Romanticism is a movement within Western painting between the end of the eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth century with an emphasis on imagination and subjective expression. There is a lot of room for the artist's intuition and imagination. This sometimes led to works of art with a poetic atmosphere, hinting at sentimentality. Wild mountains and deserted ruins. Nothing as overwhelming as a Romantic landscape. The best-known Romantic artists include the German Caspar David Friedrich, the English landscape painter John Constable and Wiliam Turner and the French Eugène Delacroix and Théodore Géricault. However, their mutual differences are exemplary of the diversity of Romanticism. Romanticism was especially noticeable in the arts, especially in literature, visual arts and music. But philosophy and religion were also influenced by it. Romanticism was a strong reaction to the ideals of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century.

Friedrich, de Wanderer

Romanticism, as mentioned, could be seen in all art forms. In music, Romanticism is periodized differently, namely between 1815 and 1910. The Romantic period in classical music ended in the violence of the First World War. The great herald of classical romantic music was Ludwig van Beethoven. After this, more classical composers emerged who gave Romanticism a sound: A symphony. Franz Schubert, Josef Anton Bruckner and Gustav Mahler, among others, composed increasingly grand and complex works.

The Romanticism movement did not emerge overnight around 1800. Advocates of "modernity" began to question the sustainability of classicist norms. It was about "the beautiful" based on one's own taste. Neoclassical artists predominantly strive for an impersonal, pure style that expresses the eternal and universal. Romantics, on the other hand, work from their personal inner world of feelings and ideals. But both movements idealized the image. The sketch, which was previously seen as an unimportant preliminary study, gained a higher status during the Romantic period as a spontaneous art expression that made the artist's individual handwriting visible through the looser use of material.

General characteristics of Romanticism

• Individualism & Weltschmerz
• Against the Enlightenment ideals
• Escapism & longing for nature
• Mystical-religious elements.
• Emphasis on the national past

The cradle of the romantic school was around the year 1800 in Germany, which was searching for its own identity after the conquest by Napoleon. Nationalism, subjectivism (brothers von Schlegel, the individualism of Goethe, the mystical philosophy of Hegel and the nostalgia of Novalis were sources of inspiration. The latter wrote the sentence: 'Die Welt muß romantisiert werden.'

Painting, philosophy and literature were closely intertwined in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century. Unlike the French artists of the Romantic period, the German Romantics maintained close contacts with poets and philosophers. They turned against the rational ideas of the French Enlightenment about art, nature, religion and reason. German Romanticism was strongly influenced by the nationalist ideas of the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. Caspar David Friedrich said: "Just as the believer prays without speaking a word, and God still lends him an ear, so the artist paints from true feeling, and the art lover understands it, recognizes it." It was the subjective experience of nature, sometimes as an almost divine experience.

Romantics in England

In England, Romanticism was part of a cultural heritage dating back to William Shakespeare. Through psychologizing literary works by John Milton and Edward Young, this tradition led to an increased attention to the imaginary, the historical and especially to the fantastic at the end of the eighteenth century. The exhibition of Henry Fuseli's demonic painting The Nightmare in 1781 proved to be a landmark moment. After that, it was mainly the landscape art of John Constable, among others, that gained the upper hand in England, also as a counterbalance to industrialization. His work was strongly atmospheric and filled with nostalgia, but more realistic, more "of this world". William Turner worked even more experimentally and had an even lighter brushwork and is called the painter of light. With his later mysterious motifs, dissolved in light and color, he acquired a special place in English Romanticism, which would later influence the Impressionists.

Romantics in France

In France, romantic thinking was first inspired by the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who with his call "back to nature". After the French Revolution and during the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte, attention for nature quickly shifted to historical themes and the glorification of the emperor himself. This decreed a neoclassical style, later called Empire style, with Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres as figurehead. However, the dominance of neoclassicism soon gave rise to a counter-movement, which returned to romantic ideals. It was not until the 1820s that Romanticism would more or less "triumph" over Neoclassicism in France.

Belgian Romanticism reached its peak during the reign of Leopold I (1831-1865) and was mainly dominated by history painting. Gustaaf Wappers and Antoine Wiertz were strongly inspired by the baroque work of Pieter Paul Rubens and Antoon van Dyck. Thematically, Wappers and Wiertz focused mainly on Flemish history. Landscapes hardly occur in Belgian Romanticism. Here too, attention is paid to the struggle and revolution against the Netherlands.

Gustave Wappers: De Septemberdays 1830 at the Great Market, Brussel

Symbolism and Expressionism followed