About our expert
Linda Walsh is Senior Lecturer in Art History and Staff Tutor in Arts in the Yorkshire Region of the Open University. She has written course material on French and British art from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, most recently for the course, From Enlightenment to Romanticism, which she currently chairs.
Linda has also published a number of articles on French art and theory and is currently researching the Romantics' views on sculpture and on the sublime.
Related programme
Romantic painting, which flourished in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Europe, was characterised by its search for the dramatic, the heroic, the unconventional and the mysterious. In its life-affirming mode it celebrated the feats of the individual mind and will. Gros’s General Bonaparte at the Bridge of Arcole (1797) depicts its conquering hero as a man of action, his elaborate sashes and unfurling flag expressing the extraordinariness, inner intensity and iron will of the hero. Nothing could be further from the earlier ancien régime concept of ‘subjects’ as (largely powerless) servants of the monarch and of the state.
Romantic painting celebrated individuality and enterprise and seemed to promise a significant break with the past. Due to the precarious developments of these revolutionary times, however, the ideal of the hero was always on a knife-edge, haunted by the fear of loss. Important state commissions such as Gros’s Napoleon Visiting the Field of the Battle of Eylau (1808) celebrated the victor’s heroic feats while at the same time drawing attention to the bloodshed and suffering of war. Would the new order really fulfil its promise? In its less life-affirming manifestations, Romantic painting was concerned with impossible or lost dreams and hidden desire.
As political turmoil in Europe gave way to a more stable, if bourgeois, state of affairs, artists inherited an interest in the individual mind that expressed itself through an increasing emphasis on inwardness. For painters and sculptors this posed a particular problem. How could one express the inner workings of the mind, inherently an invisible phenomenon, in a medium constituted by the visual? One possible way forward was to express the visual images conjured up by the imagination, particularly in dreams. While most eighteenth-century artists and theorists had conceived of the imagination as a creative synthesis of inherited tradition with newly observed sights in nature or reality (think, for example, of Joshua Reynolds’ endless variations on classical formulae in his society portraits), the Romantics saw the capacity of the imagination as boundless.
There was also an unprecedented emphasis on religious or spiritual vision and a general faith that the inner (rather than outwardly heroic) life could be given visible form. Just as events on the political stage had broken the mould, so the imagination could find endless new ways of seeing things and ‘see’ things previously unseen. Originality and unconventionality were highly prized, even if more conservative critics or members of the viewing public were not yet ready for this. The Enlightenment’s ideal of art as a school of morals gave way to a culture of liberation and was fully reawakened only much later, in the Victorian era. The world of the subconscious and supra-rational was in vogue, in the grimacing fairies of Fuseli’s Titania and Bottom (1780-90); the madmen and witches depicted by Goya and the vision of Hell in Blake’s Capaneus the Blasphemer.
Blake was part of an important strain of Romantic art that attempted to place the concerns of mortals within the larger scale of the divine. This was another example of the quest of Romanticism to reach beyond the plainly visual to the unseen. His Capaneus (guilty of over-reaching pride and ambition) is consumed by the flames of divine wrath, his solid mortal body on the point of dissolution.
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