Style & Genre Essays

Romanticism

A movement in 19th century Western art it is generally assumed to be in opposition to Neoclassicism and linked in America to Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School of painting between 1820 and 1880. Cole and his followers believed that symbolic meaning could be found in landscape and that its natural features were created by God. Their paintings reflected a quiet, reverence for God in nature, especially in wilderness areas.  These Romantic paintings are marked by intense colors, turbulent emotions, complex composition, soft outlines and sometimes-heroic subject matter.  Source; Andrew Wilton and Tim Barringer, "American Sublime: Landscape painting in the United States, 1820-1880"