c. 1790–1850

Romanticism

Around 1800, poets and painters rebelled against the cool reason of the Enlightenment. They sought feeling, the infinite and the sublime, and found them in mist, mountains, sea and night. Romanticism made landscape a mirror of the soul and the artist a solitary seer.

A monk before the void

Autumn 1810, the exhibition of the Berlin Academy. One picture unsettled visitors: at the bottom edge a tiny figure stands on a strip of dune; behind it lie an almost black sea and a vast, empty sky. No ships, no trees, nothing for the eye to hold on to. The Dresden painter Caspar David Friedrich had created The Monk by the Sea, one of the most radical pictures of its time.

A review appeared in the Berliner Abendblätter, written by Heinrich von Kleist on the basis of a text by Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim. Standing before the picture, he wrote, was “as if one’s eyelids had been cut away”. At the request of the young crown prince, the Prussian king bought the picture together with its companion piece, The Abbey in the Oakwood. Both now hang in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

A term from literature

Romanticism began as a literary movement. Around 1798, the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel set out, in their journal Athenaeum, the programme of a “Romantic poetry” that would unite art, philosophy and life. Novalis wrote: “The world must be romanticised.” He meant giving the ordinary a mysterious, infinite meaning.

For painting, a concept from philosophy became central: the sublime. In 1757 the Irishman Edmund Burke had described it as the feeling of terror and grandeur in the face of storms, abysses or endless spaces. Romantic painters sought exactly this feeling.

Germany: landscape as devotion

Caspar David Friedrich did not paint landscapes to show a place. His pictures are meditations on life, death and faith. Typical are his figures seen from behind, who gaze into the distance as we do, such as the Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. Friedrich composed his pictures in the studio from studies of different places, so they do not show a real view.

In Hamburg, Philipp Otto Runge devised a world view of plants, children and light in his Times of Day. In Vienna in 1809, young painters around Friedrich Overbeck founded the Brotherhood of St Luke. They moved to Rome, lived in an empty monastery and sought to renew religious art on the model of the Middle Ages and Raphael. Their opponents mockingly called them the “Nazarenes”.

England: light and atmosphere

In England, J. M. W. Turner and John Constable took very different paths. Constable painted the landscape of his native Suffolk with close observation of clouds and weather. His Hay Wain won a gold medal at the Paris Salon of 1824 and deeply impressed French painters. Turner dissolved ships, storms and railways into light and coloured haze. Rain, Steam and Speed of 1844 shows a locomotive hurtling towards us out of the mist, an image of modern technology and its force. At the same time, the poet and painter William Blake created an idiosyncratic body of work made of visions and myths.

France: drama and revolution

In France, Romanticism took the form of a painting of passion and political drama. At the Salon of 1819, Théodore Géricault exhibited The Raft of the Medusa, a huge picture of the survivors of an 1816 shipwreck whose circumstances had caused a scandal over incompetence and cover-up. For his studies he even drew the dying in hospitals.

After the July Revolution of 1830, Eugène Delacroix painted Liberty Leading the People: a bare-breasted female figure with the tricolour, striding forward over barricades and the fallen. His luminous, animated colour became the counterpoint to the clear line championed by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Neoclassicism.

Spain: Goya and the dark side

Francisco de Goya, court painter in Madrid, showed the dark side of reason. In his 1799 series of etchings Los Caprichos, one plate is titled “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters”. Between 1819 and 1823 he painted the walls of his country house with the so-called Black Paintings, sombre visions of violence and madness that now hang in the Prado. Goya belongs to no school, but he is regarded as one of the great pioneers of modern art.

Forgotten, rediscovered, misused

After his death in 1840, Friedrich was largely forgotten. Only the Berlin Centenary Exhibition of 1906 made him known again. Under National Socialism he was claimed as a “German” painter, which long burdened his reception. For his 250th birthday in 2024, Hamburg, Berlin and Dresden mounted major exhibitions, followed in 2025 by the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

Women also worked as painters in the Romantic era, although the academies were mostly closed to them. Louise Seidler, for example, worked in Weimar and was a friend of Goethe; Marie Ellenrieder became court painter in Baden.

Why it still matters

Romanticism gave art the right to be subjective. What counted was no longer the rule but the artist’s feeling. In this way it prepared the ground for modernism, from Turner’s dissolved light, which the Impressionists admired, to Friedrich’s empty spaces, in which some art historians see an anticipation of the abstract painting of the 20th century.