Romanticism

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818

Eugène Delacroix, Death of Sardanapalus, 1827, taking its Orientalist subject from a play by Lord
Byron

Philipp Otto Runge, The Morning, 1808

Romanticism (also known as the Romantic
movement or Romantic era) was an artistic and intellectual
movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th
century. In most parts of Europe it was at its peak from
approximately 1800 to 1850. Romanticism was characterized by
its emphasis on emotion and individualism, clandestine literature,
and paganism. Romantic thinkers idealized nature, were often
suspicious of industrialization and rationalism, and frequently
glorified the Middle Ages (as well as other, earlier periods) by
depicting them in moralistic, idealized forms. Romanticism was
[1]

partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, and the prevailing

[2]

ideology of the Age of Enlightenment, especially the scientific

rationalization of Nature. It was embodied most strongly in the
[3]

visual arts, music, and literature; it also had a major impact

on historiography, education, chess, social sciences and
[4] [5]

the natural sciences. It had a significant and complex effect on

[6]

politics: Romantic thinking

influenced conservatism, liberalism, radicalism and nationalism. [7][8]

The movement emphasized intense emotion as an authentic

source of aesthetic experience. It granted a new importance to
experiences of sympathy, awe, wonder, and terror, in part by
naturalizing such emotions as responses to the "beautiful" and
the "sublime." Romantics stressed the nobility of folk art and
[9][10]

ancient cultural practices, but also championed radical politics,

unconventional behavior, and authentic spontaneity. In contrast
to the rationalism and classicism of the Enlightenment,
Romanticism revived medievalism and juxtaposed a pastoral
[11]

conception of a more "authentic" European past with a highly

critical view of recent social changes, including urbanization,
brought about by the Industrial Revolution.
Many Romantic ideals were first articulated by German thinkers
in the Sturm und Drang movement, which elevated intuition and
emotion above Enlightenment rationalism. The events and
[12]

ideologies of the French Revolution were also direct influences

on the movement; many early Romantics throughout Europe
sympathized with the ideals and achievements of French
revolutionaries. Romanticism lionized the achievements of
[13]

"heroic" individuals -- especially artists, who began to be

represented as cultural leaders (one Romantic luminary, Percy
Bysshe Shelley, described poets as the "unacknowledged
legislators of the world" in his "Defence of Poetry"). Romanticism
also prioritized the artist's unique, individual imagination above
the strictures of classical form. In the second half of the 19th
century, Realism emerged as a response to Romanticism, and
was in some ways a reaction against it. Romanticism suffered an
overall decline during this period, as it was overshadowed by new
cultural, social, and political movements, many of them hostile to
the perceived illusions and preoccupations of the Romantics.
However, it has had a lasting impact on Western civilization, and
many "Romantic," "neo-Romantic," and "post-Romantic" artists
and thinkers created their most enduring works after the end of
the Romantic Era as such.

Defining Romanticism[edit]
Basic characteristics[edit]
The nature of Romanticism may be approached from the primary
importance of the free expression of the feelings of the artist. The
importance the Romantics placed on emotion is summed up in
the remark of the German painter Caspar David Friedrich, "the
artist's feeling is his law". For William Wordsworth, poetry
[14]

should begin as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings",

which the poet then "recollect[s] in tranquility", evoking a new but
corresponding emotion the poet can then mould into art. [15]

To express these feelings, it was considered that content of art

had to come from the imagination of the artist, with as little
interference as possible from "artificial" rules dictating what a
work should consist of. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and others
believed there were natural laws the imagination—at least of a
good creative artist—would unconsciously follow through artistic
inspiration if left alone. As well as rules, the influence of models
[16]

from other works was considered to impede the creator's own

imagination, so that originality was essential. The concept of
the genius, or artist who was able to produce his own original
work through this process of creation from nothingness, is key to
Romanticism, and to be derivative was the worst sin. This [17][18][19]

idea is often called "romantic originality". Translator and

[20]

prominent Romantic August Wilhelm Schlegel argued in

his Lectures on Dramatic Arts and Letters that the most
phenomenal power of human nature is its capacity to divide and
diverge into opposite directions. [21]

William Blake, The Little Girl Found, from Songs of Innocence and Experience, 1794

Not essential to Romanticism, but so widespread as to be

normative, was a strong belief and interest in the importance of
nature. This particularly in the effect of nature upon the artist
when he is surrounded by it, preferably alone. In contrast to the
usually very social art of the Enlightenment, Romantics were
distrustful of the human world, and tended to believe a close
connection with nature was mentally and morally healthy.
Romantic art addressed its audiences with what was intended to
be felt as the personal voice of the artist. So, in literature, "much
of romantic poetry invited the reader to identify the protagonists
with the poets themselves". [22]

According to Isaiah Berlin, Romanticism embodied "a new and

restless spirit, seeking violently to burst through old and cramping
forms, a nervous preoccupation with perpetually changing inner
states of consciousness, a longing for the unbounded and the
indefinable, for perpetual movement and change, an effort to
return to the forgotten sources of life, a passionate effort at self-
assertion both individual and collective, a search after means of
expressing an unappeasable yearning for unattainable goals". [23]

Etymology[edit]
The group of words with the root "Roman" in the various
European languages, such as "romance" and "Romanesque",
has a complicated history. By the 18th century, European
languages – notably German, French and Russian – were using
the term "Roman" in the sense of the English word "novel", i.e. a
work of popular narrative fiction. This usage derived from the
[24]
term "Romance languages", which referred to vernacular (or
popular) language in contrast to formal Latin. Most such novels
[24]

took the form of "chivalric romance", tales of adventure, devotion

and honour. [25]

The founders of Romanticism, critics August Wilhelm

Schlegel and Friedrich Schlegel, began to speak of romantische
Poesie ("romantic poetry") in the 1790s, contrasting it with
"classic" but in terms of spirit rather than merely dating. Friedrich
Schlegel wrote in his 1800 essay Gespräch über die
Poesie ("Dialogue on Poetry"): "I seek and find the romantic
among the older moderns, in Shakespeare, in Cervantes, in
Italian poetry, in that age of chivalry, love and fable, from which
the phenomenon and the word itself are derived." [26][27]

The modern sense of the term spread more widely in France by

its persistent use by Germaine de Staël in her De
l'Allemagne (1813), recounting her travels in Germany. In [28]

England Wordsworth wrote in a preface to his poems of 1815 of

the "romantic harp" and "classic lyre", but in 1820 Byron could
[28]

still write, perhaps slightly disingenuously, "I perceive that in

Germany, as well as in Italy, there is a great struggle about what
they call 'Classical' and 'Romantic', terms which were not
subjects of classification in England, at least when I left it four or
five years ago". It is only from the 1820s that Romanticism
[29]

certainly knew itself by its name, and in 1824 the Académie

française took the wholly ineffective step of issuing a decree
condemning it in literature.[30]

Period[edit]
The period typically called Romantic varies greatly between
different countries and different artistic media or areas of
thought. Margaret Drabble described it in literature as taking
place "roughly between 1770 and 1848", and few dates much
[31]

earlier than 1770 will be found. In English literature, M. H.

Abrams placed it between 1789, or 1798, this latter a very typical
view, and about 1830, perhaps a little later than some other
critics. Others have proposed 1780–1830. In other fields and
[32] [33]
other countries the period denominated as Romantic can be
considerably different; musical Romanticism, for example, is
generally regarded as only having ceased as a major artistic
force as late as 1910, but in an extreme extension the Four Last
Songs of Richard Strauss are described stylistically as "Late
Romantic" and were composed in 1946–48. However, in most
[34]

fields the Romantic period is said to be over by about 1850, or

earlier.
The early period of the Romantic era was a time of war, with the
French Revolution (1789–1799) followed by the Napoleonic
Wars until 1815. These wars, along with the political and social
turmoil that went along with them, served as the background for
Romanticism. The key generation of French Romantics born
[35]

between 1795 and 1805 had, in the words of one of their

number, Alfred de Vigny, been "conceived between battles,
attended school to the rolling of drums". According to Jacques
[36]

Barzun, there were three generations of Romantic artists. The

first emerged in the 1790s and 1800s, the second in the 1820s,
and the third later in the century.
[37]

Context and place in history[edit]

The more precise characterization and specific definition of
Romanticism has been the subject of debate in the fields
of intellectual history and literary history throughout the 20th
century, without any great measure of consensus emerging. That
it was part of the Counter-Enlightenment, a reaction against
the Age of Enlightenment, is generally accepted in current
scholarship. Its relationship to the French Revolution, which
began in 1789 in the very early stages of the period, is clearly
important, but highly variable depending on geography and
individual reactions. Most Romantics can be said to be broadly
progressive in their views, but a considerable number always
had, or developed, a wide range of conservative views, and
[38]

nationalism was in many countries strongly associated with

Romanticism, as discussed in detail below.
In philosophy and the history of ideas, Romanticism was seen by
Isaiah Berlin as disrupting for over a century the classic Western
traditions of rationality and the idea of moral absolutes and
agreed values, leading "to something like the melting away of the
very notion of objective truth", and hence not only to
[39]

nationalism, but also fascism and totalitarianism, with a gradual

recovery coming only after World War II. For the Romantics,
[40]

Berlin says,
in the realm of ethics, politics, aesthetics it was the authenticity
and sincerity of the pursuit of inner goals that mattered; this
applied equally to individuals and groups—states, nations,
movements. This is most evident in the aesthetics of
romanticism, where the notion of eternal models, a Platonic vision
of ideal beauty, which the artist seeks to convey, however
imperfectly, on canvas or in sound, is replaced by a passionate
belief in spiritual freedom, individual creativity. The painter, the
poet, the composer do not hold up a mirror to nature, however
ideal, but invent; they do not imitate (the doctrine of mimesis), but
create not merely the means but the goals that they pursue;
these goals represent the self-expression of the artist's own
unique, inner vision, to set aside which in response to the
demands of some "external" voice—church, state, public opinion,
family friends, arbiters of taste—is an act of betrayal of what
alone justifies their existence for those who are in any sense
creative. [41]

John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott, 1888, after a poem by Tennyson; like
many Victorian paintings, romantic but not Romantic.

