Symphony No. 9
1824
Amateur players filled out the orchestra at the premiere after only two rehearsals, and the singers complained that the high notes were unsingable.
★ 9.7
Browse by time · decade
1820s
1820 – 1829
Showing 145 works across all media from the 1820s
The Hay Wain
1821 · National Gallery, London
England ignored it, but the Paris Salon awarded it a gold medal in 1824 and sent Delacroix back to rework his own canvases.
★ 8.9
Saturn Devouring His Son (Goya)
1823 · El Prado, Madrid
Goya painted this straight onto the wall of his own house in his last bitter years and never meant anyone else to see it.
★ 8.5
Winterreise
1827
Schubert found the second half of these poems in a magazine only after he had already set the first twelve as a finished cycle.
★ 8.4
Death of Sardanapalus
1827 · Louvre, Paris
The king watches from his red bed while everything he owns is killed in front of him, on his own orders, before the pyre.
★ 7.8
The Betrothed
1827 · 736 pages
In seventeenth-century Lombardy two peasants want to marry, and a lord who wants the bride frightens their priest into refusing. Riot, famine, and plague come between them. Italian prose was remade on it.
★ 7.2
The Major Works
1822 · 880 pages
Shelley put atheism, revolution, and free love into lines nobody has matched for sheer music. In "Ozymandias" a tyrant's boast survives as two stone legs and a shattered face in empty sand.
★ 7.0
Alcohol is the prince of liquids, and carries the palate to its highest pitch of exaltation.
The Physiology of Taste · 1825
Dante and Virgil (The Barque of Dante)
1822 · Louvre, Paris
Delacroix's debut, and the damned are biting the hull. Romanticism announced itself with churning water and bodies learned from Rubens.
★ 6.8
The Madwoman
1823 · Musee des Beaux Arts Lyon, Lyon
One of a series Géricault painted of asylum patients for a doctor studying obsession, and he gave her the seriousness of a commissioned portrait.
★ 6.5
Cologne, the Arrival of a Packet Boat, Evening
1826 · The Frick Collection, New York City
A packet boat comes in at evening and Turner dissolves the city, the passengers and the river into a single sheet of gold.
★ 6.3
Chichester Canal
1828 · Tate Modern, London
Masts stand black against a sky going from gold to soft blue, and almost nothing else in the picture is solid.
★ 6.1
★ 6.0
The Forge
1820 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Three smiths at a forge, one hammer at the top of its swing. Goya gave laboring men the scale usually kept for gods and kings.
★ 5.7
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
1821 · 296 pages
De Quincey gives the pleasures of opium first and the pains after, in prose that turns a habit into visionary autobiography. Drug writing from Baudelaire to Burroughs still works his seam.
★ 5.6
The Last of the Mohicans
1826 · 398 pages
The scout Hawkeye and the last two Mohicans guide two sisters through the French and Indian War. Cooper made the frontiersman a national hero, and the Western has lived off him since.
★ 5.5
Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (Cole)
1828 · Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Boston
Eden on one side of the rock arch, blasted wilderness on the other, and Cole lets the landscape carry the entire moral argument.
★ 5.4
The Physiology of Taste
1825 · 464 pages
Brillat-Savarin, a French magistrate, made the table a subject for philosophy: tell me what you eat, he wrote, and I will tell you what you are. No food writer has bettered him.
★ 5.4
The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases.
On Going on a Journey · 1822
I Am Still Learning
1828 · El Prado, Madrid
An old man on two sticks, with Aun aprendo written underneath. Goya drew it in exile and failing health, near the end.
★ 5.2
★ 5.1
Marriage must ceaselessly combat a monster that devours everything: habit.
Physiologie du Mariage · 1829
The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins
1825 · Yale Center for British Art, New Haven
Five have kept their lamps lit and five have not, and the ones who have not are pleading. An avenging angel waits above.
★ 4.4