Romanticism - Definition, Characteristics, History, Art, Poetry, Literature, & Music - Britannica

2/2/2021 Romanticism | Definition, Characteristics, History, Art, Poetry, Literature, & Music | Britannica
Romanticism
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Last Updated: Dec 7, 2020 See Article History
Alternative Titles: Romantic Style, Romantic movement
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Romanticism, attitude or intellectual orientation that characterized many works of literature,

painting, music, architecture, criticism, and historiography in Western civilization over a period
from the late 18th to the mid-19th century. Romanticism can be seen as a rejection of the
precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality that typified Classicism
in general and late 18th-century Neoclassicism in particular. It was also to some
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materialism in general. Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational,
https://www.britannica.com/art/Romanticism 1/21
the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the
transcendental.
Eugène Delacroix: Liberty Leading the People

Liberty Leading the People, oil on canvas by Eugène Delacroix, 1830; in the Louvre, Paris.
Josse Christophel/Alamy
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Among the characteristic attitudes of Romanticism were the following: a deepened appreciation
of the beauties of nature; a general exaltation of emotion over reason and of the senses over
intellect; a turning in upon the self and a heightened examination of human personality and its
moods and mental potentialities; a preoccupation with the genius, the hero, and the exceptional
figure in general and a focus on his or her passions and inner struggles; a new view of the artist
as a supremely individual creator, whose creative spirit is more important than strict adherence
to formal rules and traditional procedures; an emphasis upon imagination as a gateway to
transcendent experience and spiritual truth; an obsessive interest in folk culture, national and
ethnic cultural origins, and the medieval era; and a predilection for the exotic, the remote, the
mysterious, the weird, the occult, the monstrous, the diseased, and even the satanic.
Literature
Romanticism proper was preceded by several related developments from the mid-18th century
on that can be termed Pre-Romanticism. Among such trends was a new appreciation of the

medieval romance, from which the Romantic movement derives its name. The romance was a
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tale or ballad of chivalric adventure whose emphasis on individual heroism a Britannica
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and the mysterious was in clear contrast to the elegant formality and artificiality of prevailing
Classical forms of literature, such as the French Neoclassical tragedy or the English heroic
couplet in poetry. This new interest in relatively unsophisticated but overtly emotional literary
expressions of the past was to be a dominant note in Romanticism.
00:19 02:38
Romanticism in English literature began in the 1790s with the publication of the Lyrical
Ballads of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wordsworth’s “Preface” to the
second edition (1800) of Lyrical Ballads, in which he described poetry as “the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings,” became the manifesto of the English Romantic movement in
poetry. William Blake was the third principal poet of the movement’s early phase in England.
The first phase of the Romantic movement in Germany was marked by innovations in both
content and literary style and by a preoccupation with the mystical, the subconscious, and the
supernatural. A wealth of talents, including Friedrich Hölderlin, the early Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe, Jean Paul, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, August Wilhelm and Friedrich von Schlegel, Wilhelm
Heinrich Wackenroder, and Friedrich Schelling, belong to this first phase. In Revolutionary
France, François-Auguste-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand, and Madame de Staël were the
chief initiators of Romanticism, by virtue of their influential historical and theoretical writings.

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Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein: Goethe in the Roman Campagna
Goethe in the Roman Campagna, oil on canvas by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, 1787; in the Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main,
Germany.
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
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The second phase of Romanticism, comprising the period from about 1805 to the 1830s, was
marked by a quickening of cultural nationalism and a new attention to national origins, as
attested by the collection and imitation of native folklore, folk ballads and poetry, folk dance
and music, and even previously ignored medieval and Renaissance works. The revived
historical appreciation was translated into imaginative writing by Sir Walter Scott, who is often
considered to have invented the historical novel. At about this same time English Romantic
poetry had reached its zenith in the works of John Keats, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

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Sir Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott.
© Photos.com/Getty Images
A notable by-product of the Romantic interest in the emotional were works dealing with the
supernatural, the weird, and the horrible, as in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and works by
Charles Robert Maturin, the Marquis de Sade, and E.T.A. Hoffmann. The second phase of
Romanticism in Germany was dominated by Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano, Joseph von
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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, oil on canvas by Richard Rothwell, first exhibited 1840; in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
© AISA—Everett/Shutterstock.com
By the 1820s Romanticism had broadened to embrace the literatures of almost all of Europe. In
this later, second, phase, the movement was less universal in approach and concentrated more
on exploring each nation’s historical and cultural inheritance and on examining the passions
and struggles of exceptional individuals. A brief survey of Romantic or Romantic-influenced
writers would have to include Thomas De Quincey, William Hazlitt, and Charlotte, Emily, and
Anne Brontë in England; Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, Alphonse de Lamartine, Alfred de
Musset, Stendhal, Prosper Mérimée, Alexandre Dumas, and Théophile Gautier in France;
Alessandro Manzoni and Giacomo Leopardi in Italy; Aleksandr Pushkin and Mikhail
Lermontov in Russia; José de Espronceda and Ángel de Saavedra in Spain; Adam Mickiewicz in
Poland; and almost all of the important writers in pre-Civil War America.

