By looking at this painting we can say how beautiful it all looks, with the colors blended so well and the realism in portraits of the people however knowing the background story to this work of art makes you appreciate it more and have a deeper feeling in connection to this event which is what romanticism is all about. This painting is based off a story that happened three years prior when the events of a shipwreck took the life of many people on board. With not enough lifeboats to carry everyone, only the higher-class were able to aboard, leaving about 150 survivors on a makeshift raft struggling to fight for their lives. Drifting away at sea, we can wee through this painting how gruesome and traumatizing this experience was for these people. Many were left dead and horrified with emotions, and the way Gericault captured the accuracy of these people was by doing his own research interviewing survivors, making clay models and even retrieving body parts from the morgue to get the right depiction of this occasion on a piece of canvas. Knowing all of this, we can feel the despair and the hope Gericault is trying to convey which pushes this style of emotions through body language in the Romantic Era.

Some of these artists are so creative that they have the time, dedication and patience with their works. By some, we are talking about Georges Seurat and his work A Sunday Afternoon on la Grande Jatte. Seems like a totally normal impressionist piece of art, right? However, if you look very closely you can see how Seurat used individual shades of color and placed them in the right spot to create a bigger picture or subject. This technique is called divisionalism by widely now known as pointillism. He was very fascinated with color theory and experimented with it and we can see his execution through this painting. The painting does not at all look bland and plain, but you can see shading and depth through this blended way of small dabs on a piece of canvas that took about two years to complete. For example, look at the water and how he was able to make reflections and ripples without mixing in any of the colors together. Not only was it the scene itself he wanted to dabble with but the technicolor border that he created made the image pop even more so and has made this piece one of the most famous pieces in the late 19^th century.

Rodin was a very famous impressionist sculptor who used bronze as his medium. One of his famous works called the Gates of Hell is very similar (also was influenced) to Renaissance sculptor Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise located on the doors of the Baptistry of San Giovanni in Florence, Italy. Rodin was inspired by his own works of the Gates that he later created The Poet but is now renamed as The Thinker. Hunching at 73 inches tall and 36 inches wide, The Thinker stands at its lonesome outside of the walls of the Rodin Museum in the garden. Meant to be in thought of those souls who are damned in hell, we can see the details Rodin has put into the man’s face with his eyebrows all scrunched and lips pursing against their hand on their chin as a head rest which is what a lot of us, real life people, do when we are deep in thought. We do not just blankly stare into outer space, but we make facial expressions just like The Thinker’s to show how the wheels are turning in our heads. This detailed and relatable work of art has made such an impact on the world that there are many copies of this statue throughout the world in museums in Philadelphia, Tokyo, Cleveland, Moscow and more.

There have been many things that have been said about Van Gogh, but I think one thing we can all agree on was that he was a pretty amazing artist who suffered from mental illness. One of his most famous works, The Starry Night, was painted in 1888 and 1889 from a mental asylum he was checked in trying to get the help he needed for this mental illness. What is interesting about this painting is that he mostly painted this scene from memory and emotion which someone has said that Vincent Van Gogh was able to transform his pain and trauma into art and that is very prevalent to his audience. The creativity he put in this piece is outstanding with the brush strokes and movement of the clouds and the layers on top of layers of oil paint he used with a pallet knife creating a new technique called impasto. He thought that this painting was a failure and died thinking that he was nothing but if only he knew how infamous his works are and how this “failure” work of art is now displayed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, he would be so proud of himself to say the least.