broken strokes of brush to achieve an intense color vibration (Marshall and Rene 78). However, they contrasted in several ways, for instance, the impressionists used small thin but visible brush to express their art, like light in the sky and its qualities and how the sun appears in different parts of the day. Impressionists could even use a dot to express an art. A good example is ‘The Impression of Sunrise’ by Claude Monet.



The Impression Sunrise by Claude Monet

On the other hand, Post-Impressionists used paint with thick application and had real life subjects in their painting. Additionally, the paintings were not always outdoor paintings. A good example is ‘The Centenary of Independence’ by Henri Rousseau.



The Centenary of Independence by Henri Rousseau

Works Cited

Goulart, Stirling. Interweaving visual language of the spiritual and the secular: Goya, Spanish

spiritualism, and the sublime. Diss. Old Dominion University, 2016.

King, Andrew. "British Romanticism and the Reception of Italian Old Master Art 1793–1840 by

Maureen McCue." Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History 8.1 (2016): 113-116.

Marshall, Kimball P., and Rene Desborde. "Using the Fine Arts to Illustrate Degrees of

Innovation: From the High Renaissance to Cubism." (2017).