J Alphege Brewer

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.

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Bring energy and an array of welcome colors and textures into your space by decorating with figurative fine-art prints and works on paper.

Figurative art stands in contrast to abstract art, which is more expressive than representational. The oldest-known work of figurative art is a figurative painting — specifically, a rock painting of an animal made over 40,000 years ago in Borneo. This remnant of a remote past has long faded, but its depiction of a cattle-like creature in elegant ocher markings endures.

Since then, figurative art has evolved significantly as it continues to represent the world, including a breadth of works on paper, including printmaking. This includes woodcuts, which are a type of relief print with perennial popularity among collectors. The artist carves into a block and applies ink to the raised surface, which is then pressed onto paper. There are also planographic prints, which use metal plates, stones or other flat surfaces as their base. The artist will often draw on the surface with grease crayon and then apply ink to those markings. Lithographs are a common version of planographic prints.

Figurative art printmaking was especially popular during the height of the Pop art movement, and this kind of work can be seen in artist Andy Warhol’s extensive use of photographic silkscreen printing. Everyday objects, logos and scenes were given a unique twist, whether in the style of a comic strip or in the use of neon colors.

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