Romantic Art
In emphasizing emotion and imagination, romantic art shifted away from the restraint of classicism and neoclassicism that had dominated art in Europe since the Renaissance. Romanticism achieved its greatest popularity in art, literature, music and philosophy between 1780 and 1830, although its expression of individual experiences ranging from awe to passion informed culture in the decades after.
Landscape painting was especially popular during the romantic period, as were nature studies of wild animals and fantasies of exotic lands. Romanticism varied across Europe as it reacted to the rise of industrialization, a more personal relationship with faith that was distanced from the church and the rationalist thinking of the Enlightenment.
British painters such as John Constable and J.M.W. Turner responded dramatically to the light and atmosphere of the natural world, while William Blake conveyed humanity’s connection to the divine in his visionary art. In Germany, the late-18th-century Sturm und Drang, or Storm and Drive, movement, with its probing of the unconscious, inspired a sense of mystery in work by romantic artists such as Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge. In France, where the French Revolution had turned tradition upside down, Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix used lush brushwork to paint monumental canvases with tumultuous scenes of nature and history.
The romantic movement and its subject matter were a significant influence on the Pre-Raphaelites, Symbolists and the American painters of the Hudson River School, as well as on other cultural movements in the 19th and 20th centuries that saw artists build on this perspective in which art was guided by emotion rather than reason.
Find a collection of romantic paintings, sculptures, prints and multiples and more art on 1stDibs.
1910s Romantic Art
Alabaster
20th Century Romantic Art
Pen, Ink
20th Century Romantic Art
Ink, Pen, Paper
20th Century Romantic Art
Ink, Paper, Pen
Early 2000s Romantic Art
Marble
Early 2000s Romantic Art
Lithograph, Engraving, Paint
20th Century Romantic Art
Ink, Pen
19th Century Romantic Art
Marble, Bronze
Mid-20th Century Romantic Art
Alabaster
1840s Romantic Art
Marble
1820s Romantic Art
Watercolor
19th Century Romantic Art
Marble
21st Century and Contemporary Romantic Art
Paper, Ink, Permanent Marker
2010s Romantic Art
Marble, Bronze
21st Century and Contemporary Romantic Art
Wax, Oil, Wood Panel
1880s Romantic Art
Pencil
16th Century Romantic Art
Pen, Laid Paper, Ink
1950s Romantic Art
Paper, Watercolor, Pen, India Ink
2010s Romantic Art
Paper, Tempera
20th Century Romantic Art
Ink, Pen
20th Century Romantic Art
Ink, Pen
20th Century Romantic Art
Paper, Ink, Pen