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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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French Ships Departing the Black Sea 1871
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $359.00Gillingham Mill, Dorset
By John ConstableSizes starting at $309.00Heidelberg
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $319.00La Industria
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By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $349.00Coblenz and Ehrenbreitstein from the Mosel 1839
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $319.00Growling Tiger
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $359.00Heroine Bobolin with hunters breaks under a hail of shots on a boat through the Turkish fleet 1880
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $359.00Poetry and Poets
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $289.00Ruined Monastery of Eldena near Greifswald
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $299.00Study of an Ash Tree
By John ConstableSizes starting at $299.00Frigate under sail 1838
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By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $319.00Picture in Remembrance of Johann Emanuel Bremer 1817
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $309.00Procession in Valencia
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $319.00The Cornfield
By John ConstableSizes starting at $299.00Bullfight, Suerte de Varas 1824
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $309.00Christ on the Sea of Galilee 1841
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $359.00Doorway in Meissen 1827
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $279.00Frigate Svetlana, 1892
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $399.00Neuwied and Weise Thurn, with Hoch’s Monument on the Rhine, looking towards Andernach 1819
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $319.00The Cottage in a Cornfield
By John ConstableSizes starting at $249.00Bullfight in a Divided Ring 1816
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $319.00Fog over the Sea (A Storm at Sea) 1884
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $409.00Gazebo (Gazebo in Greifswald) 1818
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $299.00Mussooree and the Dhoon from Landour 1835
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $339.00The Grove, Hampstead
By John ConstableSizes starting at $249.00The Mourning of Christ 1857
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $389.00Annonciation 1841
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $439.00Bullfight in a village
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $369.00Early snow
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $279.00Gondelier at sea at night 1843
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $409.00Lucerne- Moonlight 1843
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $339.00Willy Lott’s House from the Stour (The Valley Farm)
By John ConstableSizes starting at $249.00Banderillas in the field 1793
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $329.00Christ on the Cross
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $309.00Emilias Kilde near Copenhagen 1797
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $289.00Frigate on the sea 1838
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $469.00Landscape with goatherd and goats 1823
By John ConstableSizes starting at $249.00On the Mosell, Near Traben Trarbach 1841
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $279.00Bellinzona 1842
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $279.00Christ on the Cross 1846
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $319.00Fen Lane, East Bergholt 1811
By John ConstableSizes starting at $249.00Ice on the Dniepr 1872
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $339.00The Luisenquelle in Frederiksdahl 1797
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $269.00The Repentant St. Peter
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $259.00Lake Lucerne- the Bay of Uri from above Brunnen 1844
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $279.00Landscape with Pavilion 1797
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $289.00Loading the Ship on a Calm Misty Morning, 1870
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $369.00Sacred Family
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $339.00Saint Mary Magdalene at the Foot of the Cross 1829
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $319.00Study of the Trunk of an Elm Tree
By John ConstableSizes starting at $259.00Christ Carried Down To the Tomb 1859
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $379.00Greeting an American Ship
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $349.00The Holy Family with Saint John the Baptist as a child
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $359.00The summer (Landscape with lovers) 1807
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $309.00Trees at Hampstead – The Path to Church
By John ConstableSizes starting at $259.00Upper Fall of the Reichenbach- Rainbow 1810
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $279.00Cenotaph to the Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds
By John ConstableSizes starting at $259.00Marine scene
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $349.00Pietà, 1850
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $389.00The Garden Terrace 1811
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $319.00The Lake of Thun, Switzerland
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $299.00The taking of Christ
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $509.00Christ on the Cross 1780
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $339.00Marine View 1899
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $349.00The Brunig Pass from Meringen, Switzerland
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $309.00The Lamentation 1848
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $379.00The Woman with the Candlestick 1825
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $299.00Willy Lott’s cottage with a rainbow
By John ConstableSizes starting at $249.00Distant View of the Grove, Hampstead 1822
By John ConstableSizes starting at $259.00Lady on the Staircase-Caroline on the stairs 1825
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $299.00Moonlit coast 1864
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $349.00Rainbow- A View on the Rhine from Dunkholder Vinyard 1819
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $349.00The burial of Christ 1772
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $399.00The Resurrection of Lazarus 1850
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $359.00Charles Vi and Odette De Champdivers 1825
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $389.00Christ on the Mount of Olives 1819
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $289.00Moonlit Night
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $349.00Rheinfels Looking to Katz and Gourhausen 1817
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $329.00Sailing ship 1815
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $299.00Sky Study with Rainbow 1827
By John ConstableSizes starting at $309.00Approach to Venice, 1844
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $309.00Clorinda Rescues Olindo and Sophronia
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $379.00Moonlit night on the Black Sea coast, in the Caucasus 1891
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $379.00Saint Jerome in Penitence 1798
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $339.00The Close, Salisbury
By John ConstableSizes starting at $269.00Vision of the Christian Church 1820
By Caspar David FriedrichSizes starting at $289.00Don Quixote in His Library 1824
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $379.00Moonlit Night in Crimea 1859
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $359.00Saint John the Baptist child in the desert 1810
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $299.00The Dogano, San Giorgio, Citella, from the Steps of the Europa 1842
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $309.00View in a Garden with a red house beyond 1821
By John ConstableSizes starting at $249.00Ghost of Hamlet’s Father 1825
By Eugene DelacroixSizes starting at $309.00Gulf of Naples in the morning 1843
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $389.00Saint Ambrose
By Francisco GoyaSizes starting at $339.00Study For the White Horse
By John ConstableSizes starting at $249.00The Dogana and Santa Maria della Salute, Venice, 1843
By J.M.W. TurnerSizes starting at $329.00Gurzuf 1859
By Ivan AivazovskySizes starting at $389.00