Prior to the eighteenth century, an artist, schooled in the Neoclassical style, aimed to present an idealized image of legends and leaders to form a venerated version of the world. However, the movement known as Romanticism in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Europe sought to exaggerate emotional experience as a reaction against the typical artistic cannon. [i] This approach encouraged artists to challenge the “normal” reality and illustrate the grotesque and unpleasant perceptions of the world. The Napoleonic Wars from 1800-1815 inspired artists such as Théodore Géricault (1791-1824) and Francisco de Goya (1748-1826) to create works which reflect the experiences of the victims of the Napoleonic Wars. Their Romantic prints and lithographs depict the individuals’ pain, anguish, and terror caused by war.
Napoleon Bonaparte sought to conquer each corner of Europe, invading Italy and Spain in the south and Russia in the north.[ii] During the Napoleonic Wars of 1800-1815, coalitions comprised of Great Britain, Russia, Austria, and may other nations ultimately failed to stop Napoleon’s invasion throughout Europe. It was not until the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 that Napoleon was finally defeated and expelled to St. Helena. Despite his military and political failures at the end of his career, Napoleon was revered by numerous Frenchmen of all socio-economic classes. Staunch Bonapartists commissioned artists to create prints of Napoleon’s military prowess to promote his successes before the Bourbon Restoration (1815-1830). One wealthy Bonapartist, Antoine-Vincent Arnault, selected Théodore Géricault to create two lithographs for Arnault’s collection Vie politique et militaire de Napoléon (1822-1826). These works commemorate Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt (March in the Desert or Marche dans le désert) and his initial invasion into Italy (Crossing of Mount St. Bernard or Passage du Mont St. Bernard) (both 1822). [iii]
Géricault’s studied under well-known Neoclassical artists at the Louvre such as Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) and Antoine-Jean Gros (1771-1835).[iv] These teachers worked in a traditional manner, a style reminiscent of the Renaissance. They were also notable Bonapartists who obviously propagandized Napoleon as a military leader in their work. Despite David’s and Gros’ political beliefs showing through their work, Géricault instead fixated on the active soldiers and their experience during war. After succeeding outside his predecessors’ influence, his work showed more liberal ideals correlating with the Romantic movement. It is important to note that Marche dans le desert and Passage du Mont St. Bernard were commissions, not made of his own volition. Géricault manipulates the compositions so that Napoleon is the subject, but the soldiers also have individual characteristics and are active in the scene. In both lithographs, Napoleon is merely directing soldiers towards their goal; he is not the one fighting the war. In fact, Géricault was encouraged to alter his original compositions to fit Arnault’s Bonapartist ideals.[v] His non-commissioned and unnoticed lithography focused on the soldier’s experience in war and ignored the Napoleonic image.
Géricault’s studied under well-known Neoclassical artists at the Louvre such as Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) and Antoine-Jean Gros (1771-1835).[iv] These teachers worked in a traditional manner, a style reminiscent of the Renaissance. They were also notable Bonapartists who obviously propagandized Napoleon as a military leader in their work. Despite David’s and Gros’ political beliefs showing through their work, Géricault instead fixated on the active soldiers and their experience during war. After succeeding outside his predecessors’ influence, his work showed more liberal ideals correlating with the Romantic movement. It is important to note that Marche dans le desert and Passage du Mont St. Bernard were commissions, not made of his own volition. Géricault manipulates the compositions so that Napoleon is the subject, but the soldiers also have individual characteristics and are active in the scene. In both lithographs, Napoleon is merely directing soldiers towards their goal; he is not the one fighting the war. In fact, Géricault was encouraged to alter his original compositions to fit Arnault’s Bonapartist ideals.[v] His non-commissioned and unnoticed lithography focused on the soldier’s experience in war and ignored the Napoleonic image.
Retour de Russie (Return from Russia) (1818) is one of Géricault’s most compelling lithographs depicting the aftermath of war in the Romantic style. Retour illustrates the French army returning to France from Russia after the French defeat in Moscow in 1812.[vi] The snowy ground and the emaciated dog on the left and horse with heads bowed in defeat to suggest the setting. An infantryman with a cap and cane carrying a soldier on his back is lightly etched in the background on the right. Géricault uses the sense of touch and sight within the central group almost ironically. The grenadier walking the horse has his right sleeve pinned to his coat, signifying his amputated arm while the cuirassier, sitting on the horse, is blinded. These two soldiers help each other return home by providing the eyes and hands the other does not have. This scene represents the cruel aftermath and irreparable damage of war.