Arthur Lovejoy attempted to demonstrate the difficulty of defining

Romanticism in his seminal article "On The Discrimination of
Romanticisms" in his Essays in the History of Ideas (1948); some
scholars see Romanticism as essentially continuous with the
present, some like Robert Hughes see in it the inaugural moment
of modernity, and some like Chateaubriand, Novalis and
[42]

Samuel Taylor Coleridge see it as the beginning of a tradition of

resistance to Enlightenment rationalism—a "Counter-
Enlightenment"— to be associated most closely with German
[43][44]

Romanticism. An earlier definition comes from Charles

Baudelaire: "Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice
of subject nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling."
[45]

The end of the Romantic era is marked in some areas by a new

style of Realism, which affected literature, especially the novel
and drama, painting, and even music, through Verismo opera.
This movement was led by France, with Balzac and Flaubert in
literature and Courbet in painting; Stendhal and Goya were
important precursors of Realism in their respective media.
However, Romantic styles, now often representing the
established and safe style against which Realists rebelled,
continued to flourish in many fields for the rest of the century and
beyond. In music such works from after about 1850 are referred
to by some writers as "Late Romantic" and by others as
"Neoromantic" or "Postromantic", but other fields do not usually
use these terms; in English literature and painting the convenient
term "Victorian" avoids having to characterise the period further.
In northern Europe, the Early Romantic visionary optimism and
belief that the world was in the process of great change and
improvement had largely vanished, and some art became more
conventionally political and polemical as its creators engaged
polemically with the world as it was. Elsewhere, including in very
different ways the United States and Russia, feelings that great
change was underway or just about to come were still possible.
Displays of intense emotion in art remained prominent, as did the
exotic and historical settings pioneered by the Romantics, but
experimentation with form and technique was generally reduced,
often replaced with meticulous technique, as in the poems of
Tennyson or many paintings. If not realist, late 19th-century art
was often extremely detailed, and pride was taken in adding
authentic details in a way that earlier Romantics did not trouble
with. Many Romantic ideas about the nature and purpose of art,
above all the pre-eminent importance of originality, remained
important for later generations, and often underlie modern views,
despite opposition from theorists.

Literature[edit]
See also: Romantic poetry

Henry Wallis, The Death of Chatterton 1856, by suicide at 17 in 1770

In literature, Romanticism found recurrent themes in the

evocation or criticism of the past, the cult of "sensibility" with its
emphasis on women and children, the isolation of the artist or
narrator, and respect for nature. Furthermore, several romantic
authors, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Maturin and Nathaniel
Hawthorne, based their writings on the supernatural/occult and
human psychology. Romanticism tended to regard satire as
something unworthy of serious attention, a view still influential
today. The Romantic movement in literature was preceded by
[46]

the Enlightenment and succeeded by Realism.

Some authors cite 16th-century poet Isabella di Morra as an early
precursor of Romantic literature. Her lyrics covering themes of
isolation and loneliness, which reflected the tragic events of her
life, are considered "an impressive prefigurement of
Romanticism", differing from the Petrarchist fashion of the time
[47]

based on the philosophy of love.

The precursors of Romanticism in English poetry go back to the
middle of the 18th century, including figures such as Joseph
Warton (headmaster at Winchester College) and his
brother Thomas Warton, Professor of Poetry at Oxford
University. Joseph maintained that invention and imagination
[48]
were the chief qualities of a poet. The Scottish poet James
Macpherson influenced the early development of Romanticism
with the international success of his Ossian cycle of poems
published in 1762, inspiring both Goethe and the young Walter
Scott. Thomas Chatterton is generally considered the first
Romantic poet in English. Both Chatterton and Macpherson's
[49]

work involved elements of fraud, as what they claimed was earlier

literature that they had discovered or compiled was, in fact,
entirely their own work. The Gothic novel, beginning with Horace
Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), was an important
precursor of one strain of Romanticism, with a delight in horror
and threat, and exotic picturesque settings, matched in Walpole's
case by his role in the early revival of Gothic
architecture. Tristram Shandy, a novel by Laurence
Sterne (1759–67), introduced a whimsical version of the anti-
rational sentimental novel to the English literary public.
Germany[edit]

Title page of Volume III of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, 1808

An early German influence came from Johann Wolfgang von

Goethe, whose 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther had
young men throughout Europe emulating its protagonist, a young
artist with a very sensitive and passionate temperament. At that
time Germany was a multitude of small separate states, and
Goethe's works would have a seminal influence in developing a
unifying sense of nationalism. Another philosophic
[citation needed]

influence came from the German idealism of Johann Gottlieb

Fichte and Friedrich Schelling, making Jena (where Fichte lived,
as well as Schelling, Hegel, Schiller and the brothers Schlegel) a
centre for early German Romanticism (see Jena Romanticism).
Important writers were Ludwig Tieck, Novalis, Heinrich von
Kleist and Friedrich Hölderlin. Heidelberg later became a centre
of German Romanticism, where writers and poets such
as Clemens Brentano, Achim von Arnim, and Joseph Freiherr
von Eichendorff (Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts) met
regularly in literary circles. [citation needed]

Important motifs in German Romanticism are travelling, nature,

for example the German Forest, and Germanic myths. The later
German Romanticism of, for example E. T. A. Hoffmann's Der
Sandmann (The Sandman), 1817, and Joseph Freiherr von
Eichendorff's Das Marmorbild (The Marble Statue), 1819, was
darker in its motifs and has gothic elements. The significance to
Romanticism of childhood innocence, the importance of
imagination, and racial theories all combined to give an
unprecedented importance to folk literature, non-
classical mythology and children's literature, above all in
Germany. Brentano and von Arnim were significant literary
[citation needed]

figures who together published Des Knaben Wunderhorn ("The

Boy's Magic Horn" or cornucopia), a collection of versified folk
tales, in 1806–08. The first collection of Grimms' Fairy Tales by
the Brothers Grimm was published in 1812. Unlike the much[50]

later work of Hans Christian Andersen, who was publishing his

invented tales in Danish from 1835, these German works were at
least mainly based on collected folk tales, and the Grimms
remained true to the style of the telling in their early editions,
though later rewriting some parts. One of the brothers, Jacob,
published in 1835 Deutsche Mythologie, a long academic work
on Germanic mythology. Another strain is exemplified by
[51]

Schiller's highly emotional language and the depiction of physical

violence in his play The Robbers of 1781.
Great Britain[edit]
Main article: Romantic literature in English
William Wordsworth (pictured) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge helped to launch the Romantic Age in
English literature in 1798 with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads

In English literature, the key figures of the Romantic movement

are considered to be the group of poets including William
Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Lord
Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and the much older William Blake,
followed later by the isolated figure of John Clare; also such
novelists as Walter Scott from Scotland and Mary Shelley, and
the essayists William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb. The publication
in 1798 of Lyrical Ballads, with many of the finest poems by
Wordsworth and Coleridge, is often held to mark the start of the
movement. The majority of the poems were by Wordsworth, and
many dealt with the lives of the poor in his native Lake District, or
his feelings about nature—which he more fully developed in his
long poem The Prelude, never published in his lifetime. The
longest poem in the volume was Coleridge's The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner, which showed the Gothic side of English
Romanticism, and the exotic settings that many works featured.
In the period when they were writing, the Lake Poets were widely
regarded as a marginal group of radicals, though they were
supported by the critic and writer William Hazlitt and others.
Portrait of Lord Byron by Thomas Phillips, c. 1813. The Byronic hero first reached the wider public
in Byron's semi-autobiographical epic narrative poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812–1818).

