Romanticism

Romanticism grew out of an age of revolution, war and industry, as a reaction against the reason of the Enlightenment and the cool, sculptural Neoclassicism of painters such as Jacques-Louis David. Where the Academy ranked history painting first and landscape near the bottom, the Romantics made nature the vehicle for their deepest feelings, and the idea of the sublime, the awe and terror of storms, mountains and the sea that Edmund Burke had described in 1757, ran through their work. In Britain J. M. W. Turner dissolved ships, storms and sunlight into colour, John Constable painted the fields and skies of Suffolk with a freshness that astonished the French when The Hay Wain was shown at the Paris Salon in 1824, and William Blake built a private mythology of prophetic books printed and coloured by hand. In Germany Caspar David Friedrich painted lone figures before vast landscapes as images of the soul's encounter with God and nature. Writers such as Wordsworth, Byron and Goethe were part of the same movement.

In France Romanticism was a battle with the Academy. Théodore Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa, shown at the Salon of 1819, painted the survivors of a recent and scandalous shipwreck at the scale reserved for history, and Eugène Delacroix, the leader of the Romantic school against the classicism of Ingres, answered with drama, movement and colour, from Liberty Leading the People in 1830 to the scenes he painted after a journey to Morocco in 1832. In Spain Francisco de Goya, court painter to Charles IV, turned in his prints and his late Black Paintings to war, cruelty and the irrational. By the middle of the century Romanticism gave way to the Realism of Courbet, but its belief in the artist's individual vision, and Turner's and Constable's light and brushwork, prepared the way for Impressionism.