“To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art — that is, intimacy, spirituality, colour, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.” Charles Baudelaire, writing in France in 1846, was attempting to define an elusive phenomenon. “Romanticism,” he declared, “is precisely situated neither in choice of subjects nor in exact truth, but in a mode of feeling.” Fifty years before him, in Germany, Friedrich Schlegel had written that the “romantic kind of poetry is still in the state of becoming; that, in fact, is its real essence: that it should forever be becoming and never be perfected. It can be exhausted by no theory and only a divinatory criticism would dare to try to characterize its ideal.” If Romanticism had its theorists, they were theorists resigned to an impossible or self-denying task.

The brilliance of The Critique of Reason: Romantic Art 1760-1860 at the Yale University Art Gallery lies not in a daring characterization of an ideal, but in the construction of a conceptual framework subtle and supple enough for the art of this period to unfold before us in all its open-ended complexity. One of the aims set out and ably accomplished by this exhibition is to show that the seeds of an answer to the question, “What is Romanticism?” lay in the one posed by Immanuel Kant in 1781: “What is Enlightenment?” “Enlightenment is the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred minority.” It requires nothing but “freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters.” Far from a turning away from reason, Romanticism, as presented here, was a dialectical continuation of the critical project posited by Kant: that of a perpetual questioning of the self and its relation to the world.

Such a stimulating long view of Romantic art, with an expansion of its temporal boundaries forty years before and sixty after 1800, is partly the result of practical considerations. The Critique of Reason is a response to the need of the neighbouring Yale Center for British Art to display a selection of its treasures while closed for renovations. Romanticism is a concept loose enough conceptually and chronologically to facilitate the bringing together of key works from a collection whose strength lies in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British art with selections of continental (mainly French) work from the Gallery. This is the first time a joint venture of this kind has been attempted at Yale. Over three hundred works are on display, but the result goes far beyond what might have been a diffuse “highlights” show.

The exhibition is structured in eight thematic sections, with diverse groups of works spanning the entire hundred-year period arranged together in carefully chosen clusters. There is theoretically no sens de visite — the curators (Elisabeth Hodermarsky, Paola d’Agostino, A. Cassandra Albinson, Nina Amstutz, and Izabel Gass) consider the exhibition approachable from either of its two entrances — but its central concerns are most powerfully introduced in the room entitled ‘Nature: Spectacle and Specimen’. Here, stunning juxtapositions draw out the notion that artists of this period could be both distanced observers and feeling spectators, and often held these two positions in tension. A trio of works depicting Mount Vesuvius, including Joseph Wright of Derby’s oil, Vesuvius from Posillipo (c. 1788), William Haygarth’s drawing from jagged rocks near the crater (1816), and J.M.W. Turner’s exquisite Vesuvius in Eruption (1817-1820), is exemplary. Wright’s painting seems to hold the spewing volcano at bay, tucking it behind the repoussoir sails of a ship in silhouette. Yet the calm poise of the boat is disrupted by the lurid pink which infects the moonlit sky, setting off jarring vibrations of colour and infusing the whole canvas with an irrationality at odds with its compositional balance. Turner, meanwhile, probably never witnessed an eruption in person, but his luminous watercolour equates the elements of his palette with the energy of the natural spectacle itself. Tiny figures on the shore are eclipsed by the scene they witness, while a single man, away from the crowd, is linked in an almost preposterous axis of scale to the shooting column of lava by its reflection. Hanging nearby is Ramsay Richard Reinagle’s Ornithologist (1802), probably a portrait of John Latham. We are invited to inspect the naturalist in all his strangeness just as he peers at his specimens. With his fat hands he preens the feathers of a severed wing. His pictorial counterweight is the serpentine body of a dead bird, which appears to luxuriate in its deadness as if alive, like an odalisque.

This oscillation between states of life and death is nowhere more vivid than in two adjacent drawings by James Ward (1769-1859), an artist who reappears throughout this show. They depict human skeletons contorted in agony, uncannily reminiscent of the casts from the cavities of the dead at Pompeii made later in the nineteenth century. Can a skeleton, absent of flesh and breath, writhe in pain? Such defamiliarization also characterizes George Stubbs’s drawings for his unfinished project of Comparative Anatomy (1795-1806), where the human body, flayed and opened, is laid out for viewing in the same terms as that of an ostrich or a tiger. The inclusion of Stubbs is one of the payoffs of the curators’ decision to shift our view back to 1760. Stubbs, whose monumental Lion attacking a Horse (1762) announces the exhibition in the Gallery lobby, provides a crucial link between British and French art of this period. His work was admired by Eugène Delacroix (whose tiger lithograph is displayed next to the marvellous Zebra of 1763) and Théodore Géricault, who were both fascinated by animal psychology. Antoine-Louis Barye’s bronzes from the 1830s and 40s depicting the death struggles of predator and prey, further elaborate this theme. In Python Swallowing a Doe (1840), devourer and devoured fuse, one engulfing the other in a tangle of bodies from which a new form emerges.