In contrast, Lord Byron and Walter Scott achieved enormous

fame and influence throughout Europe with works exploiting the
violence and drama of their exotic and historical
settings; Goethe called Byron "undoubtedly the greatest genius
[52]

of our century". Scott achieved immediate success with his long

[53]

narrative poem The Lay of the Last Minstrel in 1805, followed by

the full epic poem Marmion in 1808. Both were set in the distant
Scottish past, already evoked in Ossian; Romanticism and
Scotland were to have a long and fruitful partnership. Byron had
equal success with the first part of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in
1812, followed by four "Turkish tales", all in the form of long
poems, starting with The Giaour in 1813, drawing from his Grand
Tour, which had reached Ottoman Europe, and orientalizing the
themes of the Gothic novel in verse. These featured different
variations of the "Byronic hero", and his own life contributed a
further version. Scott meanwhile was effectively inventing
the historical novel, beginning in 1814 with Waverley, set in
the 1745 Jacobite rising, which was a highly profitable success,
followed by over 20 further Waverley Novels over the next 17
years, with settings going back to the Crusades that he had
researched to a degree that was new in literature. [54]

In contrast to Germany, Romanticism in English literature had

little connection with nationalism, and the Romantics were often
regarded with suspicion for the sympathy many felt for the ideals
of the French Revolution, whose collapse and replacement with
the dictatorship of Napoleon was, as elsewhere in Europe, a
shock to the movement. Though his novels celebrated Scottish
identity and history, Scott was politically a firm Unionist, but
admitted to Jacobite sympathies. Several Romantics spent much
time abroad, and a famous stay on Lake Geneva with Byron and
Shelley in 1816 produced the hugely influential
novel Frankenstein by Shelley's wife-to-be Mary Shelley and
the novella The Vampyre by Byron's doctor John William Polidori.
The lyrics of Robert Burns in Scotland, and Thomas Moore from
Ireland, reflected in different ways their countries and the
Romantic interest in folk literature, but neither had a fully
Romantic approach to life or their work.
Though they have modern critical champions such as György
Lukács, Scott's novels are today more likely to be experienced in
the form of the many operas that composers continued to base
on them over the following decades, such as Donizetti's Lucia di
Lammermoor and Vincenzo Bellini's I puritani (both 1835). Byron
is now most highly regarded for his short lyrics and his generally
unromantic prose writings, especially his letters, and his
unfinished satire Don Juan. Unlike many Romantics, Byron's
[55]

widely publicised personal life appeared to match his work, and

his death at 36 in 1824 from disease when helping the Greek
War of Independence appeared from a distance to be a suitably
Romantic end, entrenching his legend. Keats in 1821 and
[56]

Shelley in 1822 both died in Italy, Blake (at almost 70) in 1827,
and Coleridge largely ceased to write in the 1820s. Wordsworth
was by 1820 respectable and highly regarded, holding a
government sinecure, but wrote relatively little. In the discussion
of English literature, the Romantic period is often regarded as
finishing around the 1820s, or sometimes even earlier, although
many authors of the succeeding decades were no less committed
to Romantic values.
The most significant novelist in English during the peak Romantic
period, other than Walter Scott, was Jane Austen, whose
essentially conservative world-view had little in common with her
Romantic contemporaries, retaining a strong belief in decorum
and social rules, though critics such as Claudia L. Johnson have
detected tremors under the surface of many works, such
as Northanger Abbey (1817), Mansfield Park (1814)
and Persuasion (1817). But around the mid-century the
[57]

undoubtedly Romantic novels of the Yorkshire-based Brontë

family appeared. Most notably Charlotte's Jane
Eyre and Emily's Wuthering Heights, both published in 1847,
which also introduced more Gothic themes. While these two
novels were written and published after the Romantic period is
said to have ended, their novels were heavily influenced by
Romantic literature they had read as children.
Byron, Keats and Shelley all wrote for the stage, but with little
success in England, with Shelley's The Cenci perhaps the best
work produced, though that was not played in a public theatre in
England until a century after his death. Byron's plays, along with
dramatizations of his poems and Scott's novels, were much more
popular on the Continent, and especially in France, and through
these versions several were turned into operas, many still
performed today. If contemporary poets had little success on the
stage, the period was a legendary one for performances
of Shakespeare, and went some way to restoring his original
texts and removing the Augustan "improvements" to them. The
greatest actor of the period, Edmund Kean, restored the tragic
ending to King Lear; Coleridge said that, "Seeing him act was
[58]

like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning." [59]

Scotland[edit]
Main article: Romanticism in Scotland

Robert Burns in Alexander Nasmyth's portrait of 1787

Although after union with England in 1707 Scotland increasingly

adopted English language and wider cultural norms, its literature
developed a distinct national identity and began to enjoy an
international reputation. Allan Ramsay (1686–1758) laid the
foundations of a reawakening of interest in older Scottish
literature, as well as leading the trend for pastoral poetry, helping
to develop the Habbie stanza as a poetic form. James [60]

Macpherson (1736–96) was the first Scottish poet to gain an

international reputation. Claiming to have found poetry written by
the ancient bard Ossian, he published translations that acquired
international popularity, being proclaimed as a Celtic equivalent
of the Classical epics. Fingal, written in 1762, was speedily
translated into many European languages, and its appreciation of
natural beauty and treatment of the ancient legend has been
credited more than any single work with bringing about the
Romantic movement in European, and especially in German
literature, through its influence on Johann Gottfried von
Herder and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It was also
[61]

popularised in France by figures that

included Napoleon. Eventually it became clear that the poems
[62]

were not direct translations from Scottish Gaelic, but flowery

adaptations made to suit the aesthetic expectations of his
audience. [63]

Robert Burns (1759–96) and Walter Scott (1771–1832) were

highly influenced by the Ossian cycle. Burns, an Ayrshire poet
and lyricist, is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland
and a major influence on the Romantic movement. His poem
(and song) "Auld Lang Syne" is often sung at Hogmanay (the last
day of the year), and "Scots Wha Hae" served for a long time as
an unofficial national anthem of the country. Scott began as a
[64]

poet and also collected and published Scottish ballads. His first
prose work, Waverley in 1814, is often called the first historical
novel. It launched a highly successful career, with other
[65]

historical novels such as Rob Roy (1817), The Heart of

Midlothian (1818) and Ivanhoe (1820). Scott probably did more
than any other figure to define and popularise Scottish cultural
identity in the nineteenth century. Other major literary figures
[66]

connected with Romanticism include the poets and

novelists James Hogg (1770–1835), Allan Cunningham (1784–
1842) and John Galt (1779–1839). [67]
Raeburn's portrait of Walter Scott in 1822

Scotland was also the location of two of the most important

literary magazines of the era, The Edinburgh Review (founded in
1802) and Blackwood's Magazine (founded in 1817), which had a
major impact on the development of British literature and drama
in the era of Romanticism. Ian Duncan and Alex Benchimol
[68][69]

suggest that publications like the novels of Scott and these

magazines were part of a highly dynamic Scottish Romanticism
that by the early nineteenth century, caused Edinburgh to emerge
as the cultural capital of Britain and become central to a wider
formation of a "British Isles nationalism". [70]

Scottish "national drama" emerged in the early 1800s, as plays

with specifically Scottish themes began to dominate the Scottish
stage. Theatres had been discouraged by the Church of
Scotland and fears of Jacobite assemblies. In the later eighteenth
century, many plays were written for and performed by small
amateur companies and were not published and so most have
been lost. Towards the end of the century there were "closet
dramas", primarily designed to be read, rather than performed,
including work by Scott, Hogg, Galt and Joanna Baillie (1762–
1851), often influenced by the ballad tradition
and Gothic Romanticism. [71]

France[edit]
Main article: Romanticism in France
Romanticism was relatively late in developing in French literature,
more so than in the visual arts. The 18th-century precursor to
Romanticism, the cult of sensibility, had become associated with
the Ancien Régime, and the French Revolution had been more of
an inspiration to foreign writers than those experiencing it at first-
hand. The first major figure was François-René de
Chateaubriand, an aristocrat who had remained a royalist
throughout the Revolution, and returned to France from exile in
England and America under Napoleon, with whose regime he
had an uneasy relationship. His writings, all in prose, included
some fiction, such as his influential novella of exile René (1802),
which anticipated Byron in its alienated hero, but mostly
contemporary history and politics, his travels, a defence of
religion and the medieval spirit (Génie du christianisme, 1802),
and finally in the 1830s and 1840s his
enormous autobiography Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe ("Memoirs
from beyond the grave"). [72]

The "battle of Hernani" was fought nightly at the theatre in 1830: lithograph, by J. J. Grandville

After the Bourbon Restoration, French Romanticism developed in

the lively world of Parisian theatre, with productions
of Shakespeare, Schiller (in France a key Romantic author), and
adaptations of Scott and Byron alongside French authors, several
of whom began to write in the late 1820s. Cliques of pro- and
anti-Romantics developed, and productions were often
accompanied by raucous vocalizing by the two sides, including
the shouted assertion by one theatregoer in 1822 that
"Shakespeare, c'est l'aide-de-camp de Wellington"
("Shakespeare is Wellington's aide-de-camp"). Alexandre [73]

Dumas began as a dramatist, with a series of successes

beginning with Henri III et sa cour (1829) before turning to novels
that were mostly historical adventures somewhat in the manner of
Scott, most famously The Three Musketeers and The Count of
Monte Cristo, both of 1844. Victor Hugo published as a poet in
the 1820s before achieving success on the stage with Hernani—
a historical drama in a quasi-Shakespearian style that had
famously riotous performances on its first run in 1830. Like
[74]

Dumas, Hugo is best known for his novels, and was already
writing The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831), one of the best
known works, which became a paradigm of the French Romantic
movement. The preface to his unperformed play Cromwell gives
an important manifesto of French Romanticism, stating that
"there are no rules, or models". The career of Prosper
Mérimée followed a similar pattern; he is now best known as the
originator of the story of Carmen, with his novella published 1845.
Alfred de Vigny remains best known as a dramatist, with his play
on the life of the English poet Chatterton (1835) perhaps his best
work. George Sand was a central figure of the Parisian literary
scene, famous both for her novels and criticism and her affairs
with Chopin and several others; she too was inspired by the
[75]

theatre, and wrote works to be staged at her private estate.

