American Romantic painters were largely influenced by trends in late 18th-century Europe, especially Britain, but the absence of an indigenous artistic tradition permitted a much more intuitive development. At the same time, their work, like that of the early French Romantics, is closely associated with the new spirit fostered by a national revolution. The American Revolution, by reinforcing the democratic ideal, inspired a unique brand of Romantic realism that was a strong force in American painting from the late 18th century onward and that anticipated the emergence in Europe by a whole generation. Benjamin West, in addition to his contribution to Neoclassicism, developed a style of narrative painting with dramatic subjects taken from contemporary life; while he painted his most significant work in Britain, it was on American rather than English artists that it made the most impact. John Trumbull undertook a series of 12 scenes from the American Revolution, in which careful studies of the principal participants were incorporated into colourful, baroque compositions. At their best, these works, for example “Sortie from Gibraltar” (1789; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), carry great conviction, even if they tend to be somewhat theatrical. In 1784 one of the most candid portraitists of the period, Charles Willson Peale, completed a similarly ambitious project in his paintings of the leading figures of the Revolution. A more limited enthusiasm for precise naturalistic study informs the work of Alexander Wilson, whose devoted love of birds emerges in the freshness and simplicity of the plates to his American Ornithology (9 volumes; 1808–14). His achievement has been overshadowed by his greater successor, John James Audubon, who combined scientific precision with a delight in his specimens that transforms his watercolour drawings of birds into works of rare and delicate beauty.

At the beginning of the Romantic period, artists were still influenced by British painting, but this influence grew less and less perceptible as the 19th century progressed. For instance, the portrait of “Colonel Thomas Handasyd Perkins” (1831–32; Boston Athenaeum), by Thomas Sully, the leading exponent of a new portraiture supposedly expressive of mood, has touches of Sir Thomas Lawrence in the delicately brushed surface, strong contrasts of light and dark, and exquisite elegance of pose. But, though Samuel F.B. Morse, Samuel Waldo, William Page, and others also practiced an emotive style, portraits of the 19th century increasingly tended to endorse the native tradition of solid characterization.

The career of the landscape painter Washington Allston reflects the development of American painting in his lifetime. Absorbed by German and English Romantic poetry, he began on a note of high drama, moving in cosmopolitan artistic circles in Rome and producing a number of early landscapes that seem to have played a part in winning the friendship of the English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. At this point, what was obviously an impetuous and brooding strain in Allston’s temperament found expression by depicting nature in the darker, more destructive moods dear to Turner. “The Deluge” (1804; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City) is a typical macabre invention, with bodies in a raging tempest swept ashore to where wolves and serpents lurk. On his return to the United States, however, his work assumed a quieter, more pensive aspect. “The Flight of Florimell” (1819; Detroit Institute of Arts) illustrates this later style.

An uncomplicated love for their own natural scenery emerges in the work of a succession of landscape painters who frequently strike a contemplative, lyrical note. Thomas Cole reverently recorded scenes in the valley of the Hudson River that echo the loneliness and mystery of the North American forests. With his generous humanitarian sympathies, Asher B. Durand gave a serene and artless account of nature. His feeling for space and finely diffused light renders “Kindred Spirits” (1849; New York Public Library) a touching tribute to the friendship of Cole with the American Romantic poet William Cullen Bryant. An interest in light and atmosphere was shared by George Loring Brown, FitzHugh Lane, Frederic Edwin Church, and George Harvey; all followed Durand and painted in the open. Simplicity and reticence distinguish the landscapes of Thomas Doughty, who concentrated on painting the Hudson River valley as he knew and loved it. The details of country life that fill the stories of Washington Irving are portrayed with affection by William Sidney Mount, who in “Eel Spearing at Setanket” (1845; New York State Historical Association, New York City) transcends the merely anecdotal. George Caleb Bingham approached the life of the frontier without the passionate concern that motivated many contemporary French artists. Solemn and severe in style and glowing with colour, his “Fur Traders Descending the Missouri” (c. 1845; Metropolitan Museum of Art) captures the silence and solitary grandeur of frontier life. The wildness of the frontier caught the imagination of many 19th-century artists: George Catlin, Seth Eastman, John M. Stanley, Alfred Jacob Miller, and Karl Bodmer all discovered a picturesque drama and excitement in Indian life. The Romantic period witnessed the emergence of a truly national school of painting in the United States, where events and scenery provided a constant source of stimulation for artists content to distill their own poetry from the world around them.

Russia

Napoleon’s invasion of Russia (1812) had far-reaching consequences. It marked the revival of national consciousness and the beginning of a widespread cult of Russian separateness from Europe, thus precipitating the long controversy between “Westerners” and “Slavophiles” that ran through so much of Russian 19th-century literature and thought. At the same time, Russia shared in the Romanticism—cultivated by France and Germany—that gripped Europe during the era of the Napoleonic Wars. This is reflected in the paintings of Orest Kiprensky and Vasily Tropinin. The most notable contribution to the Romantic spirit, however, was made by Karl Pavlovich Bryullov, with his monumental painting “The Last Days of Pompeii” (1830–33; State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg). A completely different trend appears in the work of Aleksandr Ivanov, the first Russian painter to express religious emotions in a western European manner. Other outstanding artists of that period were Aleksey Venetsianov and Pavel Fedotov, the forerunners of Realist painting in Russia.

The second half of the 19th century saw the maturing of Realism in Russia. A sympathetic attitude toward the hard life of the people is reflected in the works of most of the painters and sculptors of that time. The new trend in art had as its basis the populist revolutionary ferment prevalent toward the end of the 1850s and the beginning of the 1860s, much of it inspired by the writers Nikolay Dobrolyubov and Nikolay Chernyshevsky. Chernyshevsky’s dissertation Esteticheskiye otnosheniya iskusstva k deystvitelnosti (1855; “The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality”), the main thesis of which was that art must not only reflect reality but also explain and judge it, provided a starting point for contemporary artists.

From the last third of the 19th century onward, the history of Russian art is the history of a series of school struggles: the Slavophiles against the Westerners; the Academy against the Peredvizhniki (“Wanderers”); and later the joint effort of the last two against a new movement, born in the 1890s and directed by the art review Mir Iskusstva (“The World of Art”).

The Peredvizhniki was a society formed in 1870 by a group of essentially Romantic artists who, however, regarded themselves as Realists. They seceded from the Academy in 1863 in protest against alien dogmatic formulas and the constricting programs of the Academy’s annual competitions. Most prominent among the Peredvizhniki were Ivan Kramskoy, Ilya Repin, Vasily Ivanovich Surikov (see photograph), Vasily Perov, and Vasily Vereshchagin. The society attached far more importance to the moral and literary aspects of art than to aesthetics. Its artistic creed was realism, national feeling, and social consciousness. Art was to be placed at the service of humanitarian and social ideals; it was to be brought to the people. Accordingly the society organized mobile (peredvizheniye) exhibitions—hence the name. The influence of the Peredvizhniki spread throughout Russia and was dominant for nearly 30 years, but by the end of the century it had greatly declined.