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https://www.britannica.com/art/Romanticism  7/21
ARTICLE CONTENTS 
Introduction
Literature
Visual arts
Music

Charlotte Brontë
A portrait of Charlotte Brontë, based on a chalk pastel by George Richmond.
© Photos.com/Thinkstock
Visual Arts
In the 1760s and ’70s a number of British artists at home and in Rome, including James Barry,
Henry Fuseli, John Hamilton Mortimer, and John Flaxman, began to paint subjects that were
at odds with the strict decorum and classical historical and mythological subject matter of
conventional figurative art. These artists favoured themes that were bizarre, pathetic, or
extravagantly heroic, and they defined their images with tensely linear drawing and bold
contrasts of light and shade. William Blake, the other principal early Romantic painter in
England, evolved his own powerful and unique visionary images.

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William Blake: Pity
Pity, colour print finished in pen and watercolour by William Blake, 1795; in the Tate Collection, London.
Courtesy of the trustees of the Tate, London; photographs, G. Robertson, A.C. Cooper Ltd.
In the next generation the great genre of English Romantic landscape painting emerged in the
works of J.M.W. Turner and John Constable. These artists emphasized transient and dramatic
effects of light, atmosphere, and colour to portray a dynamic natural world capable of evoking
awe and grandeur.
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J.M.W. Turner: Rain, Steam, and Speed—the Great Western Railway
Rain, Steam, and Speed—the Great Western Railway, oil on canvas by J.M.W. Turner, 1844; in the National Gallery, London.
Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York
In France the chief early Romantic painters were Baron Antoine Gros, who painted dramatic
tableaus of contemporary incidents of the Napoleonic Wars, and Théodore Géricault, whose
depictions of individual heroism and suffering in The Raft of the Medusa and in his portraits of
the insane truly inaugurated the movement around 1820. The greatest French Romantic
painter was Eugène Delacroix, who is notable for his free and expressive brushwork, his rich
and sensuous use of colour, his dynamic compositions, and his exotic and adventurous subject
matter, ranging from North African Arab life to revolutionary politics at home. Paul Delaroche,
Théodore Chassériau, and, occasionally, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres represent the last,
more academic phase of Romantic painting in France. In Germany Romantic painting took on
symbolic and allegorical overtones, as in the works of Philipp Otto Runge. Caspar David
Friedrich, the greatest German Romantic artist, painted eerily silent and stark landscapes that
can induce in the beholder a sense of mystery and religious awe.

Théodore Géricault: The Raft of the Medusa
The Raft of the Medusa, oil on canvas by Théodore Géricault, c. 1819; in the Louvre, Paris. 491 × 716 cm.
Fine Art Images—Heritage Images/age fotostock

Romanticism expressed itself in architecture primarily through imitations of older architectural
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styles and through eccentric buildings known as “follies.” Medieval Gothic architecture
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appealed to the Romantic imagination in England and Germany, and this renewed interest led
to the Gothic Revival.
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London: Houses of Parliament
Houses of Parliament, London, a complex of Gothic Revival buildings designed by Charles Barry and Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, 1837–
60.
Adrian Pingstone

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Music
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Ludwig van Beethoven: Violin Concerto in D Major

Excerpt from Violin Concerto in D Major, Opus 61, by Ludwig van Beethoven, with a pianist playing the orchestra's part.
Musical Romanticism was marked by emphasis on originality and individuality, personal

emotional expression, and freedom and experimentation of form. Ludwig van Beethoven and
Franz Schubert bridged the Classical and Romantic periods, for while their formal musical
techniques were basically Classical, their music’s intensely personal feeling and their use of
programmatic elements provided an important model for 19th-century Romantic composers.
0:00 / 1:46
Hector Berlioz: Harold en Italie

Excerpt from Harold en Italie, by Hector Berlioz, 1834. Written for viola and orchestra, the piece is played here by viola and piano.