French Romantic poets of the 1830s to 1850s include Alfred de
Musset, Gérard de Nerval, Alphonse de Lamartine and the
flamboyant Théophile Gautier, whose prolific output in various
forms continued until his death in 1872.
Stendhal is today probably the most highly regarded French
novelist of the period, but he stands in a complex relation with
Romanticism, and is notable for his penetrating psychological
insight into his characters and his realism, qualities rarely
prominent in Romantic fiction. As a survivor of the French retreat
from Moscow in 1812, fantasies of heroism and adventure had
little appeal for him, and like Goya he is often seen as a
forerunner of Realism. His most important works are Le Rouge et
le Noir (The Red and the Black, 1830) and La Chartreuse de
Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839).
Poland[edit]
Adam Mickiewicz on the Ayu-Dag, by Walenty Wańkowicz, 1828

Main article: Romanticism in Poland

Romanticism in Poland is often taken to begin with the
publication of Adam Mickiewicz's first poems in 1822, and end
with the crushing of the January Uprising of 1863 against the
Russians. It was strongly marked by interest in Polish
history. Polish Romanticism revived the old "Sarmatism"
[76]

traditions of the szlachta or Polish nobility. Old traditions and

customs were revived and portrayed in a positive light in the
Polish messianic movement and in works of great Polish poets
such as Adam Mickiewicz (Pan Tadeusz), Juliusz
Słowacki and Zygmunt Krasiński. This close connection between
Polish Romanticism and Polish history became one of the
defining qualities of the literature of Polish Romanticism period,
differentiating it from that of other countries. They had not
suffered the loss of national statehood as was the case with
Poland. Influenced by the general spirit and main ideas of
[77]

European Romanticism, the literature of Polish Romanticism is

unique, as many scholars have pointed out, in having developed
largely outside of Poland and in its emphatic focus upon the issue
of Polish nationalism. The Polish intelligentsia, along with leading
members of its government, left Poland in the early 1830s, during
what is referred to as the "Great Emigration", resettling in France,
Germany, Great Britain, Turkey, and the United States.
Juliusz Słowacki, a Polish poet considered one of the "Three National Bards" of Polish literature—
a major figure in the Polish Romantic period, and the father of modern Polish drama.

Their art featured emotionalism and irrationality, fantasy and

imagination, personality cults, folklore and country life, and the
propagation of ideals of freedom. In the second period, many of
the Polish Romantics worked abroad, often banished from
Poland by the occupying powers due to their politically subversive
ideas. Their work became increasingly dominated by the ideals of
political struggle for freedom and their country's sovereignty.
Elements of mysticism became more prominent. There
developed the idea of the poeta wieszcz (the prophet).
The wieszcz (bard) functioned as spiritual leader to the nation
fighting for its independence. The most notable poet so
recognized was Adam Mickiewicz.
Zygmunt Krasiński also wrote to inspire political and religious
hope in his countrymen. Unlike his predecessors, who called for
victory at whatever price in Poland's struggle against Russia,
Krasinski emphasized Poland's spiritual role in its fight for
independence, advocating an intellectual rather than a military
superiority. His works best exemplify the Messianic movement in
Poland: in two early dramas, Nie-boska komedia (1835; The
Undivine Comedy) and Irydion (1836; Iridion), as well as in the
later Psalmy przyszłości (1845), he asserted that Poland was
the Christ of Europe: specifically chosen by God to carry the
world's burdens, to suffer, and eventually be resurrected.
Russia[edit]
Early Russian Romanticism is associated with the
writers Konstantin Batyushkov (A Vision on the Shores of the
Lethe, 1809), Vasily Zhukovsky (The Bard, 1811; Svetlana, 1813)
and Nikolay Karamzin (Poor Liza, 1792; Julia, 1796; Martha the
Mayoress, 1802; The Sensitive and the Cold, 1803). However the
principal exponent of Romanticism in Russia is Alexander
Pushkin (The Prisoner of the Caucasus, 1820–1821; The Robber
Brothers, 1822; Ruslan and Ludmila, 1820; Eugene Onegin,
1825–1832). Pushkin's work influenced many writers in the 19th
century and led to his eventual recognition as Russia's greatest
poet. Other Russian Romantic poets include Mikhail
[78]

Lermontov (A Hero of Our Time, 1839), Fyodor

Tyutchev (Silentium!, 1830), Yevgeny Baratynsky (Eda,
1826), Anton Delvig, and Wilhelm Küchelbecker.
Influenced heavily by Lord Byron, Lermontov sought to explore
the Romantic emphasis on metaphysical discontent with society
and self, while Tyutchev's poems often described scenes of
nature or passions of love. Tyutchev commonly operated with
such categories as night and day, north and south, dream and
reality, cosmos and chaos, and the still world of winter and spring
teeming with life. Baratynsky's style was fairly classical in nature,
dwelling on the models of the previous century.
Spain[edit]
Main article: Romanticism in Spanish literature

El escritor José de Espronceda, portrait by Antonio María Esquivel (c. 1845) (Museo del
Prado, Madrid)[79]

Romanticism in Spanish literature developed a well-known

literature with a huge variety of poets and playwrights. The most
important Spanish poet during this movement was José de
Espronceda. After him there were other poets like Gustavo Adolfo
Bécquer, Mariano José de Larra and the dramatists Ángel de
Saavedra and José Zorrilla, author of Don Juan Tenorio. Before
them may be mentioned the pre-romantics José
Cadalso and Manuel José Quintana. The plays of Antonio
[80]

García Gutiérrez were adapted to produce Giuseppe Verdi's

operas Il trovatore and Simon Boccanegra. Spanish Romanticism
also influenced regional literatures. For example,
in Catalonia and in Galicia there was a national boom of writers in
the local languages, like the Catalan Jacint Verdaguer and the
Galician Rosalía de Castro, the main figures of the national
revivalist movements Renaixença and Rexurdimento,
respectively. [81]

There are scholars who consider Spanish Romanticism to be

Proto-Existentialism because it is more anguished than the
movement in other European countries. Foster et al., for
example, say that the work of Spain's writers such as
Espronceda, Larra, and other writers in the 19th century
demonstrated a "metaphysical crisis". These observers put
[82]

more weight on the link between the 19th-century Spanish writers

with the existentialist movement that emerged immediately after.
According to Richard Caldwell, the writers that we now identify
with Spain's romanticism were actually precursors to those who
galvanized the literary movement that emerged in the
1920s. This notion is the subject of debate for there are authors
[83]

who stress that Spain's romanticism is one of the earliest in

Europe, while some assert that Spain really had no period of
[84]

literary romanticism. This controversy underscores a certain

[85]

uniqueness to Spanish Romanticism in comparison to its

European counterparts.
Portugal[edit]
Portuguese poet, novelist, politician and playwright Almeida Garrett (1799–1854)

Romanticism began in Portugal with the publication of the

poem Camões (1825), by Almeida Garrett, who was raised by his
uncle D. Alexandre, bishop of Angra, in the precepts
of Neoclassicism, which can be observed in his early work. The
author himself confesses (in Camões' preface) that he voluntarily
refused to follow the principles of epic poetry enunciated
by Aristotle in his Poetics, as he did the same to Horace's Ars
Poetica. Almeida Garrett had participated in the 1820 Liberal
Revolution, which caused him to exile himself in England in 1823
and then in France, after the Vila-Francada. While living in Great
Britain, he had contacts with the Romantic movement and read
authors such as Shakespeare, Scott, Ossian, Byron, Hugo,
Lamartine and de Staël, at the same time visiting feudal castles
and ruins of Gothic churches and abbeys, which would be
reflected in his writings. In 1838, he presented Um Auto de Gil
Vicente ("A Play by Gil Vicente"), in an attempt to create a new
national theatre, free of Greco-Roman and foreign influence. But
his masterpiece would be Frei Luís de Sousa (1843), named by
himself as a "Romantic drama" and it was acclaimed as an
exceptional work, dealing with themes as national independence,
faith, justice and love. He was also deeply interested in
Portuguese folkloric verse, which resulted in the publication
of Romanceiro ("Traditional Portuguese Ballads") (1843), that
recollect a great number of ancient popular ballads, known as
"romances" or "rimances", in redondilha maior verse form, that
contained stories of chivalry, life of saints, crusades, courtly love,
etc. He wrote the novels Viagens na Minha Terra, O Arco de
Sant'Ana and Helena. [86][87][88]

Alexandre Herculano is, alongside Almeida Garrett, one of the

founders of Portuguese Romanticism. He too was forced to exile
to Great Britain and France because of his liberal ideals. All of his
poetry and prose are (unlike Almeida Garrett's) entirely Romantic,
rejecting Greco-Roman myth and history. He sought inspiration in
medieval Portuguese poems and chronicles as in the Bible. His
output is vast and covers many different genres, such as
historical essays, poetry, novels, opuscules and theatre, where
he brings back a whole world of Portuguese legends, tradition
and history, especially in Eurico, o Presbítero ("Eurico, the
Priest") and Lendas e Narrativas ("Legends and Narratives"). His
work was influenced by Chateaubriand, Schiller, Klopstock,
Walter Scott and the Old Testament Psalms. [89]

António Feliciano de Castilho made the case for Ultra-

Romanticism, publishing the poems A Noite no Castelo ("Night in
the Castle") and Os Ciúmes do Bardo ("The Jealousy of the
Bard"), both in 1836, and the drama Camões. He became an
unquestionable master for successive Ultra-Romantic
generations, whose influence would not be challenged until the
famous Coimbra Question. He also created polemics by
translating Goethe's Faust without knowing German, but using
French versions of the play. Other notable figures of Portuguese
Romanticism are the famous novelists Camilo Castelo
Branco and Júlio Dinis, and Soares de Passos, Bulhão Pato and
Pinheiro Chagas. [88]

Romantic style would be revived in the beginning of the 20th

century, notably through the works of poets linked to
the Portuguese Renaissance, such as Teixeira de
Pascoais, Jaime Cortesão, Mário Beirão, among others, who can
be considered Neo-Romantics. An early Portuguese expression
of Romanticism is found already in poets such as Manuel Maria
Barbosa du Bocage (especially in his sonnets dated at the end of
the 18th century) and Leonor de Almeida Portugal, Marquise of
Alorna.[88]
Italy[edit]

