Romanticism Painting

In European painting, led by a new generation of the French school, the Romantic sensibility contrasted with the neoclassicism being taught in the academies. In a revived clash between color and design, the expressiveness and mood of color, as in works of J.M.W. Turner, Francisco Goya, Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix, emphasized in the new prominence of the brushstroke and impasto the artist's free handling of paint, which tended to be repressed in neoclassicism under a self-effacing finish.

As in England with J.M.W. Turner and Samuel Palmer, Russia with Orest Kiprensky, Ivan Aivazovsky and Vasily Tropinin, Germany with Caspar David Friedrich, Norway with J.C. Dahl and Hans Gude, Spain with Francisco Goya, and France with Théodore Géricault, Eugène Delacroix, Théodore Chassériau, and others; literary Romanticism had its counterpart in the American visual arts, most especially in the exaltation of an untamed American landscape found in the paintings of the Hudson River School. Painters like Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church and others often expressed Romantic themes in their paintings. They sometimes depicted ancient ruins of the old world, such as in Fredric Edwin Church’s piece Sunrise in Syria. These works reflected the Gothic feelings of death and decay. They also show the Romantic ideal that Nature is powerful and will eventually overcome the transient creations of men. More often, they worked to distinguish themselves from their European counterparts by depicting uniquely American scenes and landscapes. This idea of an American identity in the art world is reflected in W. C. Bryant’s poem, To Cole, the Painter, Departing for Europe, where Bryant encourages Cole to remember the powerful scenes that can only be found in America. This poem also shows the tight connection that existed between the literary and visual artists of the Romantic Era.

Some American paintings promote the literary idea of the “noble savage” (Such as Albert Bierstadt’s The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak) by portraying idealized Native Americans living in harmony with the natural world.

Thomas Cole's paintings feature strong narratives as in The Voyage of Life series painted in the early 1840s that depict man trying to survive amidst an awesome and immense nature, from the cradle to the grave.

Beginning with the late -18th to the mid -19th century, new Romantic attitude begun to characterize culture and many art works in Western civilization. It started as an artistic and intellectual movement that emphasized a revulsion against established values (social order and religion). Romanticism exalted individualism, subjectivism, irrationalism, imagination, emotions and nature - emotion over reason and senses over intellect. Since they were in revolt against the orders, they favored the revival of potentially unlimited number of styles (anything that aroused them).

Romantic artists were fascinated by the nature, the genius, their passions and inner struggles, their moods, mental potentials, the heroes. They investigated human nature and personality, the folk culture, the national and ethnic origins, the medieval era, the exotic, the remote, the mysterious, the occult, the diseased, and even satanic. Romantic artist had a role of an ultimate egoistic creator, with the spirit above strict formal rules and traditional procedures. He had imagination as a gateway to transcendent experience and spiritual truth.

The German poets and critics August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel first used the term 'Romanticism' to label a wider cultural movement. For the Schlegel brothers, it was a product of Christianity. The culture of the Middle Ages created a Romantic sensibility which differed from the Classical. Christian culture dealt with a struggle between the heavenly perfection and the human experience of inadequacy and guilt. This sense of struggle, and ever-present dark forces was allegedly present in Medieval culture.

While this view partly explains Romantic fascination with the Middle Ages, the actual causes of the Romantic movement itself correspond to the sense of rapid, dynamic social change that culminated in the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era.