Origins
Romanticism was a movement in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe and America (Linduff et al., 2005). It was initially defined as an aesthetic in literary criticism, but became recognizable as an important artistic movement by the early 1800s (Galitz, 2004). Romanticism peaked from roughly 1800 to 1840 (Wikipedia, 2012), but its impact on art is evidenced throughout the nineteenth century.
Romanticism developed on the heels of the French Revolution of 1789 as a response to the disillusionment with Enlightenment values of reason and order (Galitz, 2004). According to Eric Newton (1962), the movement was not so much a discovery of Romanticism, but a conversion to it. By the end of the eighteenth century, artists had grown weary of the Enlightenment’s emphasis on the supremacy of reason in human affairs (Viault, 1990). The Western world was being engulfed in a tedium of reason, industrialism, and scientific rationalization, from which Romanticism offered a respite (Wikipedia, 2012).
Neoclassicism retained influence as an art movement into the nineteenth century, but Romanticism emerged to challenge the Neoclassical style and its belief that art should express universal truths (Linduff et al., 2005). Romanticism rebelled against the formalism of Neoclassical composition and the rigid rules Neoclassicism applied to the creative process (Viault, 1990).
While Romanticism is generally considered the antithesis to Neoclassicism, it was shaped largely by painters trained in formal Neoclassical studios—particularly students of Jacques-Louis David in France (Galitz, 1990). Ingres, the most famous student of David, was generally characterized as a defender of classical values and considered the last Neoclassical painter (Pioch, 2002). Such a simple account, however, is inaccurate. Ingres initially rejected the lessons of David. He ultimately returned to Neoclassical values in his work, but not until he had laid the foundation for the “emotive expression” of Romanticism (Harris & Zucker, n.d.b, para. 2). Even Théodore Géricault depicted a Neoclassical mastery of the athletic nude form in his quintessential romantic painting, Raft of the Medusa (Crow, Lukacher, Nochlin, Phillips, & Pohl, F, 2007).
Because of the French Academies’ deeply rooted Neoclassical traditions, Romantic painting was not taught formally there until 1863. As such, Romantic painting had a more difficult time establishing itself in France than other European countries. However, history paintings that propagandized the Napoleon regime in the first two decades of the 1800s helped Romanticism to gain a foothold in France. Politically themed history painting remained a focus of French Romantic painting even after the time of Napoleon (Wikipedia, 2012).