Italian poet Isabella di Morra, sometimes cited as a precursor of Romantic poets[90]

Romanticism in Italian literature was a minor movement although

some important works were produced; it began officially in 1816
when Germaine de Staël wrote an article in the journal Biblioteca
italiana called "Sulla maniera e l'utilità delle traduzioni", inviting
Italian people to reject Neoclassicism and to study new authors
from other countries. Before that date, Ugo Foscolo had already
published poems anticipating Romantic themes. The most
important Romantic writers were Ludovico di Breme, Pietro
Borsieri and Giovanni Berchet. Better known authors such
[91]

as Alessandro Manzoni and Giacomo Leopardi were influenced

by Enlightenment as well as by Romanticism and
Classicism. An Italian romanticist writer who produced works in
[92]

various genres, including short stories and novels (such

as Ricciarda o i Nurra e i Cabras), was the
Piedmontese Giuseppe Botero (1815-1885), devoting much of
his career to Sardinian literature. [93]

South America[edit]
See also: Brazilian Romanticism Painting
A print exemplifying the contrast between neoclassical vs. romantic styles of landscape and
architecture (or the "Grecian" and the "Gothic" as they are termed here), 1816

Spanish-speaking South American Romanticism was influenced

heavily by Esteban Echeverría, who wrote in the 1830s and
1840s. His writings were influenced by his hatred for the
Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, and filled with themes
of blood and terror, using the metaphor of a slaughterhouse to
portray the violence of Rosas' dictatorship.
Brazilian Romanticism is characterized and divided in three
different periods. The first one is basically focused on the creation
of a sense of national identity, using the ideal of the heroic Indian.
Some examples include José de Alencar, who
wrote Iracema and O Guarani, and Gonçalves Dias, renowned by
the poem "Canção do exílio" (Song of the Exile). The second
period, sometimes called Ultra-Romanticism, is marked by a
profound influence of European themes and traditions, involving
the melancholy, sadness and despair related to unobtainable
love. Goethe and Lord Byron are commonly quoted in these
works. Some of the most notable authors of this phase
are Álvares de Azevedo, Casimiro de Abreu, Fagundes
Varela and Junqueira Freire. The third cycle is marked by social
poetry, especially the abolitionist movement, and it
includes Castro Alves, Tobias Barreto and Pedro Luís Pereira de
Sousa. [94]

Dennis Malone Carter, Decatur Boarding the Tripolitan Gunboat, 1878. Romanticist vision of the
Battle of Tripoli, during the First Barbary War. It represents the moment when the American war
hero Stephen Decatur was fighting hand-to-hand against the Muslim pirate captain.

United States[edit]
Main articles: American literature and Romantic literature in
English
Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: The Savage State (1 of 5), 1836

In the United States, at least by 1818 with William Cullen Bryant's

"To a Waterfowl", Romantic poetry was being published.
American Romantic Gothic literature made an early appearance
with Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (1820)
and "Rip Van Winkle" (1819), followed from 1823 onwards by
the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper, with their
emphasis on heroic simplicity and their fervent landscape
descriptions of an already-exotic mythicized frontier peopled by
"noble savages", similar to the philosophical theory of Rousseau,
exemplified by Uncas, from The Last of the Mohicans. There are
picturesque "local colour" elements in Washington Irving's essays
and especially his travel books. Edgar Allan Poe's tales of the
macabre and his balladic poetry were more influential in France
than at home, but the romantic American novel developed fully
with the atmosphere and drama of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The
Scarlet Letter (1850). Later Transcendentalist writers such
as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson still show
elements of its influence and imagination, as does the romantic
realism of Walt Whitman. The poetry of Emily Dickinson—nearly
unread in her own time—and Herman Melville's novel Moby-
Dick can be taken as epitomes of American Romantic literature.
By the 1880s, however, psychological and social realism were
competing with Romanticism in the novel.
Influence of European Romanticism on American writers[edit]
The European Romantic movement reached America in the early
19th century. American Romanticism was just as multifaceted
and individualistic as it was in Europe. Like the Europeans, the
American Romantics demonstrated a high level of moral
enthusiasm, commitment to individualism and the unfolding of the
self, an emphasis on intuitive perception, and the assumption that
the natural world was inherently good, while human society was
filled with corruption.
[95]

Romanticism became popular in American politics, philosophy

and art. The movement appealed to the revolutionary spirit of
America as well as to those longing to break free of the strict
religious traditions of early settlement. The Romantics rejected
rationalism and religious intellect. It appealed to those in
opposition of Calvinism, which includes the belief that the destiny
of each individual is preordained. The Romantic movement gave
rise to New England Transcendentalism, which portrayed a less
restrictive relationship between God and Universe. The new
philosophy presented the individual with a more personal
relationship with God. Transcendentalism and Romanticism
appealed to Americans in a similar fashion, for both privileged
feeling over reason, individual freedom of expression over the
restraints of tradition and custom. It often involved a rapturous
response to nature. It encouraged the rejection of harsh, rigid
Calvinism, and promised a new blossoming of American
culture.[95][96]

American Romanticism embraced the individual and rebelled

against the confinement of neoclassicism and religious tradition.
The Romantic movement in America created a new literary genre
that continues to influence American writers. Novels, short
stories, and poems replaced the sermons and manifestos of yore.
Romantic literature was personal, intense, and portrayed more
emotion than ever seen in neoclassical literature. America's
preoccupation with freedom became a great source of motivation
for Romantic writers as many were delighted in free expression
and emotion without so much fear of ridicule and controversy.
They also put more effort into the psychological development of
their characters, and the main characters typically displayed
extremes of sensitivity and excitement.[97]

The works of the Romantic Era also differed from preceding

works in that they spoke to a wider audience, partly reflecting the
greater distribution of books as costs came down during the
period.[35]
Architecture[edit]
See also: Gothic Revival architecture
Romantic architecture appeared in the late 18th century in a
reaction against the rigid forms of neoclassical architecture.
Romantic architecture reached its peak in the mid-19th century,
and continued to appear until the end of the 19th century. It was
designed to evoke an emotional reaction, either respect for
tradition or nostalgia for a bucolic past. It was frequently inspired
by the architecture of the Middle Ages, especially Gothic
architecture, It was strongly influenced by romanticism in
literature, particularly the historical novels of Victor
Hugo and Walter Scott. It sometimes moved into the domain
of eclecticism, with features assembled from different historic
periods and regions of the world. [98]

Gothic Revival architecture was a popular variant of the romantic

style, particularly in the construction of churches, Cathedrals, and
university buildings. Notable examples include the completion
of Cologne Cathedral in Germany, by Karl Friedrich Schinkel. The
cathedral had been begun in 1248, but work was halted in 1473.
The original plans for the façade were discovered in 1840, and it
was decided to recommence. Schinkel followed the original
design as much as possible, but used modern construction
technology, including an iron frame for the roof. The building was
finished in 1880.[99]

In Britain, notable examples include the Royal

Pavilion in Brighton, a romantic version of traditional Indian
architecture by John Nash (1815–1823), and the Houses of
Parliament in London, built in a Gothic revival style by Charles
Barry between 1840 and 1876. [100]

In France, one of the earliest examples of romantic architecture is

the Hameau de la Reine, the small rustic hamlet created at
the Palace of Versailles for Queen Marie Antoinette between
1783 and 1785 by the royal architect Richard Mique with the help
of the romantic painter Hubert Robert. It consisted of twelve
structures, ten of which still exist, in the style of villages
in Normandy. It was designed for the Queen and her friends to
amuse themselves by playing at being peasants, and included a
farmhouse with a dairy, a mill, a boudoir, a pigeon loft, a tower in
the form of a lighthouse from which one could fish in the pond, a
belvedere, a cascade and grotto, and a luxuriously furnished
cottage with a billiard room for the Queen. [101]

French romantic architecture in the 19th century was strongly

influenced by two writers; Victor Hugo, whose novel The
Hunchback of Notre Dame inspired a resurgence in interest in the
Middle Ages; and Prosper Mérimée, who wrote celebrated
romantic novels and short stories and was also the first head of
the commission of Historic Monuments in France, responsible for
publicizing and restoring (and sometimes romanticizing) many
French cathedrals and monuments desecrated and ruined after
the French Revolution. His projects were carried out by the
architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. These included the restoration
(sometimes creative) of the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris,
the fortified city of Carcassonne, and the unfinished
medieval Château de Pierrefonds. [99][102]

The romantic style continued in the second half of the 19th

century. The Palais Garnier, the Paris opera house designed
by Charles Garnier was a highly romantic and eclectic
combination of artistic styles. Another notable example of late
19th century romanticism is the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur by Paul
Abadie, who drew upon the model of Byzantine architecture for
his elongated domes (1875–1914). [100]

Hameau de la Reine, Palace of Versailles (1783–1785)

 •

Royal Pavilion in Brighton by John Nash (1815–1823)

Cologne Cathedral (1840–80)

Grand Staircase of the Paris Opera by Charles Garnier (1861–75)

Basilica of Sacré-Cœur by Paul Abadie (1875–1914)

Visual arts[edit]
Thomas Jones, The Bard, 1774, a prophetic combination of Romanticism and nationalism by the
Welsh artist

