10-26-16 Connor Gormley

Hello classmates. Today in class we looked at how art played a role in romanticism instead of just poetry. We viewed the painting "The Valley of Yosemite" by Albert Bierstadt. The painting is shown below. The artist shows the beauty of nature by showing a calmness. As a class we dissected this painting and found some of the reasons why this would be considered a romantic piece. Some reasons are that the water is smooth and calm, it is unspoiled nature without human interaction, and the animals in this are all peaceful animals instead of predators. The other picture shown below is an actual picture of Yosemite valley. One of the most notable things that is different is the lack of water. Bierstadt most likely made this change was to give a more calming painting. We then looked at a picture from Mr. Rivers' vacation of Yosemite and analyzed various parts of that, including his brother who was still salty for forgetting his camera. We were then told to get into groups of no more than 2. We were told to analyze a book called "RIP Van Winkle" by Diedrich Knickerbocker. We have to find all 10 examples of romanticism in the story. The origin of this story is quite interesting. The writer's real name is Washington Irving and he was an aspiring author who wasn't selling stories so he made up a story about a tenant who wasn't paying his rent in his hotel and he was going to release the manuscripts if he didn't pay up. This made Irving's books fly of the shelf.