Search - Landmarks of Western Art: Romanticism - A Journey of Art History Across The Ages on DVD

It Came Before Impressionism.

Jeffery Mingo | Homewood, IL USA | 10/13/2008

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Because I've seen entire works on Delacroix, Friedrich, Constable, and other painters separately, it was not as impressive seeing this survey on the movement. Still, this work is good for those that want the basics. I can imagine this being shown in many an art or history class in high schools.
A lot of these works on artists are very British, being made there and having their experts interviewed. The host narrator seemed to be American, however, unless he was faking an American accent. The documentary shows a virtual, computer-generated art museum with Romantic works. This was impressive in that some art docs can be dull and lifeless.
There's a part of me that wishes this work would have tied the art more to Romantic literature, but maybe that would have been too broad a scope. I was surprised that these artists often painted works to memorialize tragedies of that time period. The work says either David or Delacroix painted something after reading Byron. I'm used to hearing of Brits being inspired by those on the European continent, but I hear about the reverse much less often. This work covered artists from Germany and Spain, not just France and Britain.
In the work, often images are not fully painted out. You have to put energy into figuring out what the brush strokes represent. In this way it reminded me much of Impressionism, but that thought is never brought up by the narrator or the experts."