In the visual arts, 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 Friedrich 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,
but both their artistic sensibilities were formed when forms of
Romanticism was already strongly present in art. John Constable,
born in 1776, stayed closer to the English landscape tradition, but
in his largest "six-footers" insisted on the heroic status of a patch
of the working countryside where he had grown up—challenging
the traditional hierarchy of genres, which relegated landscape
painting to a low status. Turner also painted very large
landscapes, and above all, seascapes. Some of these large
paintings had contemporary settings and staffage, but others had
small figures that turned the work into history painting in the
manner of Claude Lorrain, like Salvator Rosa, a late
Baroque artist whose landscapes had elements that Romantic
painters repeatedly turned to. Friedrich often used single figures,
or features like crosses, set alone amidst a huge landscape,
"making them images of the transitoriness of human life and the
premonition of death". [103]
Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, Ossian receiving the Ghosts of the French Heroes (1800–
02), Musée national de Malmaison et Bois-Préau, Château de Malmaison

Other groups of artists expressed feelings that verged on the

mystical, many largely abandoning classical drawing and
proportions. These included William Blake and Samuel
Palmer and the other members of the Ancients in England, and in
Germany Philipp Otto Runge. Like Friedrich, none of these artists
had significant influence after their deaths for the rest of the 19th
century, and were 20th-century rediscoveries from obscurity,
though Blake was always known as a poet, and Norway's leading
painter Johan Christian Dahl was heavily influenced by Friedrich.
The Rome-based Nazarene movement of German artists, active
from 1810, took a very different path, concentrating on
medievalizing history paintings with religious and nationalist
themes. [104]

The arrival of Romanticism in French art was delayed by the

strong hold of Neoclassicism on the academies, but from
the Napoleonic period it became increasingly popular, initially in
the form of history paintings propagandising for the new regime,
of which Girodet's Ossian receiving the Ghosts of the French
Heroes, for Napoleon's Château de Malmaison, was one of the
earliest. Girodet's old teacher David was puzzled and
disappointed by his pupil's direction, saying: "Either Girodet is
mad or I no longer know anything of the art of painting". A new [105]

generation of the French school, developed personal Romantic

[106]

styles, though still concentrating on history painting with a political

message. Théodore Géricault (1791–1824) had his first success
with The Charging Chasseur, a heroic military figure derived
from Rubens, at the Paris Salon of 1812 in the years of the
Empire, but his next major completed work, The Raft of the
Medusa of 1818-19, remains the greatest achievement of the
Romantic history painting, which in its day had a powerful anti-
government message.
Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) made his first Salon hits with The
Barque of Dante (1822), The Massacre at Chios (1824)
and Death of Sardanapalus (1827). The second was a scene
from the Greek War of Independence, completed the year Byron
died there, and the last was a scene from one of Byron's plays.
With Shakespeare, Byron was to provide the subject matter for
many other works of Delacroix, who also spent long periods in
North Africa, painting colourful scenes of mounted Arab warriors.
His Liberty Leading the People (1830) remains, with the Medusa,
one of the best-known works of French Romantic painting. Both
reflected current events, and increasingly "history painting",
literally "story painting", a phrase dating back to the Italian
Renaissance meaning the painting of subjects with groups of
figures, long considered the highest and most difficult form of art,
did indeed become the painting of historical scenes, rather than
those from religion or mythology. [107]

Francisco Goya was called "the last great painter in whose art
thought and observation were balanced and combined to form a
faultless unity". But the extent to which he was a Romantic is a
[108]

complex question. In Spain, there was still a struggle to introduce

the values of the Enlightenment, in which Goya saw himself as a
participant. The demonic and anti-rational monsters thrown up by
his imagination are only superficially similar to those of the Gothic
fantasies of northern Europe, and in many ways he remained
wedded to the classicism and realism of his training, as well as
looking forward to the Realism of the later 19th century. But he,
[109]

more than any other artist of the period, exemplified the Romantic
values of the expression of the artist's feelings and his personal
imaginative world. He also shared with many of the Romantic
[110]

painters a more free handling of paint, emphasized in the new

prominence of the brushstroke and impasto, which tended to be
repressed in neoclassicism under a self-effacing finish.

Cavalier gaulois by Antoine-Augustin Préault, Pont d'Iéna, Paris

Sculpture remained largely impervious to Romanticism, probably

partly for technical reasons, as the most prestigious material of
the day, marble, does not lend itself to expansive gestures. The
leading sculptors in Europe, Antonio Canova and Bertel
Thorvaldsen, were both based in Rome and firm Neoclassicists,
not at all tempted to allow influence from medieval sculpture,
which would have been one possible approach to Romantic
sculpture. When it did develop, true Romantic sculpture—with the
exception of a few artists such as Rudolf Maison— rather oddly [111]

was missing in Germany, and mainly found in France,

with François Rude, best known from his group of the 1830s from
the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, David d'Angers, and Auguste
Préault. Préault's plaster relief entitled Slaughter, which
represented the horrors of wars with exacerbated passion,
caused so much scandal at the 1834 Salon that Préault was
banned from this official annual exhibition for nearly twenty
years. In Italy, the most important Romantic sculptor
[112]

was Lorenzo Bartolini. [113]

 •

George Stubbs, A Lion Attacking a Horse (1770), oil on canvas, 38 in. x 49

1/2in., Yale Center for British Art

John Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare (1781), oil on canvas, 101.6 cm ×

127 cm., Detroit Institute of Arts

Francisco Goya, The Third of May 1808, 1814

• Théodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa, 1819

Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 1830

 •

J. M. W. Turner, The Fighting Téméraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken

up, 1839
In France, historical painting on idealized medieval and
Renaissance themes is known as the style Troubadour, a term
with no equivalent for other countries, though the same trends
occurred there. Delacroix, Ingres and Richard Parkes
Bonington all worked in this style, as did lesser specialists such
as Pierre-Henri Révoil (1776–1842) and Fleury-François
Richard (1777–1852). Their pictures are often small, and feature
intimate private and anecdotal moments, as well as those of high
drama. The lives of great artists such as Raphael were
commemorated on equal terms with those of rulers, and fictional
characters were also depicted. Fleury-Richard's Valentine of
Milan weeping for the death of her husband, shown in the Paris
Salon of 1802, marked the arrival of the style, which lasted until
the mid-century, before being subsumed into the increasingly
academic history painting of artists like Paul Delaroche. [114]

Francesco Hayez, Crusaders Thirsting near Jerusalem (1836–50), Palazzo Reale, Turin
Piotr Michałowski, Reiter, c. 1840, National Museum in Warsaw

Another trend was for very large apocalyptic history paintings,

often combining extreme natural events, or divine wrath, with
human disaster, attempting to outdo The Raft of the Medusa, and
now often drawing comparisons with effects from Hollywood. The
leading English artist in the style was John Martin, whose tiny
figures were dwarfed by enormous earthquakes and storms, and
worked his way through the biblical disasters, and those to come
in the final days. Other works such as Delacroix's Death of
Sardanapalus included larger figures, and these often drew
heavily on earlier artists, especially Poussin and Rubens, with
extra emotionalism and special effects.
Elsewhere in Europe, leading artists adopted Romantic styles: in
Russia there were the portraitists Orest Kiprensky and Vasily
Tropinin, with Ivan Aivazovsky specializing in marine painting,
and in Norway Hans Gude painted scenes of fjords. In
Poland, Piotr Michałowski (1800–1855)used a Romantic style in
paintings particularly relating to the history of Napoleonic
Wars. In Italy Francesco Hayez (1791–1882) was the leading
[115]

artist of Romanticism in mid-19th-century Milan. His long, prolific

and extremely successful career saw him begin as a Neoclassical
painter, pass right through the Romantic period, and emerge at
the other end as a sentimental painter of young women. His
Romantic period included many historical pieces of "Troubadour"
tendencies, but on a very large scale, that are heavily influenced
by Gian Battista Tiepolo and other late Baroque Italian masters.
Literary Romanticism had its counterpart in the American visual
arts, most especially in the exaltation of an untamed
American landscape found in the paintings of the Hudson River
School. Painters like Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt and Frederic
Edwin Church and others often expressed Romantic themes in
their paintings. They sometimes depicted ancient ruins of the old
world, such as in Fredric Edwin Church's piece Sunrise in Syria.
These works reflected the Gothic feelings of death and decay.
They also show the Romantic ideal that Nature is powerful and
will eventually overcome the transient creations of men. More
often, they worked to distinguish themselves from their European
counterparts by depicting uniquely American scenes and
landscapes. This idea of an American identity in the art world is
reflected in W. C. Bryant's poem To Cole, the Painter, Departing
for Europe, where Bryant encourages Cole to remember the
powerful scenes that can only be found in America.
Some American paintings (such as Albert Bierstadt's The Rocky
Mountains, Lander's Peak) promote the literary idea of the "noble
savage" by portraying idealized Native Americans living in
harmony with the natural world. Thomas Cole's paintings tend
towards allegory, explicit in The Voyage of Life series painted in
the early 1840s, showing the stages of life set amidst an
awesome and immense nature.
•

Thomas Cole, Childhood (1842), one of the four scenes in The Voyage of Life

Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life

Old Age (1842)

William Blake, Albion Rose, 1794–95

 •

Louis Janmot, from his series The Poem of the Soul, before 1854

Music[edit]
See also: Romantic music, Musical nationalism, and List of
Romantic composers

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Portrait of Niccolò Paganini, 1819

