Romantic Style

Romantic paintings validate strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror, terror and awe — especially that which is experienced in confronting sublime untamed nature and its picturesque qualities. Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution. Romanticism revived medievalism in an attempt to escape the confines of population growth, urban sprawl, scientific rationalization and industrialism, and it also attempted to embrace the exotic, unfamiliar and distant, harnessing the power of the imagination to escape. The movement appealed to the revolutionary spirit as well as to those longing to break free of strict religious traditions.

Romantic Painters