Page 35 - Studio International - March 1968

For a while in the eighteenth century, men were able to that continues to give it much of its character-are con­
believe that this was the best of all possible worlds. The vincingly demonstrated. It is no longer possible to think
breakdown of that aristocratic faith marks the beginning that British Romantic art is a special case within a larger
of modern life. By the century's end, man no longer took British tradition; it is the mainstream.
his place resignedly or gratefully in the universal scheme. Heretofore, British Romantic art has usually been
He had become an individual, endowed with self­ defined in terms of its exceptional figures, Blake, Cons­
consciousness and holding to a unique destiny. Experience table, and Turner. These artists combined Romantic
was his touchstone. He gave up the comfortable certain- feeling with innovations in technique. In this particular,
they are closer to certain Romantic painters of Germany
and France than to many of their British contemporaries.
To the artists of the Continent, Romanticism often meant
a deliberate break with the past, a break that was both
spiritual and methodological. German Romantic art took
its cue from a refurbished religious mysticism (for which
Blake's might serve as an English analogue); French
Romantic art involved profound rejection of the aims,
standards, and even of the technology of the dominating
classical school.
In Britain, the shifts were characteristically less extreme.
The majority of artists accommodated the influences of
Romanticism to existing conventions or altered the con­
ventions minimally to fit new concerns of style or subject
matter. For every Blake or Fuseli who thought that Sir
Joshua Reynolds was the Devil, there were a dozen
artists like Haydon or Sir Thomas Lawrence who strug­
gled to adapt Reynold's eighteenth-century ideas to the
Romantic appetites of the new age.
In short, the value of the present exhibition is in part
that it reminds us how broadly based and comfortable
Romanticism is in British painting. (After all, the British
were among the Romantic Movement's chief inventors­
and promoters.) No movement is a matter only of major
figures; the term proposes the legions of men who finally
make understandable what the masters achieve. Neces­
sarily, the exhibition gives us more than a few of these
artists of the second and third rank-the followers who
made the scene what it was, just as followers do today.
We can tolerate some lesser paintings and drawings if
they assist us to know the intricate concerns of a period,
Thomas Bewick ties of optimism and the idealism that served the status the particular unfoldings of a general state of mind.
A starling quo equally. Instead of the possible world, he faced the 'Romantic Art In Britain' is a large enough exhibi­
watercolour on paper world of possibility. His age, the sum of the responses to tion-two hundred and thirty-five works-for vital con­
Witt Collection, London
life of this new man, we call the Romantic Movement. nexions to be noted, not that these are laboured. Samuel
The Romantic revolution was all things to all men even Palmer's contributions do not bear upon Blake, as
as it began happening. It was a profound release of presumably they might have; neither do John Linnell's,
energies that reconstructed or redirected the social, politi­ for instance. There are no early Turners to measure John
cal, and artistic institutions of Western Europe and Martin's The Seventh Plague of 1<,gypt by. The Mulreadys
subsequently affected the development of states and are not the paintings that influenced the Pre­
peoples everywhere. Implicit in Romantic attitudes are Raphaelites. In fact, the connexions are subtler than
many of the excesses, irrationalities, and contradictions those that might be made through direct association.
we think of as contemporary. Our arts and letters, ad­ They are thematic or technical. By giving a sense of an
dressed increasingly to a mass audience, still bear the epoch, the organizers have uncovered its constituents.
stamp of the emergent, chaotic individualism of almost What was aimed at was the kind of fullness that would
two hundred years ago. allow Romanticism to be reconsidered; for it is the thesis
What this decisive shift in sensibility was for the visual of the exhibition that Romantic art in Britain is intel­
arts appears in a splendid and unconventional exhibition lectually, socially, and aesthetically more important than
of British paintings and drawings, 1760-1860, organized has hitherto been allowed; and more important theoreti­
by Dr Frederick Cummings and Dr Allen Staley, cally, practically, and qualitatively in the history of
respectively of the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Western art.
Philadelphia Museum of Art. The pervasiveness, com­ Where the exhibition succeeds beyond question is m
plexity, and modernity of the Romanticism that affected establishing an enlarged frame of reference for Romanti­
British art toward the end of the eighteenth century-and cism in British painting. We are obliged to give over the
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