THE

ROMANTIC
PERIOD
O R I G I N AT E D I N E N G L A N D I N 1 7 9 8
 Romanticism, attitude or intellectual orientation that characterized
many works of literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and
historiography in Western civilization over a period from the late 18th to
the mid-19th century.
 Romanticism can be seen as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm,
harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality that typified Classicism
in general and late 18th-century Neoclassicism in particular.
 Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational,
the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the
visionary, and the transcendental.
• Among the characteristic attitudes of Romanticism were the
following:
a deepened appreciation of the beauties of nature;
a general exaltation of emotion over reason and of the senses over
intellect;
a turning in upon the self and a heightened examination of human
personality and its moods and mental potentialities;
a preoccupation with the genius, the hero, and the exceptional
figure in general, and a focus on his passions and inner struggles;
a new view of the artist as a supremely individual creator, whose
creative spirit is more important than strict adherence to formal rules
and traditional procedures;
an emphasis upon imagination as a gateway to transcendent experience
and spiritual truth; an obsessive interest in folk culture, national and
ethnic cultural origins, and the medieval era;
and a predilection for the exotic, the remote, the mysterious, the weird,
the occult, the monstrous, the diseased, and even the satanic.
 ROMANTICISM IN THE VISUAL ARTS

In the visual arts, romanticism is used to refer loosely to a trend

that appears at any time, and specifically to the art of the early
19th century.
Nineteenth century romanticism was characterized by the
avoidance of classical forms and rules, emphasis on the
emotional and spiritual, representation of the unattainable ideal,
nostalgia for the grace of past ages and a predilection for exotic.
 VISUAL ARTS
• In the 1760s and ’70s a number of British artists at home and in
Rome, including James Barry, Henry Fuseli, John Hamilton
Mortimer, and John Flaxman, began to paint subjects that were
at odds with the strict decorum and classical historical and
mythological subject matter of conventional figurative art.
These artists favored themes that were bizarre, pathetic, or
extravagantly heroic, and they defined their images with tensely
linear drawing and bold contrasts of light and shade. William
Blake, the other principal early Romantic painter in England,
evolved his own powerful and unique visionary images.
• Nebuchadnezzar is a
color monotype print
with additions of ink
and watercolor
portraying the Old
Testament Babylonian
king Nebuchadnezzar
II by the English poet
and printmaker,
William Blake.
• In the next generation the great genre of English Romantic
landscape painting emerged in the works of J.M.W. Turner and
John Constable. These artists emphasized transient and
dramatic effects of light, atmosphere, and colour to portray a
dynamic natural world capable of evoking awe and grandeur.
In France the chief early Romantic painters were Baron
Antoine Gros, who painted dramatic tableaus of contemporary
incidents of the Napoleonic Wars, and Théodore Géricault,
whose depictions of individual heroism and suffering in The
Raft of the Medusa and in his portraits of the insane truly
inaugurated the movement around 1820.
LIBERTY LEADING THE PEOPLE
BY EUGENE DELACROIX
WANDERER ABOVE THE SEA OF FOG
BY CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH
 THIRD OF MAY
BY FRANCISCO GOYA
A ROMANTIC HEROINE
 • A romantic heroine: in the Lady of
Shalott (1888) John William
Waterhaouse’s realistic technique depicts
a neo-medieval subject drawn from
Arturian Romance.
 EPISODE OF THE BELGIAN REVOLUTION OF 1830
BY EGIDE CHARLES GUSTAVE WAPPERS: A ROMANTIC
VISION
 Romanticism emphasized
everything the previous age had
not: feelings, emotions—the heart
over head—mysticism and instinct,
natural man over civilized man.
•Natural places (the wilder the
better) became focal points for
paintings and poems; the
supernatural gained a new
credibility; and the human heart
took precedence over all.
• Romanticism expressed itself in architecture primarily
through imitations of older architectural styles and
through eccentric buildings known as “follies.”
Medieval Gothic architecture appealed to the Romantic
imagination in England and Germany, and this renewed
interest led to the Gothic Revival.
• Just as Romantic painting can be divided into figure and landscape works,
so can Romantic sculpture be divided into works that concern the human
world and natural world. The leading sculptors of each type were Rude
and Barye, respectively.
• The masterpiece of François Rude is Departure of the Volunteers, a group
sculpture gracing the Arc de Triomphe (a triumphal arch erected in Paris to
commemorate the fallen of the French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic
Wars). This work portrays the goddess liberty urging the forces of the
French Revolution onward.1 Rude's masterpiece is the sculptural
counterpart to Delacroix's painting Liberty Leading the People (the most
renowned figure painting of the Romantic period).
• From the very beginning of the 19th century, breaking away
from the over strict rules of the neoclassical art still very much
in fashion, artists began to try to express feeling and states of
mind considered unworthy of interest until then: passions,
dreams, madness...
• The Musee des Augstins has a good set of example of the
themes of the period.
• Antoine-Louis Barye, the most famous animal
sculptor of all time, studied the anatomy of his
subjects by sketching residents of the Paris zoo.
Most of his works consist of single animals or
predator/prey duos. The scale of Barye's work
ranges from monuments to figurines.