Romanticism

A well-known art historian and critic describes and interprets the art and ideas of the revolutionary known as Romanticism from the late 1790s until the middle of the nineteenth century.

The shock of the intellectual and political upheavals of the late eighteenth century was felt throughout the civilized world from the United States to the Russian Empire. No artist was wholly immune to it. The influence of Romanticism–the artist’s response to that shock–was all pervasive. As Hugh Honour writes: “To some degree all subsequent Western art derives from it just as all European history since 1789 has been to some extent a consequence of the French Revolution. Romantic ideas about artistic creativity, originality, individuality, authenticity and integrity and the Romantic conception of the meaning and purpose of works of art and the role of the artist continue to dominate aesthetic thought. So deeply are they embedded in our attitudes and ways of thinking that we are rarely aware of them.”

In fact Romanticism defies definition and classification into a simple formula. There is no romantic style in the visual arts comparable with Baroque or Rococo. There is no single work of art that exemplifies the aims and ideals of the Romantics. Romanticism might also be seen as part of the continuous development from the rejection of the Rococo in the mid-eighteenth century to the emergence of Realism in the mid-nineteenth. And there are elements of Romanticism that seem uncannily modern, such as the large, almost abstract, late paintings by Turner, or the almost “Internationally Modern” buildings by Schinkel.

Hugh Honour’s highly praised Neo-classicism discussed an earlier artistic revolution. In Romanticism he considers the more momentous one that followed. This penetrating study of a complex and contradictory half-century will be essential reading for an understanding of the Romantic movement.