The Open Window and the Storm-Tossed Boat: An Essay in the Iconography of Romanticism

Abstract

THE history of nineteenth century art is sometimes presented as a struggle between two forces: on the one side, the moribund traditions, the fading grandeur of history painting, the spinners of anecdotes, the painter-poets and painter-journalists; on the opposite side, the pioneers of progress, the visual realists, the experimenters with color and pictorial structure. A fatal obsession with subject matter dooms the party of Delaroche, Meissonier, and the Düsseldorf school; a new vision of form carries forward Delacroix, Manet, the Impressionists, and Cézanne. Literature is the devil of the piece—“c'est le poete qui a fait tomber le peintre dans la fosse,” as Baudelaire summed it up.1 There is no need to point out that this view is a grotesque oversimplification; but it is also a convenient abbreviation of the truth and it expresses very well the profound revolution of taste which separates the twentieth century from the nineteenth. The prevailing attitude toward nineteenth century art is still partisan, rather than objectively historical. After fifty years, the polemic against “painted literature” has rather lost its point, but the indifference or hostility toward subject matter persists. It provides an unfavorable climate for the study of nineteenth century iconography.