Romanticism & Landscape

Romanticism, from the late 18th century, put feeling, imagination and the individual above reason and rules. Its painters sought the sublime in storms, mountains and the sea, and in dramatic events of their own time: Eugène Delacroix’s vivid colour and movement, Goya’s nightmarish visions, and Caspar David Friedrich’s lonely figures facing the vastness of nature.

Landscape, once a minor genre, rose to the first rank. J. M. W. Turner dissolved scenes into light and atmosphere, John Constable painted the English countryside directly from nature, and in America Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church celebrated the wilderness on a grand scale, while Isaac Levitan later brought a quiet lyricism to the Russian landscape.