Painting

Romanticism

Caspar David Friedrich painted a man standing at the edge of a cliff looking at fog — and meant it seriously.

DE  —  Early 19th century movement valuing emotion, nature, and the sublime

Romanticism emerged in the late 18th century as a reaction against Enlightenment rationalism, the Industrial Revolution, and Neoclassicism's cold formality. It valued emotion over reason, imagination over observation, wild nature over tamed landscape, the individual over the collective. In painting, Caspar David Friedrich's wanderer on the mountain fog (Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818) captures the Romantic vision of the lone individual confronting an infinite, indifferent universe. Géricault and Delacroix brought Romantic intensity to historical subjects — The Raft of the Medusa and Liberty Leading the People are catastrophes painted as opera. In literature, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Goethe and Hugo gave Romanticism its grammar. In music, Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin, Liszt and Wagner made feeling itself into structure.

Further Reading The Story of Art E.H. Gombrich Bookshop.org →