LibGuides: Romantic to Pre-Raphaelite Art: Media

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Art of America: Looking for Paradise (51:06) In this program, Andrew Graham-Dixon follows in the footsteps of the pioneers who built the foundations of America as he explores American painting from the 17th through the 19th centuries. He examines the earliest portraits in America and uncovers the dark truth behind Benjamin West’s famous Treaty of Penn with the Indians. In Philadelphia, he turns the pages of one of the world’s most expensive books—John James Audubon’s exquisite Birds of America—and explores the wilderness that inspired great landscape painter Thomas Cole. Graham-Dixon argues that despite idyllic themes in American art, progress and innovation have come at a high price. A BBC Production. Part of the series Art of America.
Great Artists: Delacroix (23:59) Delacroix is France’s greatest romantic painter—an artist who challenged to rigid classicism of the previous generation, injecting a degree of fluidity and unpredictability to his art. He established a taste for the exotic in European art, influenced by his travels in North Africa, as in his famous Women of Algiers in their Apartment. He is often considered to be the last great history painter of European art, producing the iconic Liberty Leading the People, a work which encapsulates the revolutionary turmoil of his day.
Great Artists: Turner (23:31) J. M. W. Turner was a visionary and a maverick, whose landscape paintings astounded and antagonized those that saw them. A member of the Royal Academy in London, Turner was fiercely attacked by critics for his radical approach to painting. Turner’s paintings reflect his varying responses to the world around him, a world that was rapidly changing as the industrial revolution propelled society forward. In addition to nature scenes, Turner’s paintings recall the ancient world, echoing neoclassical landscapes of the French painter Claude Lorrain. Works featured in this program include Fishermen at Sea, The Shipwreck, Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps, Dido Building Carthage, Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbor’s Mouth, and Rain, Steam, and Speed—The Great Western Railway.
Gustave Courbet: The Place of Death (31:58) In 1848, a political revolution in France foreshadowed a revolution in art. In 1851, Gustave Courbet’s A Burial at Ornans scandalized the public with its unembellished portrayal of an ordinary funeral. The shift toward Realism had begun. This program tells the sensational story of Courbet’s Burial while analyzing the subtleties and surprises that underlie its deceptively innocent facade.
J.M.W. Turner: The Sun Is God (1:00:00) This superb dramatization of the life and artistic development of the great painter shows a wide array of his works in the context of the time and place at which they were created. Using the writings of John Russell to provide commentary and artistic analysis, the program provides a delicate portrait of the painter whose experiments with light influenced a whole generation of Impressionists, who spent his life trying to capture in paint the power and brilliance of the sun, whose dying words were, "The sun is God."
Manet (23:43) This program looks at the life and works of Edouard Manet, the great painter often described as a forefather of the Impressionists. Through some of his most famous paintings, Tim Marlow explores Manet’s subversive style, modern subject matter, and role in the Impressionist movement.
The Pre-Raphaelite Revolt (30:46) Some of the most widely known paintings in the history of English art were produced by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, whose work stands out as the most intensely romantic aspect of Victorian painting in England. Founded in 1848 to protest against the outmoded academic conventions of the day, the Brotherhood’s influence lasted until the end of the century, affecting fashion, interior design, and literature. This program explores the early years of the group and examines the works of Millais, Ruskin, Ford Madox Brown, Holman Hunt, Arthur Hughes, and Rossetti. Over thirty paintings and nearly fifty drawings are seen in the program. The commentary for the program includes the poetry of Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Realism: The Artistic Form of the Truth (54:05) It is a creative impulse as old as humanity itself: to depict life faithfully, accurately, in words or in images. This program shows how that impulse led to Realism—a widespread artistic movement, born in the latter half of the 19th century, which rejected pretense, distortion, and sentimentality. Incorporating interviews with art historians and literary scholars, the program explores the sociopolitical origins of the phenomenon in the 1848 Revolution in France and the concurrent wave of industrialization that swept Europe and America.
Winslow Homer: Society and Solitude (1:49:50) The first major documentary study of Winslow Homer, this program features over 180 images of Homer oil paintings, watercolors, etchings, and illustrations, combined with in-depth commentary from respected art scholars and historians. Viewers will learn about Homer’s childhood, early work as an engraver, frontline Civil War experiences, European sojourns, and eventual renown as the reclusive dean of 19th-century American painting. (2 parts, 55 minutes each)

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Goya : Crazy Like a Genius Robert Hughes explores the world of Goya and gives a very personal commentary on his paintings, charting his achievements as a court painter, satirist, and war reporter, and finally as the topographer of the inner self, madness, fear, and despair.

Bridgeman Images: William Morris Collection