Some scholars believe that Géricault used imagery of Eastern figures as the ideological opposition of the Bourbon Restoration (1814-1830).[vii] In his Mameluke Defending a Wounded Trumpter (1818), a non-French soldier is the protagonist. The Mamelukes were Eastern Mediterranean equestrian soldiers enlisted in Napoleon’s Grande Armée after his campaign in Egypt in 1798.
Retour de Russie (Return from Russia) (1818) is one of Géricault’s most compelling lithographs depicting the aftermath of war in the Romantic style. Retour illustrates the French army returning to France from Russia after the French defeat in Moscow in 1812.[vi] The snowy ground and the emaciated dog on the left and horse with heads bowed in defeat to suggest the setting. An infantryman with a cap and cane carrying a soldier on his back is lightly etched in the background on the right. Géricault uses the sense of touch and sight within the central group almost ironically. The grenadier walking the horse has his right sleeve pinned to his coat, signifying his amputated arm while the cuirassier, sitting on the horse, is blinded. These two soldiers help each other return home by providing the eyes and hands the other does not have. This scene represents the cruel aftermath and irreparable damage of war.
Some scholars believe that Géricault used imagery of Eastern figures as the ideological opposition of the Bourbon Restoration (1814-1830).[vii] In his Mameluke Defending a Wounded Trumpter (1818), a non-French soldier is the protagonist. The Mamelukes were Eastern Mediterranean equestrian soldiers enlisted in Napoleon’s Grande Armée after his campaign in Egypt in 1798.
From 1816 to 1817 these soldiers left in France were killed by Royalist forces under the Bourbon Restoration for their participation of the Napoleonic army.[viii] Mameluke depicts an awe-inspiring Mameluke protecting a limp French trumpeter hanging from his horse from the attacking Eastern European soldier. The hero courageously stands over a dead, unidentified soldier as he faces his assailant. The allegory of individuality and equality is important for the Romantic movement because, unlike to the Neoclassical idea, the hero could be anybody. Géricault challenges the traditional mindset of the decorated officer like Napoleon as champion and instead illustrates a non-Frenchman as superior. Géricault also changed the way a non-European was viewed. Artists often treated the foreign figure as exotic and beautiful, inactive in their compositions.[ix] Rather than a passive figure, the Mameluke acts on his own and should be feared, not admired.
Compared to Géricault’s lithography Francisco de Goya’s etchings of the Napoleonic War in Spain were more violent and extremely graphic. The Peninsular War (1808-1814), also referred to as the Spanish War of Independence, began due to Napoleon’s invasion of Madrid on the second and third of May 1808.[x] As an attempt to control the nation, Napoleon crowned his brother Joseph as king, forcing the Spanish king to abdicate. The six years following the Madrid invasion had casualties of over 100,000 soldiers and civilians, not including the British and Portugal allies who joined Spain during the Peninsular War.[xi] Goya, the court painter to the Spanish crown, privately documented the terror Spain felt during this war through his eighty-etching series Los Desastres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War) (c. 1810-1815).[xii] It is unknown if the artist wanted to publish the etchings; they were first printed in 1863, about four decades after his death, by the Fine Arts Academy of San Fernando. If the earliest prints were seen by the Bonaparte King, he surely would have been arrested and killed for being a rebellious Spanish nationalist. Nonetheless, he created these illustrations without reference to any specific location or person. That choice renders the scenes more haunting, as if the figures are the ghosts of the civilian casualties.
Compared to Géricault’s lithography Francisco de Goya’s etchings of the Napoleonic War in Spain were more violent and extremely graphic. The Peninsular War (1808-1814), also referred to as the Spanish War of Independence, began due to Napoleon’s invasion of Madrid on the second and third of May 1808.[x] As an attempt to control the nation, Napoleon crowned his brother Joseph as king, forcing the Spanish king to abdicate. The six years following the Madrid invasion had casualties of over 100,000 soldiers and civilians, not including the British and Portugal allies who joined Spain during the Peninsular War.[xi] Goya, the court painter to the Spanish crown, privately documented the terror Spain felt during this war through his eighty-etching series Los Desastres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War) (c. 1810-1815).[xii] It is unknown if the artist wanted to publish the etchings; they were first printed in 1863, about four decades after his death, by the Fine Arts Academy of San Fernando. If the earliest prints were seen by the Bonaparte King, he surely would have been arrested and killed for being a rebellious Spanish nationalist. Nonetheless, he created these illustrations without reference to any specific location or person. That choice renders the scenes more haunting, as if the figures are the ghosts of the civilian casualties.
