Romanticism in Visual Arts: Origins and First Manifestos

The term Romanticism was first used in Germany at the end of the 1700s,  when the critics August and Friedrich Schlegel wrote about romantic poetry.

In 1813, Madame de Staël, a prominent leader of French intellectual life, popularized the term in France after the publication of her account of her travels to Germany.

In 1815, the English poet William Wordsworth, who became an important voice of the romantic movement and believed that poetry should be the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, compared the romantic harp with the classical lyre.

Artists who considered themselves part of the movement saw themselves as sharing a state of mind or attitude towards art, nature, and humanity, but did not base themselves on strict definitions or principles.

Contrary to established social order, religion, and values.

Romanticism in Visual Arts

Both the English poet and artist William Blake and the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya were dubbed "fathers of Romanticism" by several scholars due to the emphasis of their works on subjective vision, the power of imagination, and a frequently somber political consciousness.

Blake, working mainly with engravings, published his own illustrations alongside his poetry that expressed his vision of a new world, creating mythical worlds full of gods and powers and strongly criticizing industrial society and individual oppression. 

Goya explored the terrors of irrationality in a series of fourteen paintings known as The Black Paintings. They conveyed the forces of nightmare underlying life and human events.

With the intention of keeping the paintings hidden inside his house, Goya invested all his negative feelings in the works through painting scenes full of terror and horrific occurrences, as we can see in his painting The Witches' Sabbath.

In France, the painter Antoine-Jean Gros influenced the artists Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix,  who later led and developed the romantic movement.

By narrating the military campaigns of Napoleon Bonaparte in paintings such as Bonaparte Visiting the Plague-Stricken in Jaffa (1804), Gros emphasized the emotional intensity and suffering of the scene.

In England, Germany, and the United States, the main romantic artists focused mainly on landscape, as seen in the works of the British artist John Constable, the German Caspar David Friedrich and the American Thomas Cole, but always with the concern of the relationship between the individual and nature.

For the most part developed during the French Revolution, Romanticism was allied with a revolutionary and rebellious spirit. The rule of reason and the law of Enlightenment was perceived as restrictive and mechanical.

As a result, artists turned to scenes of rebellion and protest.

In 1818 Théodore Géricault created The Raft of the Medusa, inspired by a true account of a shipwreck, as a denunciation of the French government's policies that led to the tragedy. 

In the same way, William Turner in The Slave Ship, intended to influence the British government to a more active abolition policy.

Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix,  was created to support the Parisian people's revolt against the restoration government of Charles X.

Delacroix also painted a series of works that describe the Greek struggle for independence against the Ottoman Empire.  The Massacre at Chios  portrays the survivors of a massacre that occurred when the Ottoman Empire conquered a Greek island of rebels and killed or enslaved most of the inhabitants.

To understand the rest of this journey, continue to our next article: Romanticism in Visual Arts: National Expressions in Germany, Spain, and England.