Romanticism in art – characteristics, artists and works

Romanticism is a movement in art, literature and music that dominated Europe from roughly 1800 to 1850. It placed feeling, imagination and individual experience before the reason of the Enlightenment, and painters sought the sublime in nature, the dramatic in history and the dark in the human mind.

Facts

A reaction against reason

During the 18th century the Enlightenment had put reason at the centre, and Neoclassicism had taken its rules from antiquity. Around 1800 taste swung. The French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars and the first factories had shown that the world was unpredictable, and many artists wanted to depict what could not be measured: feelings, dreams, longing and terror.

Romanticism was not a unified style but an attitude. A Romantic painting can be a quiet moonlit landscape or a violent battle. What unites them is that the picture should arouse a strong feeling in the viewer.

Nature and the sublime

A key concept was the sublime: the mixture of awe and fear one feels before something immensely large, such as a stormy sea, an abyss or a mountain in mist. The Irish philosopher Edmund Burke had distinguished the sublime from the beautiful as early as 1757, and the Romantics made it one of painting's great subjects.

Caspar David Friedrich painted solitary figures with their backs to us, as in Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. We see the landscape through their eyes and share their reverence. In England William Turner dissolved sea, steam and sunsets into light, as in The Fighting Temeraire, while John Constable painted the English countryside with great love for weather and clouds.

History, liberty and horror

In France the Romantics depicted their own time with drama. Théodore Géricault painted the shipwrecked survivors on the Raft of the Medusa, and Eugène Delacroix painted Liberty Leading the People after the July Revolution of 1830, with Liberty herself as a woman holding the tricolour.

In Spain Francisco de Goya depicted the horrors of war. The Third of May 1808, painted in 1814, shows French soldiers shooting Spanish civilians in the light of a lantern. The man in the white shirt stretches out his arms as if on a cross. The picture became a model for later anti-war images.

The dark and the dreamt

Romanticism was also drawn to the supernatural and the unconscious. Johann Heinrich Fuseli painted nightmares, and the English poet and artist William Blake created his own mythologies in coloured prints. The Middle Ages, fairy tales and folk poetry became new sources of subjects.

The national was just as important. All over Europe artists sought out their own country's history, landscape and folk life. This paved the way for National Romanticism later in the 19th century, in both painting and architecture.

Romanticism in the Nordic countries

In Sweden the period corresponds to Romanticism after 1809. Carl Johan Fahlcrantz painted Swedish landscapes in a soft, idealised light, and the Norwegian Johan Christian Dahl, who worked in Dresden and was a friend of Friedrich, depicted the Norwegian mountains dramatically and naturalistically.

Romanticism lived on for a long time in the Nordic countries. August Malmström painted Dancing Fairies in 1866, a fairy-tale picture in mist and moonlight that became one of Sweden's best-loved paintings. By the middle of the 19th century, however, Realism had taken over in Europe, with everyday life rather than dreams as its subject.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Who painted Wanderer above the Sea of Fog?