Although Goya’s Romantic style already shone through his earlier series of satirical prints, Los Caprichos (1790s), the nightmarish Desastres series demonstrates a more advanced form of Romantic style. The first half of the series illustrates Napoleon’s soldiers attacking, torturing, and raping Spanish men and women. The triplet Las mugeres dan valor (The women give courage), Y son fieras (And are like wild beasts), and Que valor! (What valor!) present women as active and stoic figures, similarly to Géricault’s Mameluke. In Las mugeres, two women fight off men by hitting them and stabbing them with daggers. Only one figure has a face visible to the audience; the woman on the left looks deranged with eyes wide open and mouth agape in terror as she stabs her attacker. Next to her, another woman fends off a man who grasps a chunk of her hair and pushes her down. Y son fieras contains more than four women armed and protecting themselves from the French soldiers in a chaotic fight. In the foreground, a lunging woman holds a child behind her back with her left hand and stabs a man with a spear in her right. The final of the three plates, Que valor! shows a single living woman standing atop of a pile of dead bodies, lighting a cannon directed towards a void supposedly filled with French soldiers. Each of these examples are an important representation of the Romantic movement in conjunction with war. Historically, the idea of women as soldiers was frowned upon; however, Goya corrected the traditional war narrative in this series. He promotes them as individuals who fought, without men, during war and faced the same struggles as a classic soldier.
No se puede mirar (One cannot look at this) (no. 26) presents the Spanish civilian as religious martyrs for the nationalist cause. This print illustrates the moment before a group of men and women are executed. The figures are all weeping or dead, aside from the man kneeling in the foreground, begging the bayonets creeping from the right to be spared. However, that figure is one of the least prominent of the print; the limp woman totally illuminated in a white outfit and arms extended outward is easily apparent and appears Christ-like.[xiii] She leans back on another person whose head nestles in the other’s neck. The figure on her left holds his face in his hand, a recognizable gesture of intense fear and despair. These three along with the three figures hugging each other tightly together, only one of their weeping faces visible, and the two kneeling men, bring together a complete understanding of what gruesome future the group faces.
The most revolting Desastres plates are Goya’s demonstrations of torture and dismemberment which possibly address guerrilla warfare Spain used against the French army. Fuerte cosa es! (This is too much!), Por que? (Why?), and Tampoco (Not [in this case] either) each depict at least one soldier who gazes at the dying men hanging from trees. Fuerte cosa es and Por que? also display soldiers actively tearing apart and killing the men while the Frenchman of Tampoco leans on a table, looking up at the dead man with a grin across his face. Plate thirty-nine, Grande hazaña! Con Muertos! (Great deeds! Against the dead!) is the cumulation of the previous three. Hung upon a tree are three bodies: one at the back hung by his feet and head hitting the ground. A second body’s arms are tied behind him around the tree trunk and head bobs downwards. The final body is maimed- its legs are tied, bent around a branch, head spiked next to its knees, and arms cut from the torso bound at its wrists and hung under the head. These highly imaginative scenes are gruesome and difficult to consider without shock. Despite their graphic nature, the compositions are well-balanced, and figures beautifully rendered with care. The voyeuristic element in these examples refers to No se puede miriar. Yet, Goya wants the audience to look and remember the terror helpless civilians faced.
The most revolting Desastres plates are Goya’s demonstrations of torture and dismemberment which possibly address guerrilla warfare Spain used against the French army. Fuerte cosa es! (This is too much!), Por que? (Why?), and Tampoco (Not [in this case] either) each depict at least one soldier who gazes at the dying men hanging from trees. Fuerte cosa es and Por que? also display soldiers actively tearing apart and killing the men while the Frenchman of Tampoco leans on a table, looking up at the dead man with a grin across his face. Plate thirty-nine, Grande hazaña! Con Muertos! (Great deeds! Against the dead!) is the cumulation of the previous three. Hung upon a tree are three bodies: one at the back hung by his feet and head hitting the ground. A second body’s arms are tied behind him around the tree trunk and head bobs downwards. The final body is maimed- its legs are tied, bent around a branch, head spiked next to its knees, and arms cut from the torso bound at its wrists and hung under the head. These highly imaginative scenes are gruesome and difficult to consider without shock. Despite their graphic nature, the compositions are well-balanced, and figures beautifully rendered with care. The voyeuristic element in these examples refers to No se puede miriar. Yet, Goya wants the audience to look and remember the terror helpless civilians faced.
Although Goya and Géricault’s national affiliations differ, both artists focus on the negative effects of the Napoleonic War. As Romantic artists, they depict grotesque experiences which reflect their life as either a Spanish or French citizen. They emphasized individual suffering and anguish, including dismemberment, fear, and sacrifice. The artists also included the unseen factions— women and non-Europeans— who were dragged into war by their aggressors. These prints were not necessarily seen by the public until years after the artists died; however, their own illustrations of war clearly represent a closer idea of how civilians and soldiers perceived war. Commissioned work like Géricault’s two prints for Arnault’s collection remains in the traditional form of art which ignores large groups of people who should be recognized.
