What was romanticism in art

Such explorations of emotional states extended into the animal kingdom, marking the Romantic fascination with animals as both forces of nature and metaphors for human behavior. This curiosity is manifest in the sketches of wild animals done in the menageries of Paris and London in the s by artists such as Delacroix, Antoine-Louis Barye, and Edwin Landseer.

Gericault depicted horses of all breeds—from workhorses to racehorses—in his work. His oil sketch Images of wild, unbridled animals evoked primal states that stirred the Romantic imagination. Along with plumbing emotional and behavioral extremes, Romantic artists expanded the repertoire of subject matter, rejecting the didacticism of Neoclassical history painting in favor of imaginary and exotic subjects.

Orientalism and the worlds of literature stimulated new dialogues with the past as well as the present. In , Delacroix journeyed to Morocco, and his trip to North Africa prompted other artists to follow.

The French Revolution had been spurred by Neoclassical ideals of democracy and fraternity, but it resulted in thousands dead and conservative backlash as monarchies reeled in fear of revolution. The instability in France created a hole that allowed Napoleon to rise and bring war to most of Europe. And to fuel those wars, people began slaving away in factories in what would become known as the Industrial Revolution.

Living conditions remained awful for the poor. Society was still plagued by social ills. Science and rationality had not saved the day. Unsatisfied with the Enlightenment, the Romantics eschewed the formal rigidity, emotional restraint, and cool intellectualism of the visual language of Neoclassicism in favor of art that expressed the mysterious depths of the human psyche and the unknowable power of Nature. In the late 18th century, artists like Henry Fuseli in Rome and William Blake in England began producing work that was completely idiosyncratic, abandoning the expectations of the Academies in favor of dramatic scenes with strange, supernatural, or heroic subject matter.

It was goodbye virtuous Romans frozen in perfectly balanced compositions, hello visions of demons crouching on sleeping maidens. With dramatic lighting and unique subjects, the work of the Romantics was powerful and arresting.

In England, the stirrings of Romanticism can be deciphered in the Cult of the Picturesque and the subsequent Gothic Revival. Blake eschewed traditional Christianity and felt instead that imagination was "the body of God.

Europe a Prophecy reflected his disappointment in the French Revolution that he felt had not resulted in true freedom but in a world full of suffering as reflected in England and France in the s. Little known during his lifetime, Blake's works were rediscovered by the Pre-Raphaelites at the end of the 19 th century, and as more artists continued to rediscover him in the 20 th century, he has become one of the most influential of the Romantic artists.

This painting depicts Napoleon I, not yet the Emperor, visiting his ailing soldiers in in Jaffa, Syria, at the end of his Egyptian Campaign. His troops had violently sacked the city but were subsequently stricken in an outbreak of plague. Gros creates a dramatic tableau of light and shade with Napoleon in the center, as if on a stage. He stands in front of a Moorish arcade and touches the sores of one of his soldiers, while his staff officer holds his nose from the stench.

In the foreground, sick and dying men, many naked, suffer on the ground in the shadows. A Syrian man on the left, along with his servant who carries a breadbasket, gives bread to the ill, and two men behind them carry a man out on a stretcher. While Gros' teacher Jaques Louis David also portrayed Napoleon in all of his mythic glory, Gros, along with some of David's other students, injected a Baroque dynamism into their compositions to create a more dramatic effect than David's Neoclassicism offered.

Gros' depiction of suffering and death, combined with heroism and patriotism within an exotic locale became hallmarks of many Romantic paintings. The use of color and light highlights Napoleon's gesture, meant to convey his noble character in addition to likening him to Christ, who healed the sick. Napoleon commissioned the painting, hoping to silence the rumors that he had ordered fifty plague victims poisoned.

The work was exhibited at the Salon de Paris, its appearance timed to occur between Napoleon's proclaiming himself as emperor and his coronation. Content compiled and written by Rebecca Seiferle. Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Valerie Hellstein. The Art Story. Ways to support us. Romanticism Started: c. Summary of Romanticism At the end of the 18 th century and well into the 19 th , Romanticism quickly spread throughout Europe and the United States to challenge the rational ideal held so tightly during the Enlightenment.

Later Developments and Legacy. Later phases of the Romantic movement in Britain embraced Pre-Raphaelites and symbolism. Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you. The Pre-Raphaelites were a secret society of young artists and one writer , founded in London in They were opposed …. Late nineteenth-century movement that advocated the expression of an idea over the realistic description of the natural world.

Neo-romanticism is a term applied to the imaginative and often quite abstract landscape based painting of Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland …. Watercolour expert Mike Chaplin tackles the language of watercolour in Turner's work through line, tone and colour.

Katharine Stout.