- Choose your Country
- Choose your Country
Romanticism
Romanticism is a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength during the Industrial Revolution. It was partly a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature, and was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature.
The movement stressed strong emotion as a source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror and awe-especially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities, both new aesthetic categories. It elevated folk art and custom to something noble, and argued for a “natural” epistemology of human activities as conditioned by nature in the form of language, custom and usage.
Our modern sense of a romantic character is sometimes based on Byronic or Romantic ideals. Romanticism reached beyond the rational and Classicist ideal models to elevate medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived to be authentically medieval, in an attempt to escape the confines of population growth, urban sprawl and industrialism, and it also attempted to embrace the exotic, unfamiliar and distant in modes more authentic than chinoiserie, harnessing the power of the imagination to envision and to escape.
Although the movement is rooted in German Pietism, which prized intuition and emotion over Enlightenment rationalism, the ideologies and events of the French Revolution laid the background from which Romanticism emerged. The confines of the Industrial Revolution also had their influence on Romanticism, which was in part an escape from modern realities, indeed, in the second half of the 19th century, “Realism” was offered as a polarized opposite to Romanticism. Romanticism elevated the achievements of what it perceived as misunderstood heroic individuals and artists that altered society. It also legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority which permitted freedom from Classical notions of form in art. There was a strong recourse to historical and natural inevitability, a zeitgeist, in the representation of its ideas.
In a basic sense, the term “Romanticism” has been used to refer to certain artists, poets, writers, musicians, as well as political, philosophical and social thinkers of the late 18th and early to mid 19th centuries. It has equally been used to refer to various artistic, intellectual, and social trends of that era. Despite this general usage of the term, a precise characterization and specific definition of Romanticism have been the subject of debate in the fields of intellectual history and literary history throughout the twentieth century, without any great measure of consensus emerging. Arthur Lovejoy attempted to demonstrate the difficulty of this problem in his seminal article “On The Discrimination of Romanticisms” in his Essays in the History of Ideas (1948), some scholars see romanticism as essentially continuous with the present, some see in it the inaugural moment of modernity, some see it as the beginning of a tradition of resistance to the Enlightenment-a Counter-Enlightenment-and still others place it firmly in the direct aftermath of the French Revolution. An earlier definition comes from Charles Baudelaire: “Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling.”
Many intellectual historians have seen Romanticism as a key movement in the Counter-Enlightenment, a reaction against the Age of Enlightenment. Whereas the thinkers of the Enlightenment emphasized the primacy of deductive reason, Romanticism emphasized intuition, imagination, and feeling, to a point that has led to some Romantic thinkers being accused of irrationalism.
In visual art and literature, Romanticism found recurrent themes in the evocation or criticism of the past, the cult of “sensibility” with its emphasis on women and children, the heroic isolation of the artist or narrator, and respect for a new, wilder, untrammeled and “pure” nature. Furthermore, several romantic authors, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, based their writings on the supernatural/occult and human psychology.
The Scottish poet James Macpherson influenced the early development of Romanticism with the international success of his Ossian cycle of poems published in 1762, inspiring both Goethe and the young Walter Scott.
An early German influence came from Johann Wolfgang Goethe whose 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther had young men throughout Europe emulating its protagonist, a young artist with a very sensitive and passionate temperament. At that time Germany was a multitude of small separate states, and Goethe’s works would have a seminal influence in developing a unifying sense of nationalism. Another philosophic influence came from the German idealism of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Schelling, making Jena (where Fichte lived, as well as Schelling,Hegel, Schiller and the brothers Schlegel) a center for early German romanticism (“Jenaer Romantik”). Important writers were Ludwig Tieck, Novalis (Heinrich von Ofterdingen, 1799), Heinrich von Kleist and Friedrich Hoelderlin. Heidelberg later became a center of German romanticism, where writers and poets such as Clemens Brentano, Achim von Arnim, and Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff met regularly in literary circles. Important motifs in German Romanticism are travelling, nature, and ancient myths. The later German Romanticism of, for example, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (The Sandman), 1817, and Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff’s Das Marmorbild (The Marble Statue), 1819, was darker in its motifs and has gothic elements.