Endnotes:
i William Vaughan, Romanticism (Oxford University Press, 1978).
ii Historiography is based on Stephen Eisenmann and Thomas Crow, “Chronology”, in Nineteenth Century Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1994) and Pierre Gassier and Juliet Wilson, The Life and Complete Work of Francisco Goya, Edited by Francois Lachenal. (New York: Reynal &, 1981)
iii James Clifton, “March in the Desert” and “Crossing of Mount St. Bernard” by Leslie M. Scattone, in The Plains of Mars (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2009), 87-89
iv Biographical information on Théodore Géricault is compiled from Eisenmann and Crow, Nineteenth Century Art and Lorenz Eitner, Géricault: His Life and Work (London: Orbis, 1983)
v Clifton, “March in the Desert”, 89. For original sketch of the Egyptian campaign, see Géricault, Study for the March in the Desert (recto), 1822-26. (Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, Paris.)
vi Clifton, “Return from Russia”, by Leslie M. Scattone, 90. This campaign resulted in the loss of about one million lives during war and retreat.
vii Clifton, “The Grand and the Terrible: European Visions of the Ottomans”, Emine Fetvaci, 38. See also Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, “Géricault’s Orient Engagé.” In Théodore Géricault, The Alien Body: Tradition in Chaos, edited by Serge Guilbaut, Maureen Ryan and Scott Watson (Exh. Cat. Vancouver: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia, 1997), 136-144.
viii On Mamelukes, see Jean Savant, Les Mamelouks de Napoléon (Paris : Calmann-Lévy, 1949)
ix Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1994)
x The invasion is also referred as the May Uprisings or Dos de Mayos
xi Michael Clodfelter, Warfare and Armed Conflicts: A Statistical Encyclopedia of Casualty and Other Figures, 1494-2000. (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2008), 162-169.
xii Biographical information on Francisco de Goya is compiled from Eisenmann and Crow, Nineteenth Century Art, Gassier and Wilson The Life and Complete Work of Francisco Goya, and Fred Licht, Goya in Perspective, (Englewood, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973)
xiii This figure resembles a pietà, a religious subject in which a dead Christ is cradled in Mary’s arms. This is a very popular trope in Christian art.
i William Vaughan, Romanticism (Oxford University Press, 1978).
ii Historiography is based on Stephen Eisenmann and Thomas Crow, “Chronology”, in Nineteenth Century Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1994) and Pierre Gassier and Juliet Wilson, The Life and Complete Work of Francisco Goya, Edited by Francois Lachenal. (New York: Reynal &, 1981)
iii James Clifton, “March in the Desert” and “Crossing of Mount St. Bernard” by Leslie M. Scattone, in The Plains of Mars (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2009), 87-89
iv Biographical information on Théodore Géricault is compiled from Eisenmann and Crow, Nineteenth Century Art and Lorenz Eitner, Géricault: His Life and Work (London: Orbis, 1983)
v Clifton, “March in the Desert”, 89. For original sketch of the Egyptian campaign, see Géricault, Study for the March in the Desert (recto), 1822-26. (Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, Paris.)
vi Clifton, “Return from Russia”, by Leslie M. Scattone, 90. This campaign resulted in the loss of about one million lives during war and retreat.
vii Clifton, “The Grand and the Terrible: European Visions of the Ottomans”, Emine Fetvaci, 38. See also Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, “Géricault’s Orient Engagé.” In Théodore Géricault, The Alien Body: Tradition in Chaos, edited by Serge Guilbaut, Maureen Ryan and Scott Watson (Exh. Cat. Vancouver: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia, 1997), 136-144.
viii On Mamelukes, see Jean Savant, Les Mamelouks de Napoléon (Paris : Calmann-Lévy, 1949)
ix Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1994)
x The invasion is also referred as the May Uprisings or Dos de Mayos
xi Michael Clodfelter, Warfare and Armed Conflicts: A Statistical Encyclopedia of Casualty and Other Figures, 1494-2000. (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2008), 162-169.
xii Biographical information on Francisco de Goya is compiled from Eisenmann and Crow, Nineteenth Century Art, Gassier and Wilson The Life and Complete Work of Francisco Goya, and Fred Licht, Goya in Perspective, (Englewood, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973)
xiii This figure resembles a pietà, a religious subject in which a dead Christ is cradled in Mary’s arms. This is a very popular trope in Christian art.