ART 200X Blog

My blog will be comparing the Hudson River School style to that of the German Romantic Movement. The Hudson River School style lasted from roughly 1825-1890 before falling out of popularity, with the German Romantic Movement lasting from the late 1700's to the early 1800's. While the Hudson River School specifically focused on renditions of the vast, luscious American landscapes, the German Romantic Movement was more broad in what it covered. The German Romantic Movement focused on emotion and nature, trying to express the "German soul" through stoic and breathtaking paintings of scenes ranging from natural landscapes to impactful portraits.  The Hudson River School Cole, Thomas. The Oxbow . 1836, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York " The Oxbow" presents a grand scene brimming with vibrant green plant life and an expansive background featuring the Connecticut river. Cole, coming from Ohio, found great inspiration in his early 20's to paint grand pa

 To start, I have "The Storming of the Bastille"  (1789) by Jean-Pierre Houël. It is a painting made to depict the storming of the Bastille- a medieval fortress- by revolutionary insurgents. The importance of the insurgents taking the Bastille cannot be understated, as it was a slap across the face of the French nobility. Commoners taking such a fortified stronghold gave them not just a strategic upper-hand, but it also solidified the idea of the nobility being at the mercy of the commoners. In terms of the art itself, there's something so striking about the juxtaposition of the fortified old bastion and the contemporary weapons and clothing such as the strikingly colored uniforms and the cannons and muskets. It's gritty and hazy, which conveys the mayhem that the battles created. All the while, it represents the hard-fought efforts of the revolution and the changes in the French power that came with it.  Moving aside from the revolution and war that "The Stormin

 In my last blog, I covered Caravaggio's "The Calling of Saint Matthew" . While I had included this in a post meant to cover paintings from the Renaissance, it is actually a baroque. In spite of making such an embarrassing mistake, I found a new appreciation for tenebrism. This is all to say that I was drawn to Artemisia Gentileschi's "Judith Slaying Holofernes"  from the moment I saw it. The painting shows clear tones of tenebrism and humanism, with historical and religious undertones that give the painting even more depth once you learn about it. The painting depicts Judith and her maid slaying and decapitating Holofernes, an Assyrian general. Holofernes, in his lust for the widowed Judith, allowed her into his tent, then got drunk. Originally planning to take advantage of Judith due to his power as a general, it's ironic that she was the one to kill him. Judith killed Holofernes as he was about to invade and raze the city of Bethulia, where Judith liv