In predominantly Roman Catholic countries Romanticism was less pronounced than in Germany and Britain, and tended to develop later, after the rise of Napoleon. Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand is often called the “Father of French Romanticism”. In France, the movement is associated with the nineteenth century, particularly in the paintings of Theodore Gericault and Eugene Delacroix, the plays, poems and novels of Victor Hugo (such as Les Miserables and Ninety-Three), and the novels of Stendhal.
In Russia, the principal exponent of Romanticism is Alexander Pushkin. Mikhail Lermontov attempted to analyse and bring to light the deepest reasons for the Romantic idea of metaphysical discontent with society and self, and was much influenced by Lord Byron. The poet Fyodor Tyutchev was also an important figure of the movement in Russia, and was heavily influenced by the German Romantics.
In the United States, romantic gothic literature made an early appearance with Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820) and Rip Van Winkle (1819), followed from 1823 onwards by the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper, with their emphasis on heroic simplicity and their fervent landscape descriptions of an already-exotic mythicized frontier peopled by “noble savages”, similar to the philosophical theory of Rousseau, exemplified by Uncas, from The Last of the Mohicans. There are picturesque “local color” elements in Washington Irving’s essays and especially his travel books. Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of the macabre and his balladic poetry were more influential in France than at home, but the romantic American novel developed fully in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s atmosphere and melodrama. Later Transcendentalist writers such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson still show elements of its influence and imagination, as does the romantic Realism of Walt Whitman.
But by the 1880s, psychological and social Realism was competing with romanticism in the novel. The poetry of Emily Dickinson-nearly unread in her own time-and Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick can be taken as epitomes of American Romantic literature. As in England, Germany, and France, literary Romanticism had its counterpart in American visual arts, most especially in the exaltation of untamed America found in the paintings of the Hudson River School. Painters like Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church and others often combined a sense of the sublime with underlying religious and philosophical themes. Thomas Cole’s paintings feature strong narratives as in The Voyage of Life series painted in the early 1840s that depict man trying to survive amidst an awesome and immense nature, from the cradle to the grave.
Read moreShowing 1–100 of 1752 results
Belshazzar’s Feast
By John MartinSizes starting at ₹28,619Liberty Leading the People 1830
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at ₹25,549The Clothed Maja
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at ₹26,969The Fighting Temeraire
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at ₹22,119The Ninth Wave 1850
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at ₹27,919The Tortoise Trainer
By Osman Hamdi BeySizes starting at ₹25,789The White Horse 1819
By John ConstableSizes starting at ₹22,509Wanderer above the Sea of Fog 1818
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at ₹21,099Christ on the Sea of Galilee 1854
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at ₹25,979Koranic Instruction
By Osman Hamdi BeySizes starting at ₹21,569Monk by the Sea
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at ₹24,059The Hay Wain 1800
By John ConstableSizes starting at ₹22,509The Nude Maja
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at ₹26,729The Plains of Heaven
By John MartinSizes starting at ₹29,309The Rainbow 1873
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at ₹25,219Venice- The Dogana and San Giorgio Maggiore, 1834
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at ₹22,119A Jewish Wedding in Morocco
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at ₹26,579Fishermen at Sea 1796
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at ₹22,119Islamic Theologian With Quran 1902
By Osman Hamdi BeySizes starting at ₹20,389Stratford Mill
By John ConstableSizes starting at ₹22,269The Last Judgement
By John MartinSizes starting at ₹31,249The Second of May 1808 or The Charge of the Mamelukes 1814
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at ₹26,679View of Tiflis, 1868
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at ₹24,189Winter landscape 1811
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at ₹22,039Fanatics of Tangier
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at ₹26,579Great Day of His Wrath
By John MartinSizes starting at ₹28,969Moonrise over the Sea 1822
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at ₹21,329On May 3 in Madrid or “The executions” 1814
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at ₹26,679The Black Sea 1881
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at ₹26,049The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at ₹21,099Two Musician Girls
By Osman Hamdi BeySizes starting at ₹22,509View on the Stour near Dedham 1822
By John ConstableSizes starting at ₹22,739Charles IV of Spain and His Family 1800
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at ₹25,209Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still
