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| | Romanticism in paintings, first defined as an aesthetic in literary criticism around 1800, gained momentum as an artistic movement in France and Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century and flourished until mid-century.
In French and British paintings of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the recurrence of images of shipwrecks and other representations of man's struggle against the awesome power of nature manifest this sensibility.
Another facet of the Romantic art toward nature emerges in the landscapes of John Constable, whose art expresses his response to his native English countryside. For his major paintings, Constable executed full-scale sketches.
This interest in the individual and subjective—at odds with eighteenth-century rationalism—is mirrored in the Romantic approach to portrait. Traditionally, records of individual likeness, portraits became vehicles for expressing a range of psychological and emotional states in the hands of Romantic painters. Gericault probed the extremes of mental illness in his portraits of psychiatric patients.
Along with plumbing emotional and behavioral extremes, Romantic artists expanded the repertoire of subject matter, rejecting the didacticism of Neoclassical history painting in favor of imaginary and exotic subjects.
Chassériau documented his visit to Algeria in notebooks filled with watercolors and drawings, which later served as models for paintings done in his Paris studio.
In its stylistic diversity and range of subjects, Romanticism defies simple categorization. As the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1846, "Romanticism in paintings is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in a way of feeling." |
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