San Antonio College Library

Classicism and Neo-classicism - Vision of antiquity - Art and revolution - The ideal - Sensibility and the sublime.

The image of Eugène Delacroix as an august artist with an august oeuvre was initially frozen into place by posthumous tributes and it has continued to the present. He was one of the finest yet least understood painters of the nineteenth century, the golden age of the French Romantic movement. He is remembered best for his masterpiece, 'La Liberté guidant le people', but few of his works have received the kind of constant, fascinated revisiting that...

This chiaroscuro social painting is a remarkable human record of late nineteenth-century Paris, its inhabitants and its private geography at a time of huge social and moral change. Degas' constant flitting between genres and from back-stage to front of stage enabled him to capture the fleeting nature of existence while creating an everlasting image of Paris.

Neoclassicism, which flourished between 1750 and 1850, was the most pervasive style in the history of European art. Irwin looks at all its manifestations, its scope and its appeal, from the fine to the utilitarian.

The 19th century is like no other: an aesthetic, scientific and political bubbling is changing the face of the world. Paris is a genuine cultural hub. An intellectual and artistic elite was formed including Auguste Rodin. Bold and gifted, he and others altered this era forever. Rodin's destiny is both singular and closely context related. Fed by a public and private correspondence, this film will draw the strands of his life and reminds the background...

Andrew Graham-Dixon explores how art in France took a dramatic turn following the French Revolution that ushered in a bold new world. From the execution of King Louis XVI and the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte--a figure who simultaneously repelled and inspired artists of his time--through to the rise of Romanticism and an art of seduction, sex, and high drama, Andrew explores artists including Jacques-Louis David, whose works appeared on the barricades...

1000 Masterpieces from the Great Museums of the World takes us on a fascinating journey through the history of art and provides a deeper insight into the masterpieces of painting. This film explores Wilhelm von Kobell's "The Siege of Kosel," completed in 1808 and housed in the New Pinakothek in Munich.

It was in the Bavarian mountains that much of Germany's sense of nationhood and identity was forged. Caspar David Friedrich became the Romantic movement's first great painter, creating perhaps its defining image in Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. More explicitly nationalistic was the Nazarene Brotherhood, a group of young artists, including Johann Friedrich Overbeck and Philipp Veit, who lived like monks in a deconsecrated monastery. This program also...