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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.
Read moreShowing 1401–1500 of 1752 results
An Egyptian Poppy and a Water Mole 1812
By John ConstableSizes starting at $249.00Shipping off East Cowes Headland 1827
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $289.00The Count of Floridablanca, 1783
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $319.00The Wagon in a Flooded Valley, 1897
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $449.00Carriage in a Storm
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $449.00Plants growing near a wall 1830
By John ConstableSizes starting at $259.00Shipping
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $299.00The Duke of Osuna 1798
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $299.00Entrance of the Meuse- Orange-Merchant on the Bar, Going to Pieces
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $319.00Rushes by a pool 1821
By John ConstableSizes starting at $269.00Tchoomaks in Little Russia
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $449.00The Duke of Wellington 1812
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $279.00Fishing Boats Bringing a Disabled Ship into Port Ruysdael
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $299.00Study of a Burdock
By John ConstableSizes starting at $289.00The Marquis of Villafranca and Duke of Alba, 1795
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $339.00View of the Saladin Citadel from the banks of the Nile, 1871
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $339.00Study of Foliage 1828
By John ConstableSizes starting at $329.00The Battle of Trafalgar 1822
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $299.00Vicente Joaquín Osorio de Moscoso, Count of Altamira
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $329.00View of the Sudak Bay 1879
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $349.00A Summer’s Day in Crimea, 1867
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $379.00Horse and Cart 1814
By John ConstableSizes starting at $309.00The Battle of Trafalgar 1823
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $299.00Vicente María Vera de Aragón, 1st Duke of Roca 1795
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $289.00Portrait of Ferdinand VII
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $289.00Studies of Two Ploughs
By John ConstableSizes starting at $299.00The Confluence of the Thames and the Medway
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $299.00View of Crimea, 1871
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $399.00Alexander Pushkin at the Top of Ai-Petri at Sunrise 1899
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $419.00The Junction of the Thames and the Medway, 1807
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $309.00The Skylark, Dedham
By John ConstableSizes starting at $249.00Tiburcio Pérez y Cuervo, the Architect 1820
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $279.00Constantinople, View of the Golden Horn with a self-portrait of the artist sketching
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $339.00East Bergholt Church 1809
By John ConstableSizes starting at $269.00Portrait of Isidoro Maiquez 1807
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $289.00The Sun of Venice Going to Sea
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $289.00A Windmill near Brighton
By John ConstableSizes starting at $269.00The actor Isidoro Máiquez 1807
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $289.00View from Livadia, 1861
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $339.00Whalers (Boiling Blubber) Entangled in Flaw Ice
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $279.00Antonio Adán de Yarza
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $299.00The Admiral’s House in Hampstead
By John ConstableSizes starting at $259.00View of the Leander’s Tower in Constantinople
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $349.00Whalers 1845
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $279.00Friar Miguel Fernández Flores 1815
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $269.00Look to the Large Cascade and Large Petergof Palace 1837
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $389.00View of Dedham Vale from East Bergholt, 1815
By John ConstableSizes starting at $269.00Whalers
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $279.00Cardinal Luis María de Borbón 1800
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $319.00East Bergholt Church – The Ruined Tower at the West End 1815
By John ConstableSizes starting at $279.00Moonlit Night 1860
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $359.00Windermere 1821
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $299.00Hursley, Hampshire 1804
By John ConstableSizes starting at $279.00Portrait of Juan Antonio Llorente
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $339.00Ukrainian Landscape at Night 1870
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $339.00Yacht Racing on the Solent 1827
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $289.00A Sea Piece – A Rough Sea with a Fishing Boat
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $289.00Brigadier Alberto Foraster
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $279.00West Lodge, East Bergholt
By John ConstableSizes starting at $339.00Winter landscape
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $379.00Charles IV, King of Spain
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $279.00The Lane from East Bergholt to Flatford 1812
By John ConstableSizes starting at $329.00The Prince of Orange, William III
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $309.00Winter landscape 1876
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $349.00East Cowes Castle 1828
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $289.00Hampstead Heath, with the House Called ‘The Salt Box’
By John ConstableSizes starting at $339.00Hauling a Horse and Cart out of the Ice 1876
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $349.00Portrait of Don Miguel De Lardizábal 1815
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $289.00Dedham Vale with the House Called ‘Dedham Valley’
By John ConstableSizes starting at $339.00East Cowes Castle, the Regatta Beating to Windward 1827
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $309.00Ice-Breakers on the Frozen Neva in St. Petersburg 1877
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $399.00Portrait of Juan Martín de Goicoechea y Galarza 1790
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $289.00A Scene on the English Coast 1798
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $299.00A View of the Sevastopol Bay in the Moonlight
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $509.00Golding Constable’s House, East Bergholt 1811
By John ConstableSizes starting at $459.00Retrato de Leandro Fernández Moratín 1799
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $289.00Battle of Vyborg Bay 1846
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $399.00Self portrait 1795
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $309.00The Harbor of Dieppe 1826
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $289.00Self-portrait 1815
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $299.00The Blue Grotto of Capri, 1841
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $419.00The Harbour of Brest- The Quayside and Château
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $269.00Autorretrato ante el caballete 1785
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $319.00Biarritz 1889
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $389.00Wreckers – Coast of Northumberland, with a Steam-Boat Assisting a Ship off Shore
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $279.00A Wreck, with Fishing Boats
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $299.00Brig Mercury attacked by two Turkish ships 1892
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $409.00Portrait of a man with sombrero
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $299.00Capture of Sevastopol 1855
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $399.00Hurrah! for the Whaler Erebus! Another Fish!
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $279.00Portrait of Joaquina Téllez-Girón, Marquise of Santa Cruz 1805
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $339.00Coastal View at Sunset with Fishing Boat Returning to Port
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $299.00Evening in the Crimea.,Yalta, 1848
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $439.00The Duchess of Alba in White 1795
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $309.00Lyme Regis, Dorsetshire, England
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $319.00The Marquesa de Pontejos 1786
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $339.00Windmills in the Ukrainian steppe at sunset 1862
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $329.00Condesa de Altamira and Her Daughter, María Agustina
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $379.00Jesus Walks on Water, 1863
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $339.00Seascape with Distant Coast 1840
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $279.00