Romanticism
Description
Romanticism (also known as the Romantic movement or Romantic era) was an artistic and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century. The purpose of the movement was to advocate for the importance of subjectivity, imagination, and appreciation of nature in society and culture in response to the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Read more ↗
Key Artists
Eugène Delacroix
The undisputed leader of French Romantic painting whose expressive brushwork, passionate movement, and study of optical color theory defined the movement's dramatic fervor.
J.M.W. Turner
British master of light and atmosphere who elevated landscape painting to revolutionary heights by dissolving form into sublime vortexes of mist, fire, and stormy seas.
Caspar David Friedrich
Quintessential German Romantic landscape painter whose solitary figures contemplating vast mountains and gothic ruins symbolized spiritual yearning and the sublime.
Francisco Goya
Spanish visionary whose deeply emotional, psychologically intense, and politically charged works bridged Old Master traditions and modern Romanticism.
John Constable
Leading English Romantic landscape painter who captured the fleeting atmospheric effects of his native Suffolk countryside with fresh, scientific naturalism.
Théodore Géricault
Pioneering French Romantic whose monumental, harrowing masterpiece 'The Raft of the Medusa' shattered Neoclassical academic decorum with raw human suffering.
William Blake
British poet, painter, and printmaker whose visionary, mystical watercolours and illuminated prophetic books rebelled against Enlightenment rationalism.
Famous Artworks
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Fun Facts
To achieve absolute anatomical and emotional realism for 'The Raft of the Medusa', Théodore Géricault brought severed human limbs and heads from hospital morgues into his studio to study their exact decay and pallor.
↗ Source: britannica.com
When John Constable exhibited 'The Hay Wain' at the Paris Salon of 1824, Eugène Delacroix was so deeply stunned by Constable's vivid green brushwork that he immediately repainted the background skies of his own 'Massacre at Chios' before the exhibition opened.
↗ Source: britannica.com