Romanticism was born as a reaction against the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Romanticism is identified by a focus on emotion, imagination, and individualism, as well as a rejection of the rationalism and restraint of the Enlightenment. It also placed a strong importance on creative freedom and individual expression, as well as a celebration of nature and the wonders of the natural world. Romantic artists explored the sublime through paintings of the imagination, which could often turn into nightmares, and natural landscapes, which were mighty and beautiful but always dangerous. Romanticism first showed itself in landscape painting, where from as early as the 1760s British artists began to turn to wilder landscapes and storms, and gothic architecture, even if they had to make do with Wales as a setting. Caspar David Friederich and J.M.W. Turner were born less than a year apart in 1774 and 1775 respectively and were to take German and English landscape painting to their extremes of Romanticism.
Characteristics of romanticism:
- Emotion
- Individualism
- Nature
- Celebration of isolation
- Emphasis on women
- High imagination
- Romanticism
- Emphasis on aesthetic beauty
- Celebration of artistic and creativity and imagination
Sublime
The Sublime is a western aesthetic concept of ‘the exalted’ of ‘beauty that is grand and dangerous’. The Sublime refers to the wild, unbounded grandeur of nature. Theory began with Edmund Burke in the mid eighteenth century, where he defined sublime art as art that refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation.
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What is Romanticism technique?
One technique employed by many Romantic painters was the use of small, close strokes of complementary colours to create brilliance and vivid visual effect. This approach become later followed with the aid of using the Impressionists, who introduced their very own interpretation of the method.
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