Romanticism has very little to do with things popularly thought of as "romantic," although love may occasionally be the subject of Romantic art. Rather, it is an international artistic and philosophical movement that redefined the fundamental ways in which people in Western cultures thought about themselves and about their world.
Casper David Friedrich 'Wanderer above a sea of fog'
As an intellectual and aesthetic phenomenon, Romanticism dominated cultural thought from the last decade of the 18th century well into the first decades of the 20th century. From its earliest manifestations in Germany with the "Sturm und Drang" Movement of the 1770's to its vibrant first flowering in England in the 1790's to its importation to American soil from the 1820's onward, Romanticism has exerted a powerful hold on Western thought and culture.
In aesthetic terms this individuality translated into the revolution of feeling against form - the rejection of classical equipoise in favor of Romantic asymmetry. Romantic poets, painters, and musicians ceased struggling to make the expression fit conventional forms and boldly carved out new forms to encase their expression and thought. Ever-striving, ever in flux, the Romantic Soul required an equally dynamic new language to make itself understood.
The Age of Enlightenment, as the 18th century was named for its emphasis on reason and its optimistic faith in a perfectible material and spiritual universe, immolated itself in the flames of the revolutions which closed that century. And as Europe and America arose, phoenix-like from the ashes, a bold new vision had taken hold. The birth of Romanticism is also the birth of the modern.
The Enlightenment emphasized the primacy of deductive reason, Romanticism emphasized intuition, imagination and feeling. Romanticism focuses on Nature; a place free from society's judgement and restrictions.
John William Waterhouse 'The Lady of Shallot' 1888
Romanticism, more than anything else, is the cult of the individual - the cultural and psychological nativity of the I - the Self - the inner spark of divinity that links one human being to another and all human beings to the Larger Truth. In poetry, visual art, and music, artists became increasingly preoccupied with articulating the personal experience that becomes, in turn, a representative one. The Poet--the artist in all his various incarnations--takes on quasi-religious status not only as prophet and moral leader, but also as a divinely inspired vehicle through which Nature and the common man find their voices.
The image above and the ones below were painted by Casper David Friedrich. The visualisation and portrayal of landscape in an entirely new manner was Friedrich's key innovation. He sought not just to explore the blissful enjoyment of a beautiful view, as in the classic conception, but rather to examine an instant of sublimity, a reunion with the spiritual self through the contemplation of nature. Friedrich was instrumental in transforming landscape in art from a backdrop subordinated to human drama to a self-contained emotive subject. Friedrich's paintings commonly employed the Rückenfigur—a person seen from behind, contemplating the view. The viewer is encouraged to place himself in the position of the Rückenfigur, by which means he experiences the sublime potential of nature, understanding that the scene is as perceived and idealised by a human.
Friedrich created the notion of a landscape full of romantic feeling. His art details a wide range of geographical features, such as rock coasts, forests, and mountain scenes. He often used the landscape to express religious themes. During his time, most of the best-known paintings were viewed as expressions of a religious mysticism.
Below it is possible to see how Friedrich's ideas, both compositional and with regards to the concept of the sublime influenced artists in the 20th Century.
Embracing the unknown and unafraid of the contraries of human existence, the Romantics overthrew the philosophical, artistic - even geographical - limitations of the Enlightenment. The quintessential Romantic figure was the Wanderer, literally and figuratively journeying in search of new lands, new places in the imagination, and new vistas for the soul. Exotic lands, the amorphous world of dreams, the dark terrors of the psyche as well as the dizzying heights of creativity and the dazzling beauties of Nature - these were all waystations along the Romantic quester's route.
For the Romantic, Nature was, indeed, a constant companion and teacher - both benign and tyrannical. She became the stage on which the human drama was played, the context in which man came to understand his place in the universe, the transforming agent which harmonized the individual soul with what the Transcendentalists would call the Over-Soul. Throughout all of Romantic literature, music, and art, Nature is a dynamic presence, a character who speaks in a language of symbols at once mysterious and anthropomorphic. who engages man in a dialogue with the life-force, itself.
Realism: The Return to the Real
Realism in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects "in accordance with secular, empirical rules", as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation. As such, the approach inherently implies a belief that such reality is ontologically independent of man's conceptual schemes, linguistic practices and beliefs, and thus can be known (or knowable) to the artist, who can in turn represent this 'reality' faithfully. Modern realism "begins from the position that truth can be discovered by the individual through the senses" and as such "it has its origins in Descarts and Locke, and received its first full formulation by Thomas Reid in the middle of the eighteenth century."
Courbet painted figurative compositions, landscapes, seascapes, and still lifes. He courted controversy by addressing social issues in his work, and by painting subjects that were considered vulgar, such as the rural bourgeoisie, peasants and working conditions of the poor. His work belonged neither to the predominant Romantic nor Neoclasical schools. History painting, which the Paris Salon esteemed as a painter's highest calling, did not interest Courbet, who stated that "the artists of one century [are] basically incapable of reproducing the aspect of a past or future century" ... Instead, he believed that the only possible source for a living art is the artist's own experience.
His work, along with the work of Jean-François Mille, became known as Realism. For Courbet realism dealt not with the perfection of line and form, but entailed spontaneous and rough handling of paint, suggesting direct observation by the artist while portraying the irregularities in nature. He depicted the harshness in life, and in so doing challenged contemporary academic ideas of art.
Jean-François Millet
John Singer Sargent
Edgar Degas
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