The term "Romanticism" when applied to music has come to

imply the period roughly from 1800 until 1850, or else until
around 1900. Musical Romanticism is predominantly a German
phenomenon—so much so that one respected French reference
work defines it entirely in terms of "The role of music in the
aesthetics of German romanticism". Another French [116]

encyclopedia holds that the German temperament generally "can

be described as the deep and diverse action of romanticism on
German musicians", and that there is only one true
representative of Romanticism in French music, Hector Berlioz,
while in Italy, the sole great name of musical Romanticism
is Giuseppe Verdi, "a sort of [Victor] Hugo of opera, gifted with a
real genius for dramatic effect". Similarly, in his analysis of
Romanticism and its pursuit of harmony, Henri Lefebvre posits
that, "But of course, German romanticism was more closely
linked to music than French romanticism was, so it is there we
should look for the direct expression of harmony as the central
romantic idea." Nevertheless, the huge popularity of German
[117]

Romantic music led, "whether by imitation or by reaction", to an

often nationalistically inspired vogue amongst Polish, Hungarian,
Russian, Czech, and Scandinavian musicians, successful
"perhaps more because of its extra-musical traits than for the
actual value of musical works by its masters". [118]

In the contemporary music culture, the romantic musician

followed a public career depending on sensitive middle-class
audiences rather than on a courtly patron, as had been the case
with earlier musicians and composers. Public persona
characterized a new generation of virtuosi who made their way as
soloists, epitomized in the concert tours of Paganini and Liszt,
and the conductor began to emerge as an important figure, on
whose skill the interpretation of the increasingly complex music
depended. [119]

Evolution of the term "Romanticism" in

Musicology[edit]

Ludwig van Beethoven, painted by Joseph Karl Stieler, 1820

Although the term "Romanticism" when applied to music has

come to imply the period roughly from 1800 until 1850, or else
until around 1900, the contemporary application of "romantic" to
music did not coincide with this modern interpretation. Indeed,
one of the earliest sustained applications of the term to music
occurs in 1789, in the Mémoires of André Grétry. This is of [120]

particular interest because it is a French source on a subject

mainly dominated by Germans, but also because it explicitly
acknowledges its debt to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (himself a
composer, amongst other things) and, by so doing, establishes a
link to one of the major influences on the Romantic movement
generally. In 1810 E. T. A.
[121]

Hoffmann named Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven as "the three

masters of instrumental compositions" who "breathe one and the
same romantic spirit". He justified his view on the basis of these
composers' depth of evocative expression and their marked
individuality. In Haydn's music, according to Hoffmann, "a child-
like, serene disposition prevails", while Mozart (in the late E-flat
major Symphony, for example) "leads us into the depths of the
spiritual world", with elements of fear, love, and sorrow, "a
presentiment of the infinite ... in the eternal dance of the
spheres". Beethoven's music, on the other hand, conveys a
sense of "the monstrous and immeasurable", with the pain of an
endless longing that "will burst our breasts in a fully coherent
concord of all the passions". This elevation in the valuation of
[122]

pure emotion resulted in the promotion of music from the

subordinate position it had held in relation to the verbal and
plastic arts during the Enlightenment. Because music was
considered to be free of the constraints of reason, imagery, or
any other precise concept, it came to be regarded, first in the
writings of Wackenroder and Tieck and later by writers such
as Schelling and Wagner, as preeminent among the arts, the one
best able to express the secrets of the universe, to evoke the
spirit world, infinity, and the absolute. [123]

This chronologic agreement of musical and literary Romanticism

continued as far as the middle of the 19th century, when Richard
Wagner denigrated the music of Meyerbeer and Berlioz as
"neoromantic": "The Opera, to which we shall now return, has
swallowed down the Neoromanticism of Berlioz, too, as a plump,
fine-flavoured oyster, whose digestion has conferred on it anew a
brisk and well-to-do appearance." [124]
Frédéric Chopin in 1838 by Eugène Delacroix

It was only toward the end of the 19th century that the newly
emergent discipline of Musikwissenschaft (musicology)—itself a
product of the historicizing proclivity of the age—attempted a
more scientific periodization of music history, and a distinction
between Viennese Classical and Romantic periods was
proposed. The key figure in this trend was Guido Adler, who
viewed Beethoven and Franz Schubert as transitional but
essentially Classical composers, with Romanticism achieving full
maturity only in the post-Beethoven generation of Frédéric
Chopin, Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Hector Berlioz
and Franz Liszt. From Adler's viewpoint, found in books like Der
Stil in der Musik (1911), composers of the New German
School and various late-19th-century nationalist composers were
not Romantics but "moderns" or "realists" (by analogy with the
fields of painting and literature), and this schema remained
prevalent through the first decades of the 20th century.
[121]

By the second quarter of the 20th century, an awareness that

radical changes in musical syntax had occurred during the early
1900s caused another shift in historical viewpoint, and the
change of century came to be seen as marking a decisive break
with the musical past. This in turn led historians such as Alfred
Einstein to extend the musical "Romantic era" throughout the
[125]

19th century and into the first decade of the 20th. It has
continued to be referred to as such in some of the standard music
references such as The Oxford Companion to
Music and Grout's History of Western Music but was not
[126] [127]

unchallenged. For example, the prominent German

musicologist Friedrich Blume, the chief editor of the first edition
of Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (1949–86), accepted
the earlier position that Classicism and Romanticism together
constitute a single period beginning in the middle of the 18th
century, but at the same time held that it continued into the 20th
century, including such pre-World War II developments
as expressionism and neoclassicism. This is reflected in some
[128]

notable recent reference works such as the New Grove

Dictionary of Music and Musicians and the new edition of Musik
[121]

in Geschichte und Gegenwart. [129]

Felix Mendelssohn, 1839

Robert Schumann, 1839

Franz Liszt, 1847

 •

Daniel Auber, c. 1868

Hector Berlioz by Gustave Courbet, 1850

Giovanni Boldini, Portrait of Giuseppe Verdi, 1886

Richard Wagner, c. 1870s

 •

Giacomo Meyerbeer, 1847

Gustav Mahler, 1896

Outside the arts[edit]

Akseli Gallen-Kallela, The Forging of the Sampo, 1893. An artist from Finland deriving inspiration
from the Finnish "national epic", the Kalevala

Sciences[edit]
Main article: Romanticism in science
The Romantic movement affected most aspects of intellectual
life, and Romanticism and science had a powerful connection,
especially in the period 1800–1840. Many scientists were
influenced by versions of the Naturphilosophie of Johann Gottlieb
Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling and Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and others, and without
abandoning empiricism, sought in their work to uncover what they
tended to believe was a unified and organic Nature. The English
scientist Sir Humphry Davy, a prominent Romantic thinker, said
that understanding nature required "an attitude of admiration,
love and worship, [...] a personal response". He believed that
[130]

knowledge was only attainable by those who truly appreciated

and respected nature. Self-understanding was an important
aspect of Romanticism. It had less to do with proving that man
was capable of understanding nature (through his budding
intellect) and therefore controlling it, and more to do with the
emotional appeal of connecting himself with nature and
understanding it through a harmonious co-existence. [131]

Historiography[edit]
History writing was very strongly, and many would say harmfully,
influenced by Romanticism. In England, Thomas Carlyle was a
[132]

highly influential essayist who turned historian; he both invented

and exemplified the phrase "hero-worship", lavishing largely
[133]

uncritical praise on strong leaders such as Oliver

Cromwell, Frederick the Great and Napoleon. Romantic
nationalism had a largely negative effect on the writing of history
in the 19th century, as each nation tended to produce its own
version of history, and the critical attitude, even cynicism, of
earlier historians was often replaced by a tendency to create
romantic stories with clearly distinguished heroes and
villains. Nationalist ideology of the period placed great
[134]

emphasis on racial coherence, and the antiquity of peoples, and

tended to vastly overemphasize the continuity between past
periods and the present, leading to national mysticism. Much
historical effort in the 20th century was devoted to combating the
romantic historical myths created in the 19th century.
Theology[edit]
To insulate theology from scientism or reductionism in science,
19th-century post-Enlightenment German theologians developed
a modernist or so-called liberal conception of Christianity, led
by Friedrich Schleiermacher and Albrecht Ritschl. They took the
Romantic approach of rooting religion in the inner world of the
human spirit, so that it is a person's feeling or sensibility about
spiritual matters that comprises religion. [135]

Chess[edit]
Main article: Romantic chess
Romantic chess was the style of chess which emphasized quick,
tactical maneuvers characterized by aesthetic beauty rather than
long-term strategic planning, which was considered to be of
secondary importance. The Romantic era in chess is generally
[136]

considered to have begun around the 18th century (although a

primarily tactical style of chess was predominant even
earlier), and to have reached its peak with Joseph MacDonnell
[137]

and Pierre LaBourdonnais, the two dominant chess players in the

1830s. The 1840s were dominated by Howard Staunton, and
other leading players of the era included Adolf Anderssen, Daniel
Harrwitz, Henry Bird, Louis Paulsen, and Paul Morphy. The
"Immortal Game", played by Anderssen and Lionel
Kieseritzky on 21 June 1851 in London—where Anderssen made
bold sacrifices to secure victory, giving up both rooks and a
bishop, then his queen, and then checkmating his opponent with
his three remaining minor pieces—is considered a supreme
example of Romantic chess. The end of the Romantic era in
[138]

chess is considered to be the 1873 Vienna

Tournament where Wilhelm Steinitz popularized positional play
and the closed game.

Romantic nationalism[edit]
Main article: Romantic nationalism
Egide Charles Gustave Wappers, Episode of the Belgian Revolution of 1830, 1834, Musée d'Art
Ancien, Brussels. A romantic vision by a Belgian painter.
Hans Gude, Fra Hardanger, 1847. Example of Norwegian romantic nationalism.

