" The remark contains an admirable
characterization of romanticism; as distinguished from classicism,
romanticism is consciousness of the background. With Gros, Gericault,
Paul Huet, Michel, Delacroix, French painting ceased to be abstract and
impersonal. Instead of continuing the classic detachment, it became
interested, curious, and catholic. It broadened its range immensely, and
created its effect by observing the relations of its objects to their
environment, of its figures to the landscape, of its subjects to their
suggestions even in other spheres of thought; Delacroix, Marilhat,
Decamps, Fromentin, in painting the aspect of Orientalism, suggested,
one may almost say, its sociology. For the abstractions of classicism,
its formula, its fastidious system of arriving at perfection by
exclusions and sacrifices, it substituted an enthusiasm for the concrete
and the actual; it revelled in natural phenomena. Gautier was never
more definitely the exponent of romanticism than in saying "I am a man
for whom the visible world exists." To lines and curves and masses and
their relations in composition, succeeds as material for inspiration and
reproduction the varied spectacle of the external world.
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