Romanticism

Caspar David Friedrich, The wanderer above the sea of fog (1818)

Romanticism was an innovative artistic, musical, and literary movement in the early 1800s which emphasized feelings, and nature. The Romantic period of art was also a period of rebirth for religious values. Romanticism opposed elements of the Enlightenment that emphasized rationalism at the expense of human emotion and imagination. In writing, Romanticism elevated the common man, nationalism, freedom, and the supernatural, while also glorifying nature. In music, the Russian composer Tchaikovsky epitomized this movement.

The term "Romanticism" was coined because it originated in European regions of the "Romance Languages," namely French, Spanish and Italian. Novelist Victor Hugo led this movement in Europe with his works readable by the common man. German and British Romanticism followed soon after. Other countries such as America and Canada also had Romantic art movements.

American literature typifying this era include Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Edgar Allan Poe's writings, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Even inventors including Samuel Morse, who originated the Morse code, were inspired by Romanticism.

Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) was perhaps the most important of the French Romantic painters; in English literature, the Lyrical Ballads (1798), poems co-authored by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an early example of this movement.

Romanticism notably had different subgenres, as Dark Romanticists like Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne notably emphasized the grotesque and Gothic themes more in their literature.

La Favorita by Antonio Fabrés y Costa.

John William Waterhouse's The Lady of Shalott, 1888.

Chassériau, Othello and Desdemona in Venice.

## Contents

* 1 Key Artists
* 2 Key Authors
* 3 In Literature
* 4 See also
* 5 External links

## Key Artists[edit]

Philippe Jacques De Loutherbourg, The Falls of the Rhine at Schaffhausen, 1788.

* William Blake
* Henry Fuseli
* Francisco de Goya
* Eugene Delacroix
* Theodore Chasseriau
* William Turner
* John Constable
* Philippe Jacques De Loutherbourg

Adrian Ludwig Richter, Genoveva in the Forest Seclusion, 1841.

## Key Authors[edit]

* Ralph Waldo Emerson
* Walt Whitman
* Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
* E.T.A. Hoffmann
* Percy Bysshe Shelley
* Mary Shelley
* Sir Walter Scott
* Edgar Allan Poe
* Henry David Thoreau
* Herman Melville
* Nathaniel Hawthorne
* William Wordsworth
* John Keats

## In Literature[edit]

It evoked the past and emphasized women and children, mostly because of their purity, as well as romantic love, idealism and nationalism – as found, for example, in Goethe's works.

## See also[edit]

* Painting Schools
* Romantic paintings
* History of painting
* Gallery Francisco de Goya

## External links[edit]

* Romanticism Art History Archive
* Romanticism