A New Laocoön: Literature and Romantic Art in France.
We cannot do better at introducing this section than to refer to a note by Theophile Gautier who spoke of a “brotherhood” of painting and poetry. “At that time, poetry and painting formed a brotherhood. Artists read poetry and poets frequented artists. Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Byron and Scott were to be found as much in the studio as in the study.”[1] These authors would constitute the “Big Five” for literary-inclined painters, but artists also drew on themes taken from other writers like Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo, Lamartine, to name a few. Wakefield sees the origins of associations between painting and literature in France in the journalism of the late-eighteenth-century, publically- minded writers like Diderot who was known to many painters, though there was still some condescension from writers who were traditionally in a more “privileged social position over painters” and therefore tended to see visual artists as mere artisans.[2] The dominance of literature over painting would prevail into the nineteenth-century though artists like Delacroix aware of literature’s ascendancy, would fight to “emancipate painting” from its stranglehold. On this subject Delacroix was much influenced by Mme de Stael who had urged painters to limit themselves to colour and form rather than trying to create the equivalent of narrative or poetry in their painting; this, along with Lessing’s Laocoön represented a pulling away from the ut pictura poesis formula towards literature as an element of painting rather than a substitute for it. Some artists like the German Cartel failed to heed these cries for change and resolved to produce the equivalent of romantic literature, like a narrative scene from the end of Chateaubriand's novel Rene (above)[3]
[1] Cited in Wakefield, The French Romantics,
[2] Ibid.
[3] Journal, 26th Jan, 1824 for Delacroix’s use of Mme de Stael.
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