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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.
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Rebecca and the Wounded Ivanhoe 1823
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $329.00The Coast in Amalfi 1841
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $389.00Weymouth Bay from the Downs above Osmington Mills 1816
By John ConstableSizes starting at $319.00Alnwick Castle 1829
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $309.00Brighton Beach, with Fishing Boat and Crew
By John ConstableSizes starting at $279.00Casa de locos (The Madhouse) 1794
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $329.00Lion Hunt
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $389.00Solitary Tree 1822
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $279.00The Great Pyramid at Giza 1871
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $389.00Escena de Inquisición
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $359.00Evening (Sunset behind Dresden’s Hofkirche) 1824
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $299.00Helvoetsluys; the City of Utrecht, 64, Going to Sea 1832
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $309.00Seascape Study – Brighton Beach looking west
By John ConstableSizes starting at $279.00The Lion Hunt 1855
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $389.00View of Cairo, 1870
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $349.00A View on the Orwell
By John ConstableSizes starting at $279.00Evening in Cairo, 1870
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $339.00High Street, Oxford 1810
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $319.00Lion Hunt
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $389.00Moonrise over the Sea 1821
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $289.00Scene with Flagellants 1808
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $249.00Gathering Storm 1899
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $399.00Life-Boat and Manby Apparatus Going Off to a Stranded Vessel Making Signal (Blue Lights) of Distress, 1831
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $299.00Lion Hunt in Morocco
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $349.00Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon 1824
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $289.00Prison Interior
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $279.00Rainstorm over the Sea
By John ConstableSizes starting at $279.00Chain Pier, Brighton
By John ConstableSizes starting at $279.00Courtyard with Lunatics 1794
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $279.00Port Ruysdael
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $299.00Sea View. Storm on the Sea 1878
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $409.00The Wild Boar Hunt
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $389.00Two Men by the Sea 1817
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $309.00August Bridge in Dresden 1820
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $299.00Brighton Beach Looking West
By John ConstableSizes starting at $299.00Rhodes
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $369.00Shipwreck off the Black Sea Coast
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $439.00The milkmaid of Bordeaux 1827
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $259.00The Tiger Hunt 1854
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $399.00Among the Waves 1898
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $409.00Arab Stalking a Lion
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $339.00Between Folkestone and Sandgate 1833
By John ConstableSizes starting at $299.00El tío Paquete
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $279.00Evening by the river-Lonely house by the pine forest
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $319.00Rockets and Blue Lights to Warn Steamboats of Shoal 1840
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $299.00Arab Horseman Attacked by a Lion
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $379.00Flat Countryside (Isle of Ruegen near Greifswald)
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $309.00Night Scene from the Inquisition 1810
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $269.00Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth 1842
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $299.00The Survivor, 1880
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $399.00Weymouth Bay 1824
By John ConstableSizes starting at $329.00Brighton Beach 1824
By John ConstableSizes starting at $349.00Children fighting for chestnuts
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $439.00Fir Forest with a Waterfall 1828
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $289.00Seascape with a Squall Coming Up
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $309.00Storm 1857
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $389.00The Women of Algiers 1834
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $399.00Brighton Beach
By John ConstableSizes starting at $409.00Chalk Cliffs at Ruegen 1
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $279.00Children looking for nests
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $409.00Sheerness as seen from the Nore 1808
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $299.00Stormy sea at night 1853
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $379.00Women of Algiers in their Apartment
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $379.00Barge below Flatford Lock 1810
By John ConstableSizes starting at $329.00Children playing bulls
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $439.00Rock Canyon in the Harz 1811
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $269.00Stormy Seas, 1895
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $379.00The Campo Santo, Venice 1842
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $319.00The Expulsion of Heliodorus From the Temple
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $359.00Children playing leapfrog
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $439.00Fire in London, Seen from Hampstead 1826
By John ConstableSizes starting at $299.00Graves of fallen freedom warriors 1812
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $299.00Stormy seas, 1900
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $379.00Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus 1829
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $319.00Weislingen Captured by Götz’s Men 1853
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $339.00Children playing seesaw
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $409.00Gillingham Bridge, Dorset 1823
By John ConstableSizes starting at $299.00Marphise 1852
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $379.00Riverside in fog-Elbe ship in the early morning fog 1821
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $299.00The Blue Rigi- Lake of Lucerne, Sunrise 1842
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $329.00The Survivors, 1876
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $359.00Children playing soldiers
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $439.00Erminia and the Shepherds
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $379.00Landscape with Cottage and Figures
By John ConstableSizes starting at $289.00New Moon above the Riesengebirge Mountains
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $319.00The Red Rigi 1842
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $309.00The wrath of the seas
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $439.00Children inflating a bladder 1777
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $299.00Hampstead Heath, with a Bonfire 1822
By John ConstableSizes starting at $259.00Lake Geneva and Mount Blanc
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $329.00Morning mist in the mountains 1808
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $309.00Sea 1897
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $439.00The Natchez 1835
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $349.00Hampstead Heath, with Pond and Bathers 1821
By John ConstableSizes starting at $259.00Lake of Lucerne, from the Landing Place at Fleulen, Looking towards Bauen and Tell’s Chapel, Switzerland
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $309.00Seashore with fisherman 1807
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $329.00Storm 1851
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $419.00The Education of Achilles 1862
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $359.00The giants
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $349.00Dance on the banks of the Manzanares
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $359.00