ROMANTICISM

Although the seeds of Romanticism were sown in the visionary paintings of Blake and Fuseli, it was only at the turn of the 19th century that artists such as Caspar David Friedrich, J.M.W. Turner, and to some extent John Constable, began to depict wild landscapes and seascapes which suggested “a longing for the unbounded and the undefinable” (Isaiah Berlin, 1965). Human beings, in these paintings, are insignificant compared to nature which, contrary to the teachings of the Enlightenment, cannot be dominated. In the United States these ideas were embraced Hudson River School artists such as Thomas Cole (1801-1848) and Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900). The roots of Romanticism in France lay in historical paintings commissioned to celebrate Napoleon’s victories, but within a few decades artists such as Théodore Gericault (1791-1824) and Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) were producing more critical works. The mid-19th century British Pre-Raphaelite movement also held to a Romantic conception of nature and individual expression, but its primary concern was to reject the classical tradition which artists such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) traced back to Raphael.