Collection: Romanticism

Romanticism was a European and North American art movement that flourished between approximately 1800 and 1850. It emerged as a reaction against Enlightenment rationalism and the formal restraint of Neoclassicism, originating in Germany before spreading to France, Britain, and the United States. The movement valued emotional authenticity, individual imagination, and the natural world over classical convention.

Romantic painting is defined by several recurring concerns. Landscape became a principal subject in its own right, treated with dramatic intensity rather than as a backdrop for narrative scenes. The aesthetic of the sublime, an experience of awe and terror in the face of vast natural forces, occupied a central place in the movement's theory and practice. Medieval, exotic, and literary subjects appeared frequently, often featuring isolated figures in states of psychological intensity or contemplation before nature.

The movement developed distinct regional accents. The German school, centred on Caspar David Friedrich, produced introspective landscape compositions of figures before vast natural panoramas. In France, Eugène Delacroix and Théodore Géricault developed a colour-driven historical and orientalist painting. British landscape Romanticism was anchored by John Constable and J. M. W. Turner. American Romanticism took the form of the Hudson River School, with Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, and Albert Bierstadt as its central figures. The Spanish painter Francisco Goya bridged late Enlightenment painting and the Romantic generation.

By the mid-nineteenth century, Romanticism had begun to give way to Realism and to the early modernist movements. Its emphasis on personal expression and natural subject matter remained influential through the rest of the century. Principal sub-movements include German Romanticism, the Hudson River School, Orientalism, and the sublime landscape tradition.