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Art Through Time · 1790 to 1850

Romanticism

Romanticism was the movement that, from the 1790s to about 1850, put feeling before reason: storms, shipwrecks, ruins, revolutions and lone figures before vast nature. Its painters were Caspar David Friedrich in Germany, J. M. W. Turner and John Constable in England, Francisco Goya in Spain, and Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix in France.

It was less a single style than a mood. Where Neoclassicism prized clear outlines and civic virtue, the Romantics looked for the sublime: the awe, close to fear, of things too large to take in.

When
1790 to 1850
Where
Germany, Britain and France
Began
The 1790s; Géricault's Raft of the Medusa, 1819
Grew out of
Neoclassicism

When was the Romantic period in art?

Romantic painting runs from the 1790s, when Goya, Henry Fuseli and William Blake were at work and the young Turner first showed at the Royal Academy, to about 1850, when Realism turned painters toward ordinary life. Its great moment in France was the Salon of 1819, where Géricault showed The Raft of the Medusa, a shipwreck from the news, painted at the size of a history painting.

Its feeling outlived it. In America the Hudson River School painted the wilderness as a promised land into the 1870s, and in Russia Ivan Aivazovsky painted Romantic seas for the rest of the century.

How to recognize Romantic art

  • Nature as the main character. Mountains, seas and skies, with people small before them, as in Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.
  • The sublime. Storms, fire and shipwreck, as in Turner's The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, which he watched from the river in 1834.
  • Dreams and the dark. Fuseli's The Nightmare of 1781, with a demon crouched on a sleeping woman, was an early shock.
  • History as drama, often from the painter's own time: revolution, war and massacre.
  • Loose, expressive brushwork and strong color, the side Delacroix took against the clean line of Ingres.
  • Ruins, moonlight and Gothic churches, as in Friedrich's The Abbey in the Oakwood.

Romanticism in each country

In Germany, Friedrich painted from Dresden: lone figures seen from behind, looking out at the sea, the moon or the mountains, so that the viewer looks with them. In England, Turner dissolved ships and trains into light and weather, and Constable painted the fields of his native Suffolk, with skies he studied like a scientist; The Hay Wain won a gold medal in Paris in 1824.

In France, Géricault and Delacroix made the Salon a battleground: Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People honors the July Revolution of 1830. In Spain, Goya painted The Third of May 1808 in 1814, six years after French soldiers shot the people of Madrid. In Russia, Karl Bryullov's The Last Day of Pompeii made him famous across Europe.

Famous Romantic paintings

What came after Romanticism?

Around 1848, Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet turned from storms and heroes to stonebreakers, peasants and village funerals: Realism. In England the same year, the young Pre-Raphaelites carried the Romantic love of legend into sharp, bright detail.

Inside Romanticism

Romanticism painters

More Romanticism paintings

See Romanticism on the timelineEvery art movement in order