One of Romanticism's key ideas and most enduring legacies is

the assertion of nationalism, which became a central theme of
Romantic art and political philosophy. From the earliest parts of
the movement, with their focus on development of national
languages and folklore, and the importance of local customs and
traditions, to the movements that would redraw the map of
Europe and lead to calls for self-determination of nationalities,
nationalism was one of the key vehicles of Romanticism, its role,
expression and meaning. One of the most important functions of
medieval references in the 19th century was nationalist. Popular
and epic poetry were its workhorses. This is visible in Germany
and Ireland, where underlying Germanic or Celtic linguistic
substrates dating from before the Romanization-Latinization were
sought out.
Early Romantic nationalism was strongly inspired by Rousseau,
and by the ideas of Johann Gottfried von Herder, who in 1784
argued that the geography formed the natural economy of a
people, and shaped their customs and society. [139]

The nature of nationalism changed dramatically, however, after

the French Revolution with the rise of Napoleon, and the
reactions in other nations. Napoleonic nationalism and
republicanism were, at first, inspirational to movements in other
nations: self-determination and a consciousness of national unity
were held to be two of the reasons why France was able to
defeat other countries in battle. But as the French
Republic became Napoleon's Empire, Napoleon became not the
inspiration for nationalism, but the object of its struggle.
In Prussia, the development of spiritual renewal as a means to
engage in the struggle against Napoleon was argued by, among
others, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a disciple of Kant. The
word Volkstum, or nationality, was coined in German as part of
this resistance to the now conquering emperor. Fichte expressed
the unity of language and nation in his address "To the German
Nation" in 1806:
Those who speak the same language are joined to each other by
a multitude of invisible bonds by nature herself, long before any
human art begins; they understand each other and have the
power of continuing to make themselves understood more and
more clearly; they belong together and are by nature one and an
inseparable whole. ...Only when each people, left to itself,
develops and forms itself in accordance with its own peculiar
quality, and only when in every people each individual develops
himself in accordance with that common quality, as well as in
accordance with his own peculiar quality—then, and then only,
does the manifestation of divinity appear in its true mirror as it
ought to be. [140]

This view of nationalism inspired the collection of folklore by such

people as the Brothers Grimm, the revival of old epics as
national, and the construction of new epics as if they were old, as
in the Kalevala, compiled from Finnish tales and folklore,
or Ossian, where the claimed ancient roots were invented. The
view that fairy tales, unless contaminated from outside literary
sources, were preserved in the same form over thousands of
years, was not exclusive to Romantic Nationalists, but fit in well
with their views that such tales expressed the primordial nature of
a people. For instance, the Brothers Grimm rejected many tales
they collected because of their similarity to tales by Charles
Perrault, which they thought proved they were not truly German
tales; Sleeping Beauty survived in their collection because the
[141]

tale of Brynhildr convinced them that the figure of the sleeping

princess was authentically German. Vuk Karadžić contributed
to Serbian folk literature, using peasant culture as the foundation.
He regarded the oral literature of the peasants as an integral part
of Serbian culture, compiling it to use in his collections of folk
songs, tales and proverbs, as well as the first dictionary of
vernacular Serbian. Similar projects were undertaken by the
[142]

Russian Alexander Afanasyev, the Norwegians Peter Christen

Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe, and the Englishman Joseph
Jacobs. [143]

Polish nationalism and messianism[edit]

The November Uprising (1830–31), in the Kingdom of Poland, against the Russian Empire

Romanticism played an essential role in the national awakening

of many Central European peoples lacking their own national
states, not least in Poland, which had recently failed to restore its
independence when Russia's army crushed the Polish
Uprising under Nicholas I. Revival and reinterpretation of ancient
myths, customs and traditions by Romantic poets and painters
helped to distinguish their indigenous cultures from those of the
dominant nations and crystallise the mythography of Romantic
nationalism. Patriotism, nationalism, revolution and armed
struggle for independence also became popular themes in the
arts of this period. Arguably, the most distinguished Romantic
poet of this part of Europe was Adam Mickiewicz, who developed
an idea that Poland was the Messiah of Nations, predestined to
suffer just as Jesus had suffered to save all the people. The
Polish self-image as a "Christ among nations" or the martyr of
Europe can be traced back to its history of Christendom and
suffering under invasions. During the periods of foreign
occupation, the Catholic Church served as bastion of Poland's
national identity and language, and the major promoter of Polish
culture. The partitions came to be seen in Poland as a Polish
sacrifice for the security for Western civilization. Adam Mickiewicz
wrote the patriotic drama Dziady (directed against the Russians),
where he depicts Poland as the Christ of Nations. He also wrote
"Verily I say unto you, it is not for you to learn civilization from
foreigners, but it is you who are to teach them civilization ... You
are among the foreigners like the Apostles among the idolaters".
In Books of the Polish Nation and Polish Pilgrimage Mickiewicz
detailed his vision of Poland as a Messias and a Christ of
Nations, that would save mankind. Dziady is known for various
interpretation. The most known ones are the moral aspect of part
II, individualist and romantic message of part IV, as well as
deeply patriotic, messianistic and Christian vision in part III of the
poem. Zdzisław Kępiński, however, focuses his interpretation
on Slavic pagan and occult elements found in the drama. In his
book Mickiewicz hermetyczny he writes
about hermetic, theosophic and alchemical philosophy on the
book as well as Masonic symbols.

Gallery[edit]
Emerging Romanticism in the 18th century
•

Joseph Vernet, 1759, Shipwreck; the 18th-century "sublime"

Joseph Wright, 1774, Cave at evening, Smith College Museum of

Art, Northampton, Massachusetts
 •

Henry Fuseli, 1781, The Nightmare, a classical artist whose themes often
anticipate the Romantic

Philip James de Loutherbourg, Coalbrookdale by Night, 1801, a key location

of the English Industrial Revolution
French Romantic painting
•

Théodore Géricault, The Charging Chasseur, c. 1812

Ingres, The Death of Leonardo da Vinci, 1818, one of his Troubadour

style works
 •

Eugène Delacroix, Collision of Moorish Horsemen, 1843–44

Eugène Delacroix, The Bride of Abydos, 1857, after the poem by Byron
Other
•

Joseph Anton Koch, Waterfalls at Subiaco, 1812–1813, a "classical"

landscape to art historians

• James Ward, 1814–1815, Gordale Scar

John Constable, 1821, The Hay Wain, one of Constable's large "six footers"
 •

J. C. Dahl, 1826, Eruption of Vesuvius, by Friedrich's closest follower

William Blake, c. 1824–27, The Wood of the Self-Murderers: The Harpies and
the Suicides, Tate

Karl Bryullov, The Last Day of Pompeii, 1833, The State Russian Museum, St.
Petersburg, Russia

Isaac Levitan, Pacific, 1898, State Russian Museum, St.Petersburg

J. M. W. Turner, The Burning of the Houses of Lords and

Commons (1835), Philadelphia Museum of Art
 •

Hans Gude, Winter Afternoon, 1847, National Gallery of Norway, Oslo

Ivan Aivazovsky, 1850, The Ninth Wave, Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

John Martin, 1852, The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Laing Art
Gallery

Frederic Edwin Church, 1860, Twilight in the Wilderness, Cleveland Museum

of Art

Albert Bierstadt, 1863, The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak

Romantic authors[edit]
• Jane Austen
• Nikoloz Baratashvili
• Castro Alves
• Prosper Mérimée
• Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
• William Blake
• Charlotte Brontë
• Emily Brontë
• Gonçalves Dias
• Anne Brontë
• Robert Burns
• Manuel Antônio de Almeida
• Lord Byron
• Thomas Carlyle
• Alexander Chavchavadze
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• Emily Dickinson
• Alexandre Dumas
• Maria Edgeworth
• Joseph von Eichendorff
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Álvares de Azevedo
• Mihai Eminescu
• Ugo Foscolo
• Aleksander Fredro
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• Machado de Assis
• Nikolai Gogol
• Brothers Grimm
• Wilhelm Hauff
• Nathaniel Hawthorne
• E. T. A. Hoffmann
• Casimiro de Abreu
 • Victor Hugo
• Washington Irving
• John Keats
• Zygmunt Krasiński
• Józef Ignacy Kraszewski
• Herman Melville
• Adam Mickiewicz
• Novalis
• Cyprian Kamil Norwid
• Mikhail Lermontov
• Alessandro Manzoni
• Gérard de Nerval
• Grigol Orbeliani
• Petar II Petrović-Njegoš
• Laza Kostić
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Wincenty Pol
• Alexander Pushkin
• Ion Heliade Rădulescu
• Mary Robinson
• Fagundes Varela
• George Sand
• August Wilhelm von Schlegel
• Friedrich von Schlegel
• Walter Scott
• Mary Shelley
• Percy Bysshe Shelley
• Juliusz Słowacki
• Henry David Thoreau
• Joaquim Manuel de Macedo
• Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder
• William Wordsworth
• Bernardo Guimarães

Scholars of Romanticism[edit]
• Gerald Abraham
• M. H. Abrams
• Donald Ault
• Jacques Barzun
• Frederick C. Beiser
• Ian Bent
• Isaiah Berlin
• Tim Blanning
• Harold Bloom
• Friedrich Blume
• James Chandler
• Jeffrey N. Cox
• Carl Dahlhaus
• Northrop Frye
• Maria Janion
• Peter Kitson
• Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
• Arthur Oncken Lovejoy
• Paul de Man
• Tilar J. Mazzeo
• Jerome McGann
• Anne K. Mellor
• Jean-Luc Nancy
• Ashton Nichols
• Leon Plantinga
• Christopher Ricks
• Charles Rosen
• René Wellek
• Susan J. Wolfson