Romanticism is remembered for its storms, its mountaintops and its lone wanderers gazing at the horizon. It also had a night side, peopled with demons, ruins, shipwrecks and the dead, and some painters went looking for it close to home, in a studio stocked with borrowed corpses or in front of a canvas they would never manage to finish.
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A Mood Born in an Age of Revolutions
Dark Romanticism never had a manifesto or a fixed style. It was a mood, and it took hold of painters from the late 1700s, in an age of revolutions and wars, when the Enlightenment's faith in reason began to look fragile.
In place of the ideal, it asked for nightmares, the macabre and the irrational. German calls it Schwarze Romantik, black Romanticism, the title of a large exhibition in Frankfurt in 2012. Paris followed a year later with a title borrowed from Edgar Allan Poe, The Angel of the Odd.
Every work on this list was made while Romanticism itself was alive, between 1781 and 1857. Paintings sit beside a print, a watercolor and an ink drawing, because the subject counted for more than the medium. Its revival by the Symbolists and the Surrealists is another chapter.
12. Antoine Wiertz, Two Young Girls, or The Beautiful Rosine (1847)
A small paper label hangs from the skull. It reads La Belle Rosine, the beautiful Rosine, and the name belongs to the skeleton, not to the young woman with roses in her hair who stands facing it.
The picture dates from 1847, when Antoine Wiertz was working in Brussels, and he called it Two Young Girls. One girl is alive, the other dead long enough to lose her flesh, yet he poses them side by side like two models, with an easel and a palette waiting in the shadows.
Confrontations of this kind were Wiertz's specialty, and the Belgian state soon gave him room for them. In 1850 it agreed to build him a vast studio at public expense, on one condition: at his death, everything inside would belong to the nation. He filled it with death in every form, down to The Premature Burial of 1854, where a man forces open his own coffin, labeled dead of cholera.
Who Rosine was, nobody knows. By naming the bones and leaving the living girl anonymous, Wiertz points to the simplest reading of his title: the two young girls are one girl, before and after.
Nothing in the picture is supernatural, and that is what makes it unsettling: a woman, a skeleton and a name on a scrap of paper.
At a Glance
Artist: Antoine Wiertz (1806 to 1865)
Painted: 1847
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: Not published
Where to see it: Musée Wiertz, Brussels (Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium)
11. John Martin, The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum (1822)
The volcano at the center of this picture is not the one John Martin painted in 1822. His was torn away in January 1928, when the Thames burst its banks in London and flooded the basement of the Tate Gallery, where the canvas lay in storage. For the next eighty years, almost everyone believed the river had destroyed the whole painting.