- 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 1601–1700 of 1752 results
The Billiard Players 1827
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $279.00The Duchess of Alba and la Beata 1795
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $269.00Cricket on the Goodwin Sands
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $279.00Meeting of fishermen on the coast of the Gulf of Naples, 1842
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $399.00The XII Marchioness of Villafranca painting her husband 1804
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $319.00End of Storm 1839
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $389.00Josefa de Castilla Portugal y van Asbrock de Garcini 1804
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $279.00Sisteron from the North-West, with a Low Sun
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $279.00Saint Catherine’s Hill, Guildford, Surrey 1830
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $329.00The Countess del Carpio, Marquesa de la Solana
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $309.00View of Vesuvius on a moonlit night 1858
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $399.00Portrait of the Marquesa de Santiago 1804
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $339.00Steeton Manor House, Near Farnley
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $299.00Dartmoor- The Source of the Tamar and the Torridge 1813
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $329.00The Marchioness of Santa Cruz
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $309.00Self-portrait 1799
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $319.00St. Lucia
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $289.00Ferdinand VII, When Prince of Asturias
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $279.00Self-Portrait
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $299.00A Lady in a Van Dyck Costume
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $319.00Portrait of Martín Zapater 1797
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $289.00Jessica
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $329.00Manuel Quijano 1815
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $289.00Portrait of Francisco Javier Goya 1805
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $259.00Two Women with a Letter 1830
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $329.00Christ Driving the Traders from the Temple 1832
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $389.00Juana Galarza de Goicoechea 1805
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $249.00Manuela Goicoechea and Galarza 1805
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $249.00Music Party, East Cowes Castle 1835
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $269.00Portrait of Gumersinda Goicoechea y Galarza 1805
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $249.00The Rest on the Flight into Egypt 1828
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $279.00Hercules and Omphale 1784
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $339.00The Hero of a Hundred Fights
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $279.00Annunciation 1785
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $379.00Dinner in a Great Room with Figures in Costume
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $279.00Naufragio
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $289.00Pilate Washing his Hands
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $299.00Adoration of the Name of God
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $399.00The Vision of Jacob’s Ladder 1830
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $319.00Cat fight 1786
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $539.00Queen Mab’s Cave 1846
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $279.00Still Life with Golden Bream
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $279.00The Death of Actaeon, with a Distant View of Montjovet, Val d’Aosta 1837
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $289.00A Butcher’s Counter
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $289.00Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the Burning Fiery Furnace
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $289.00Bacchus and Ariadne
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $249.00Three Salmon Steaks
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $289.00Dead birds
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $289.00The Memorial to Byron, Scott and Moore
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $269.00Interior of a Romanesque Church
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $259.00Woodcocks
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $279.00Dead turkey
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $279.00Interior of St. John’s Palace, Eltham 1793
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $259.00Dead hares
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $279.00Figures in a Building
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $289.00Interior of a Great House- The Drawing Room, East Cowes Castle 1830
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $279.00The plucked turkey
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $289.00Scene in a Church or Vaulted Hall 1830
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $289.00The Long Cellar at Petworth 1835
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $259.00George IV at St Giles’s, Edinburgh 1822
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $259.00The Cobbler’s Home 1825
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $279.00Between Decks 1827
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $299.00Ancient Rome; Agrippina Landing with the Ashes of Germanicus 1839
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $299.00The Palazzo Balbi on the Grand Canal, Venice
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $279.00The Piazzetta, Venice 1835
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $299.00Venice, The Mouth of the Grand Canal 1840
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $299.00The Sun of Venice 1840
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $289.00Bridge of Sighs, Ducal Palace and Custom-House
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $329.00Barge on the River, Sunset
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $299.00Breakers on a Flat Beach
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $279.00Projected Design for Fonthill Abbey, Wiltshire 1798
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $299.00Edinburgh from Calton Hill 1819
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $329.00Kirkby Lonsdale Churchyard, Westmorland
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $299.00Forum Romanum, for Mr Soane’s Museum 1826
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $329.00Italian Landscape with Bridge and Tower 1827
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $329.00Le Havre- Sunset 1827
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $299.00Mount Snowdon, Afterglow
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $279.00River Scene with Weir in Middle Distance
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $279.00St Benedetto, Looking towards Fusina
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $289.00Sunset and Moonrise 1832
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $299.00The Ponte Delle Torri, Spoleto
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $289.00The Rialto, Venice
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $289.00Tummel Bridge, Perthshire
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $309.00View on the River Brent, North London
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $329.00Sunrise, with a Boat between Headlands
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $279.00Yacht Approaching the Coast
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $289.00Yarmouth Sands 1840
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $289.00Waves Breaking on a Shore 1835
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $269.00Coast Scene with Fishermen and Boats
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $279.00Coast Scene with White Cliffs and Boats on Shore
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $279.00Seascape 1828
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $259.00Seascape with a Sailing Boat and a Ship
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $279.00Schloss Rosenau, Coburg
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $269.00Cassiobury Park- Reaping 1807
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $289.00Bridge at Meulan 1832
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $289.00Valley with a Distant Bridge and Tower 1825
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $279.00Landscape
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $279.00East Cowes Castle, the Regatta Starting for Their Moorings 1827
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $279.00Caernarvon Castle 1798
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $299.00House beside the River, with Trees and Sheep
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $279.00