Joseph Mallord William Turner, Wreckers—Coast of Northumberland, with a Steam-Boat Assisting a Ship off Shore (1833–34). Oil on canvas. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
“Romanticism is like a phantom,” Prince Pyotr Vyazemsky complained in 1824. “Many people believe in it; there is a conviction that it exists, but where are its distinctive features; how can it be defined?” Two decades later, Baudelaire identified only its features: Romanticism is found “neither in choice of subjects nor in exact truth, but in a way of feeling.” The question of definition requires the wider context, the political, scientific, and perceptual revolutions of John Stuart Mill’s “Age of Change.” As Richard Holmes showed in The Age of Wonder (2008), the irrationalist was also the man of science. The dandy who sniffed the daffodil might dissect it in paint for a naturalist’s catalogue. The poet who plunged inwards and downwards might, like William Blake, surface with a business plan for color printing. Reason and the passions, order and disarray, Enlightenment and Romanticism: the dialectic and outcome summarized in the title of Jacques Barzun’s pathbreaking study, Classic, Romantic, and Modern (1961).
Modern, though youngest, has aged the worst. Yale’s Center for British Art, one of Louis Kahn’s last designs, is closed for repairs. Across the road, the Yale Art Gallery, an earlier Kahn design, was restored in 2006. The temporary closure of the British collection has inspired the first collaborative exhibition between the neighbors. The exhibition is