Romantic Landscape
Techniques. Resources. Creative Processes. Genres
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Romantic Landscape
Romanticism is a storm of feelings. Reason and intellect are overwhelmed by passion. Romanticism is a movement of the early nineteenth century where everything was emotion, vital energy, and poetic exaltation. Something very singular happened with landscape painting: artists transmitted their emotions through the representation of a nature scene.
Landscape painting became important, and although it was already a genre that had acquired its independence, it became a major genre. It began to be taken into account as something important and valuable, no longer as something anecdotal or decorative.
Artists added emotions to the landscape; they added their subjectivity. And although they did not deform it (as Expressionism did a century later, depending on the artists’ expressions), they left aside the realistic detail to interpret the scene in a more poetic, freer way.
The romantic painter highlights, emphasizes, and exaggerates. There is a word that defines Romanticism in general and romantic landscape in particular, and that is “idealization.” The artist, in the midst of a storm of passions, idealizes.
The landscape is no longer descriptive, but spiritual. It does not tell us what the countryside or a mountain looks like, but what the painter feels.
Technically, the spirit of this genre means that color and light (emotion over reason) are above drawing. The Englishmen Constable and Turner were fascinated with this study of light and went out of their studios to have a direct experience. A tradition began, and the Barbizon School continued it (Barbizon artists used to paint directly in the open air), and then Impressionism arrived.
Image: Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1942). Turner
Recommended links:
Characteristic Elements of Romantic Painting.
Fundamental Painters of Romanticism.
Timeline: from Neoclassicism till the end of the 19th century.
Turner Seascapes and Romanticism.
The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up (1839).
Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842), Turner.
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