Adjoining this bay, ‘The Artist as Social Critic’ is dominated by a complete framed sequence of Goya’s Disasters of War (c. 1810-20, published 1863). There could be no more powerful argument than these prints against the idea of the romantic artist as aloof and detached. Indeed, the problem of how ambitious art should engage with the contemporary world stands behind all the works in this section, including James Barry’s great aquatint of 1776, The Phoenix, an impassioned expression of his support for American Independence, and plates from Blake’s America, in which references to Paine and Washington burst through the mythic language. James Gillray’s Apotheosis of Hoche (1798), a supreme example of his “mock-heroic” mode, reminds us that the corollary of social or political critique was a critique of the forms of art: just as Barry’s Phoenix suggested that the true aims of the history painter might be best served by the medium of print, so Gillray’s satire, with its visual allusion to the Sistine Last Judgment, was “Michel Angelo travestied.” Daumier’s Rue Transnonain similarly challenged the hierarchy of genres. “It’s not what you’d call caricature exactly,” Baudelaire wrote, “it’s history, it’s reality, trivial and terrible.” The lithograph hangs with an unlikely group of works taking urban poverty and suffering as their subjects: Pity the Sorrows of a Poor Old Man! from Géricault’s “English” lithographs (1821), Frank Holl’s Faces in the Fire (1866), Pierre-Paul Prud’hon’s Grief-stricken Family (1821), John Everett Millais’s L’Enfant du Regiment (1854-55) and Thomas Annan’s photographic scenes of Glasgow slums (c.1868-71). Ary Scheffer’s Retreat of Napoleon’s Army from Russia in 1812 (1826), forms a link with an oil sketch of the same date, Seated Turk, by Richard Parkes Bonington, on display next-door in a room devoted to “Distant Lands, Foreign Peoples.” Both paintings were shown at an exhibition in Paris held to benefit the cause of Greek Independence.

By far the largest space of the exhibition is occupied by ‘Landscape and the Perceiving Subject’, which begins with an extraordinary sequence of cave and prison views, from Wright of Derby’s Cavern, near Naples (1774) to Nicolas Toussaint Charlet’s Osselles Caves lithographs (1829), via Piranesi’s Carceri etchings (begun as early as the 1740s). What sort of landscape is the interior of a cave, or the nightmarish labyrinth of an imaginary prison? Once we have emerged from the gloom of these works it is impossible to experience the blinding luminosity of Turner’s Dort, on the opposite wall, in the same way again. One contemporary remarked that the painting “almost puts your eyes out.” The Turners, and other major landscapes from the YCBA, including John Constable’s Hadleigh Castle (1829), look spectacular against slate grey walls, in contrast to their usual Louis Kahn beige across the street. The only German works in the entire exhibition — Carl Wilhelm Kolbe’s anthropomorphic etchings of trees — are placed next to landscapes by John Linnell, Samuel Palmer, and Gustave Le Gray, and oils by Richard Parkes Bonington and Constable are interspersed with pictures by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Charles-François Daubigny. Further sections of night landscapes and exhibition watercolors are supplemented by a separate room given over to ‘The Changing Role of the Sketch’.

‘Religion after the Age of Reason’ provides a rare chance to see works by Delacroix alongside those of the English visionaries John Martin, Blake, John Flaxman, and Samuel Palmer. One of the strangest objects on show here — nothing could better encapsulate the contradictions of its age — is Jean-Léon Gérôme’s God the Father (1858), a design for Pope Pius IX’s railway carriage. Gérôme’s locomotive God appears wracked with doubt, biting his knuckles on a truncated cushion of cloud. This is juxtaposed, unexpectedly, with Flaxman’s Get Thee Behind Me, Satan (1783-87), while another Flaxman drawing, the Creation (c.1790), with its back-turned, faceless bodies, is suggestive of cells dividing—of automatic, rather than thinking or willed, generation. Selections from the Mellon copy of Blake’s Jerusalem, the only hand-coloured version in existence, form a link to Blake’s seven unfinished Dante engravings, the highlight of the adjacent bay, ‘The Literary Impulse’, which considers the importance to the Romantic generation of textual sources. A complete set of Delacroix’s Faust lithographs echoes the arrangement of Goya’s etchings downstairs.

Attention to the variety of new media developed in this period is one of the exhibition’s great strengths, with explanatory texts on the lithograph, watercolour, albumen print, cliché-verre, and the Woodburytype sensitively inserted throughout. A final section, ‘Beyond Likeness’, presents a group of portraits in a range of media, from medals to marble, oils to photographic prints. The curators argue that what makes these portraits Romantic, indeed revolutionary, is an unprecedented focus on their sitters’ emotional states, and a new intimacy between the portrayer and portrayed. Again, the question of the “self” is pertinent here. What kind of subject — or subjects — was in formation between 1760 and 1860, we might ask. In his keynote lecture to a symposium organized to coincide with the exhibition, T. J. Clark argued that the reason why the critic William Hazlitt couldn’t fully understand William Blake’s art was that they came from different social worlds; it was class, in the end, that separated them and made the artisan Blake incomprehensible. It might have been profitable to reflect more openly in the exhibition itself on the question of who, exactly, the artists represented here were, and from which worlds they came. Unless, for example, one counts Mary Freer of Constable’s wonderful portrait of 1809, or the woman who posed as Dido for Henry Fuseli in 1781, as collaborators, every single producer in this show is a man. Another area that receives less attention than it perhaps deserves is the problem of patronage. This was a period of major transformations in how art was commissioned and sold as well as viewed. James Jefferys’s unusual self-portrait drawing, which shows him writing a letter to his patron threatening to renounce his profession, hints at the reversal of a traditional dynamic, in which the artist emerges in antagonistic relation to his audience.

These are questions which it may be unfair to expect a show of this size and scope to tackle in any depth. The real success of The Critique of Reason lies in its expansive, dialectical vision of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European art, whose contradictions and paradoxes it does not try to resolve. Rather, by means of thoughtfully chosen themes and placements, it enables us to see them more vividly. It also forcefully makes the case that British art of this period cannot properly be understood in isolation from the continental context.

The Critique of Reason is at Yale University Art Gallery from March 6th to July 26th, 2015.

Image: George Stubbs, A Lion Attacking a Horse (1762). Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.