Romanticism artwork offered a fantastical escape from the reality of urban life. Romanticism focused on feelings and the condition of the soul, which was often reflected in nature. Romantic period artists did not simply paint what they saw in a landscape but painted the way they felt from the landscape. Artists were free to be creative, harnessing inspiration from their dreams and their consciousness to illustrate fantastic figures or troubled landscapes. Here is our selection of the 12 most famous Romanticism paintings.
Henry Fuseli’s Romantic artwork, The Nightmare, was the first of its kind making Fuseli somewhat of a transitional figure– leading the progression of art from The Age of Reason to Romantic-era art. Fuseli’s peculiar and macabre artwork depicts a seemingly spellbound woman in deep sleep draped across a divan.
The woman has her arms stretched below her, with a demon-like incubus crouched on top of her, glaring threateningly at the viewer. Partially hidden, we see a mysterious mare with bewitching white eyes and flaring nostrils. In Fuseli’s ghastly portrayal, he paints the woman in an idealized manner, which coincides with the principles of Neoclassicism. However, he deviated from this by using his painting to explore the darker depths of the human psyche, while most were busied with the scientific exploration of the physical world.
- M. W. Turner - was one of the pioneering Western artists to capture ambiance and mood in his Romanticism art pieces. Turner was an exceptionally influential 19th-century landscape painter. He became enraptured by the Reichenbach Falls, a waterfall of the River Aare close to Meiringen in Switzerland, which he witnessed during his travels in 1802. Upper Fall of the Reichenbach: Rainbow was a scene he painted numerous times both in Switzerland and in his home country of England.
More Painters of this time: Famous Romanticism Paintings - The Best Examples of Romantic-Era Art
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