By John MartinSizes starting at ₹26,579The Leaping Horse 1825
By John ConstableSizes starting at ₹21,569The Murder of the Bishop of Liège, 1829
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at ₹26,679The Slave Ship 1840
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at ₹21,569The wave 1889
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at ₹29,159Two Men Contemplating the Moon
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at ₹20,859Young Woman Reading
By Osman Hamdi BeySizes starting at ₹21,099Descent of Noah from Ararat
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at ₹29,159Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows 1831
By John ConstableSizes starting at ₹20,859Saturn Devouring His Son
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at ₹25,319The Cross in the Mountains
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at ₹18,979The Death of Sardanapalus 1844
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at ₹26,329The Grand Canal – Venice 1835
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at ₹21,569The Scholar
By Osman Hamdi BeySizes starting at ₹27,199The Seventh Plague
By John MartinSizes starting at ₹29,139Chalk Cliffs at Ruegen
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at ₹20,859Dido building Carthage 1815
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at ₹23,329Flatford Mill (‘Scene on a Navigable River’)
By John ConstableSizes starting at ₹21,159Persian Carpet Dealer On the Street
By Osman Hamdi BeySizes starting at ₹34,129Scenes From the Massacre at Chios
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at ₹24,529Ship in the stormy sea
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at ₹25,429The Deluge
By John MartinSizes starting at ₹28,969The Duchess of Alba, 1797
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at ₹22,269An Arab Reading
By Osman Hamdi BeySizes starting at ₹21,569Combat of the Giaour and Hassan 1835
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at ₹24,869Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum
By John MartinSizes starting at ₹30,549Storm at Cape Aya 1875
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at ₹27,769Sunken dog
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at ₹23,169The Lock
By John ConstableSizes starting at ₹20,159The Shipwreck 1805
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at ₹22,849Woman at a Window 1822
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at ₹22,269Abbey among Oak Trees
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at ₹23,439In Front of the Green Mosque
By Osman Hamdi BeySizes starting at ₹25,559Peace – Burial at Sea 1842
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at ₹18,979Sodom and Gomorrah
By John MartinSizes starting at ₹29,309Storm on the Black Sea
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at ₹27,299The Parasol 1777
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at ₹24,079The Spring – Eurydice Bitten by a Serpent While Picking Flowers (Eurydice’s Death)
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at ₹24,869Wivenhoe Park, Essex 1816
By John ConstableSizes starting at ₹25,789Battle of Dunsinane or Macbeth
By John MartinSizes starting at ₹28,089Children with hunting dogs 1786
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at ₹21,329Death on a pale horse 1825
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at ₹20,169Old Man in Front of the Graves of Children, 1903
By Osman Hamdi BeySizes starting at ₹21,569Storm over the Black Sea 1893
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at ₹28,229The Opening of Waterloo Bridge, Seen from Whitehall Stairs, London, 18 June 1817
By John ConstableSizes starting at ₹22,739The Summer – Diana Surprised by Actaeon
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at ₹24,869Walk at Dusk-Man Contemplating a Megalith
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at ₹21,329Blind man 1788
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at ₹25,549Destruction of Tyre
By John MartinSizes starting at ₹26,229Portrait of Naile Hanım
By Osman Hamdi BeySizes starting at ₹22,489Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway 1844
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at ₹20,599Stormy Sea
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at ₹27,919The Arctic Ocean
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at ₹21,879The Autumn – Bacchus and Ariadne
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at ₹24,869The Wheat Field 1816
By John ConstableSizes starting at ₹22,849Blind man 1788 1
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at ₹23,869Malvern Hall 1821
By John ConstableSizes starting at ₹22,509Norham Castle, Sunrise 1845
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at ₹20,809Pandemonium
By John MartinSizes starting at ₹29,489Reciting the Quran
By Osman Hamdi BeySizes starting at ₹21,799Stormy Sea 1
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at ₹27,299The life stages 1834
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at ₹21,639The Winter – Juno Beseeches Aeolus To Destroy Eneas’ Fleet
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at ₹24,869A Picnic
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at ₹29,649Malvern Hall, Warwickshire
By John ConstableSizes starting at ₹22,739Norham Castle- Sunrise
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at ₹21,769Ovid Among the Scythians 1959
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at ₹28,279