The impact of Romanticism upon the arts has been immense and ongoing. Romantic painters aimed for emotional intensity. Sometimes their pictures contained startlingly violent imagery, reflecting man’s smallness in the face of the vastness of the natural world, as in Gericault’s explicit and frightening ‘Raft of the Medusa’. However Romantic attitudes to nature worked on more than one level. Their affinity with the world around them was often evoked in their paintings, for example in the works of Constable. There are strong echoes of Romanticism in contemporary concerns about the environment and the need to appreciate and preserve it. Romantics also embraced the foreign and the exotic, especially eliciting an interest in Orientalism, and this too affected the history of art.

In sculpture there was a move to create imaginative pieces which would appeal to the emotions: Auguste Rodin tried to capture the inner lives of his subjects. In portraiture, painters began to explore the sitter’s feelings and psychological state, and pictures of animals were similarly probing. The Romantics revered children, because they were innocent and close to nature. Youngsters had tended to be included in family groups, dressed as young adults; but the Romantic approach was to depict them as real children, and to encourage society to be more child-centred.

Romanticism influenced political ideology, inviting engagement with the cause of the poor and oppressed and with ideals of social emancipation and progress. The individual was prized, but it was also felt that people were under an obligation to their fellow-men: personal commitment to the group was therefore important. Governments existed to serve the people. There was a feeling that people were actively part of the historical process, and could therefore contribute to social progress.

Early Romantics supported the French Revolution, although the terrible bloodshed in France caused Wordsworth, for example, to revise his opinions. Wars of self-determination appealed to Byron, who espoused Italian nationalism and advocated the liberation of the Greeks from the Turks. It seems to have been something of a Romantic trait to identify with such causes, and to get involved in foreign adventures. Similarly, in the twentieth-century the Spanish Civil War attracted ardent and idealistic supporters.

Romanticism did not supersede Enlightenment thought; rather it offered alternative outlooks and horizons. In promoting the imagination over reason, the Romantics encouraged individuals to experiment boldly, to question things instead of blindly accepting them. If we pause to think for a moment about the 1960s, this was a decade in which there was a renewed emphasis on Romanticism. The early Romantic innovative vision had clashed with classicism; in the 1960s there was again a striking opposition between tradition and counter-cultures, a desire to ‘get back to nature’, and many people were lured by Eastern mysticism. Rebelliousness and innovation were again manifest in many spheres of activity.

In some circumstances this was liberating and life-enhancing; however there has always been an underlying tension in Romanticism: it has a melancholic aspect, because Time is man’s enemy. There is a sense of the limitless potential of man, but also an awareness that life is transitory.

Lord Byron was larger than life, a living legend, and the early deaths of Keats, Shelley and Byron enhanced these figures in the eyes of posterity, earning them iconic status. Heroic visionaries, battling on in spite of adverse circumstances, they invited admiration and empathy. Perhaps today’s passion for celebrity is very much in keeping with the spirit of Romanticism, and a number of media artistes have achieved immortality by virtue of their insistence on living life their way, seeking fulfilment on their own terms – whatever the outcome.

One thing is certain: the Romantic period marked a shift in the way people thought, and has continued to exert a decisive influence on the way we see and experience the world.

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Content last updated: 21/09/2005

About our expert

Stephanie Forward is Senior Tutor in Open Studies in the Centre for Lifelong Learning at the University of Warwick, and is an Associate Lecturer with The Open University. Her publications include Dreams, Visions and Realities; Sex, Social Purity and Sarah Grand (with Ann Heilmann), and the CD script for Blenheim Palace: The Churchills and their Palace.

Stephanie has been involved in two significant OU/BBC projects: The Big Read (2003) and the television series The Romantics (2006). She also leads the Open2 bookclub.

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