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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 601–700 of 1752 results
The Domleschg Valley, Looking North to the Gorge at Rothenbrünnen
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $279.00The Sea at Dieppe, 1852
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $289.00The Woodcutters
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $339.00Autumn
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $379.00Battle of Çesme at Night 1848
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $309.00Mountain Landscape with Lake 1842
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $289.00Neubrandenburg in the morning mist
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $289.00Ovid Among the Scythians 1862
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $449.00Willy Lott’s House
By John ConstableSizes starting at $279.00Battle of Chios on 24 June, 1770 1848
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $309.00City at Moonrise 1817
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $299.00Les Deux Foscari 1855
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $409.00Llanthony Abbey, Monmouthshire 1834
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $299.00The work 1786
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $239.00Trentham Park 1801
By John ConstableSizes starting at $279.00Chapel by the Coast on a Moonlit Night
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $369.00Hesiod and the Muse
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $329.00Launceston, Cornwall
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $299.00Night in a Harbour (Sisters)
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $299.00Scene on the Downs, near Brighton
By John ConstableSizes starting at $289.00The fisherman with his rod 1775
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $599.00Brightwell Church and Village 1815
By John ConstableSizes starting at $289.00Capturing Of The Turkish Ship Mersina, 1877
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $339.00Cross and cathedral in the mountains 1812
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $269.00Lausanne from the West
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $319.00The Departure of Elisabeth of France For Spain
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $389.00Woman with two boys at the fountain (The poor at the fountain)
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $559.00Branch Hill Pond, Hampstead
By John ConstableSizes starting at $309.00Calm Sea 1887
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $399.00Cross in the mountains
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $359.00Llanberis Lake and Snowdon – Caernarvon, Wales
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $309.00The Acerolera 1779
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $609.00The Justice of Trajan
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $379.00Caucasus, 1871
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $409.00Le Corps De Garde à Meknès 1847
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $299.00Lucerne from the Lake
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $329.00Old Sarum
By John ConstableSizes starting at $299.00Ruins of the Oybin 1835
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $289.00The military man and the lady 1779
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $599.00A Windmill near Brighton 1824
By John ConstableSizes starting at $299.00Chumaks leisure 1885
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $409.00Lion Mauling a Dead Arab 1847
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $319.00Oybin church ruins 1812
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $299.00Tell’s Chapel, Lake Lucerne 1841
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $269.00The injured mason 1786
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $559.00A View on Hampstead Heath with Harrow in the Distance 1822
By John ConstableSizes starting at $309.00Columbus’ Farewell before Starting on his Voyage from Port Palos in Spain
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $459.00The Cemetery 1825
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $289.00The injured mason 1786 1
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $539.00The Lauerzersee with Schwyz and the Mythen, Switzerland
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $299.00Tiger and Snake 1862
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $329.00A Young Girl in a Woodland Landscape
By John ConstableSizes starting at $329.00Constantinople, the Top-Kahné Mosque, 1884
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $339.00Hunter with his dogs 1775
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $609.00Lion and Lioness in the Mountains 1847
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $339.00Mountain Scene, Mist Rising
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $309.00The Cemetery Gate
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $279.00A View at Hampstead – Evening 1822
By John ConstableSizes starting at $339.00Constantinople 1882
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $359.00Martinswand, near Innsbruck 1833
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $299.00Ruins at dusk (Church ruin in the forest) 1831
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $299.00The Snowstorm (sketch) 1786
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $319.00Tigre Jouant Avec Une Tortue 1862
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $349.00A View at Salisbury, from the Library of Archdeacon Fisher’s House 1829
By John ConstableSizes starting at $349.00Crimean Coast by Moonlight
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $419.00Moon over Lausanne 1836
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $319.00The Madrid fair 1779
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $329.00Woman in front of Setting Sun 1818
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $319.00Young Tiger Playing With Its Mother 1830-2
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $369.00A Windmill near Brighton
By John ConstableSizes starting at $349.00Crimean Tartars on the Sea Shore 1850
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $409.00Mountain Landscape with Rainbow
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $309.00Royal Tiger
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $369.00The Letter
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $339.00View on the Ligurian Coast near Genoa
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $299.00A Shepherd in a Landscape 1811
By John ConstableSizes starting at $359.00Crimean View
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $389.00Lion Devouring a Goat
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $409.00Stilts
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $359.00The Lake of Lucerne from Brunnen
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $299.00View of Schmiedebergerkamm
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $309.00A Village Fair, probably at East Bergholt 1811
By John ConstableSizes starting at $469.00Feodosia, Sunrise 1852
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $439.00Gallant colloquium
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $339.00Gate in the garden wall
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $319.00Lioness Reclining 1855
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $399.00The Lake of Zug 1843
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $349.00Alegoría de la Agricultura
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $269.00Branch Hill Pond – Evening
By John ConstableSizes starting at $299.00Departing for foreign shores
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $439.00Hut with a well on Rügen 1802
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $329.00Lion and Alligator
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $319.00Vèrres in the Val d’Aosta 1840
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $259.00Alegoría del Comercio
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $269.00Crimean View 1
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $409.00Heidelberg 1846
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $309.00Lion Devouring a Horse 1844
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $339.00Nightly cloudy sky-Evening 1824
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $339.00Woodland Scene Overlooking Dedham Vale
By John ConstableSizes starting at $299.00Cloud study 1798
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $349.00