Anna Korovkina
Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia
The paper is dedicated to the problems of European portrait painting at the turn of 18th–19th centuries and formation of romantic portrait concept.
The portrait became the main genre in that period. Acute interest to the neo-classical historical painting gave way to romanticism desire for expressing model’s individualism and new artistic methods in portrait genre.
At the turn of the century there were two schools which better reflected tendencies of the period. France tended to the classical tradition of the 18th century, while England adhered to traditions of sentimentalism, as the Royal Academy of Arts was established later, in 1768 only.
To make such research, paintings which mostly reflect main trends in art around 1800 as well as paintings of the middle of the 18th century by well-known artists were analysed.
The aim of the study was to identify distinctive trends of each school and common features of European portrait art of the 18th–19th centuries.
The conclusion of the research is that the concept of romantic portrait was identified by creation of a unique image by means of portrait. It was expressed by the choice of unusual compositions, sizes, background, making more nuanced colors. Most of paintings were filled with air and natural light.
It should be noted that there is a lot of literature devoted to European art of early Romanticism but none of the authors singles out the phenomenon of portraiture around 1800 as a particular problem. However, in our view, this problem is interesting for future researches.