The Nineteenth Century

Early Nineteen Century Modernism and Romanticism:

Writers:
Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774: a novel if immense influence in establishing the image of the introspective, self-pitying, melancholy Romantic hero.
Faust, 1808-1832

Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience, 1794

Wordsworth, second edition of Lyrical Ballads, 1800, a colection of poems by him and his friend Coleridge; he announced the advent of a poetic revolution.

Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, 1820
Keats, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, 1820

Music:
Beethoven, Symphony no.9, 1825

Romantic Painters: Goya, Gericault, Delacroix, Ingres, Turner, Millet, Daumier

Neo-Classicism versus Romanticism

Second Half of the Nineteenth Century

Writers:
Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 1857
Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, 1864
Baudelaire, Les Fleurs de Mal (The Flowers of Evil), 1857
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1855
Tennyson, In Memoriam, 1850
Browning, "My Last Duchess," 1842
Frederick Douglas, The Narrative of the Life, 1845
Emily Dickinson, 1830-1886


Music:
Tchaikovsky, Symphony no. 5, Romeo and Juliet, 1888
Verdi, La Traviata (opera), 1853
Wagner, Tristan und Isolde (opera), 1859


Impressionism, 1865-1880

Impressionist Painters: Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cassat, Pissarro

Post Impressionism, 1880-1890

Post Impressionist Painters: Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gaugain, Toulouse-Lautrec, Munch, Rousseau

Van Gogh on The Night Cafe: " I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green. The room is blood red and dark yellow with a green billiard table in the middle; there are four lemon yellow lamps with a glow of orange and green. Everywhere there is a clash and contrast of the most alien reds and greens in the figures of little sleeping hooligans, in the empty dreary room. . . I have tried to express the idea that the cafe is a place where one can ruin one's self, run mad or commit a crime. So I have tried to express as it were the powers of darkness in a low drink shop. . . ." (Art: A History of Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Frederick Hartt, 3rd ed., New York: Abrams, 1989)