As with all depictions of Romantic heroes, nature is situated in its vastness as a great blue distant sky, as snowcapped mountains, as foreign castles and running falls-as the backdrop to a man’s momentary drama.The beauty of nature and man's loneliness are dominant themes in the work of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840). But more interesting, Gros catches the swagger and dash of a hero, propping himself on one leg casually against the hindquarter of his steed, with all the heft his gold suede clenched fist could suggest-while his actual death is merely a footnote to the eternity in oil that Baron Gros would bequeath him. His dark blue eyes betray another, more melancholic, time in his life. As though lingering, untried youth reflects back through his soft paleness and the pout of his lips. Nevertheless, the second lieutenant’s whole persona was given up to poetic allusions-an elegiac muse-for he had not the steely eyes of a warrior but the gentle countenance of a Byronic poet looking elsewhere, having been on his ultimate “grand tour.” His warrior’s metallic chest plate serves to counterbalance the fleshy pink globe of his head and the blond wispy shag of his hair. Perhaps art only surrenders illusions, vague escaping spirits that we animate.

So, I would return to LACMA and Baron Gros’ Portrait of Second Lieutenant Charles Legrand with new eyes. It was the time of William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, John Keats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and of course so many more.

Sometimes referred to as “the Counter-Enlightenment,” Romanticism seemed to become an artistic undercurrent to intellectual and progressive scientific thinking, therefore forging a new visual emotional language.įor me, there was an evocatively haunting presence in the poetry of the time, in the narrative arts that would be the voice behind the paintings, and in the mood that would capture the somewhat subversive glamour that made Romanticism such an engaging and magnetic force. Their strident proclamation for individual creativity as the path to freedom and a reunion with nature was-or should be-humanity’s primary goal. I was somewhat amazed that the Romantic ideals were looking back to the late medieval Gothic fantasies and Renaissance Judeo-Christian themes of love and terror, re-creating an emotional resonance out of a utopian ambition for this harmony. Romanticism is the movement that was principally sustained by the belief that unbounded nature and human imagination-and not reason-are the sources of harmony, running contrary to traditional Greco-Roman antiquity. 1810, gift of California Charities Foundation

Antoine-Jean Gros, Portrait of Second Lieutenant Charles Legrand, c.

Romanticism by Norbert Wolf