The possibilities for dramatic expressiveness in music were augmented both by the expansion
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and perfection of the instrumental repertoire and by the creation of new musical forms, such as
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the lied, nocturne, intermezzo, capriccio, prelude, and mazurka. The Romantic spirit often
found inspiration in poetic texts, legends, and folk tales, and the linking of words and music
either programmatically or through such forms as the concert overture and incidental music is
another distinguishing feature of Romantic music. The principal composers of the first phase of
Romanticism were Hector Berlioz, Frédéric Chopin, Felix Mendelssohn, and Franz Liszt. These
composers pushed orchestral instruments to their limits of expressiveness, expanded the
harmonic vocabulary to exploit the full range of the chromatic scale, and explored the linking of
instrumentation and the human voice. The middle phase of musical Romanticism is
represented by such figures as Antonín Dvořák, Edvard Grieg, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
Romantic efforts to express a particular nation’s distinctiveness through music was manifested
in the works of the Czechs Antonín Dvořák and Bedřich Smetana and by various Russian,
French, and Scandinavian composers.
0:00 / 2:14
Carl Maria von Weber: “Einst träumte meiner sel'gen Base”

“Einst träumte meiner sel'gen Base,” Ännchen's aria (No. 13, Romance) from Act III of Der Freischütz (1821) by Carl Maria von Weber.
Romantic opera in Germany began with the works of Carl Maria von Weber, while Romantic
opera in Italy was developed by the composers Gaetano Donizetti, Vincenzo Bellini, and
Gioachino Rossini. The Italian Romantic opera was brought to the height of its development by
Giuseppe Verdi. The Romantic opera in Germany culminated in the works of Richard Wagner,
who combined and integrated such diverse strands of Romanticism as fervent nationalism; the
cult of the hero; exotic sets and costumes; expressive music; and the display of virtuosity in
orchestral and vocal settings. The final phase of musical Romanticism is represented by such
late 19th-century and early 20th-century composers as Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss,
Edward Elgar, and Jean Sibelius.

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This article was most recently revised and updated by Alicja Zelazko, Assistant Editor.
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history of Europe: Romanticism and Realism
To make the story of 19th-century culture start in the year of the French Revolution is at once
convenient and accurate, even though nothing in history “starts” at a precise moment. For although
the revolution itself…
Western architecture: Origins and development
…forms, was, paradoxically, also a Romantic movement. Prompted by feeling as well as by reason,
architects interested themselves as much in the picturesque aspects of nature and objects in nature
(such as ruins) as in rational procedures. The term Romantic Classicism has been used by some 20th-…
Western painting: Romanticism
Romanticism is a term loosely used to designate numerous and diverse changes in the arts during a
period of more than 100 years (roughly, 1760–1870), changes that were in reaction against
Neoclassicism (but not necessarily the classicism of Greece and Rome) or against what…
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Petrus Borel
French author
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See Article History
Alternative Titles: Borel d’Hauterive, Joseph-Pierre Borel
Petrus Borel, original name Joseph-Pierre Borel, also called Borel d’Hauterive, (born
June 29, 1809, Lyon, Fr.—died July 1859, Mostaganem, Alg.), French poet, novelist, and critic
active in the Romantic movement.
The 12th of an ironmonger’s 14 children, Borel was trained as an architect but turned to literature
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“Lycanthrope” (“Wolf-Man”). He became a leader of the group of daring writers known as Les
Bousingos, among whom were Gérard de Nerval and Théophile Gautier. With the revival of
interest in classical style, he fell into poverty. However, he was able to obtain a post in the
colonization of Algeria. Because of his proud and touchy nature, he was dismissed in 1855 and
spent the rest of his life, ragged and unkempt, in a Gothic mansion in Mostaganem. His works,
redolent of horror and melodrama, include Rhapsodies (1832), the short stories in Champavert,
contes immoraux (1833; “Champavert, Immoral Stories”), and Madame Putiphar (1839), with a
verse prologue that foreshadows the poet Charles Baudelaire’s spiritual style. Borel’s intensity, as
an individual and a writer, would later inspire the Surrealists.
This article was most recently revised and updated by J.E. Luebering, Executive Editorial Director.
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French literature: The poetry of the Romantics
…to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830, there was a marked possibility that
French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics and the socialism of utopian writers such as
Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s…
Literature
Literature, a body of written works. The name has traditionally been applied to those imaginative works of poetry and prose
distinguished by the intentions of their authors and the perceived aesthetic excellence of their execution. Literature may be
classified according to a variety of systems,…
Short story
Short story, brief fictional prose narrative that is shorter than a novel and that usually deals with only a few
characters. The short story is usually concerned with a single effect conveyed in only one or a few
significant episodes or scenes. The form encourages economy of setting, concise…
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Petrus Borel
QUICK FACTS
BORN
June 29, 1809
Lyon, France

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Mostaganem, Algeria
MOVEMENT / STYLE
Romanticism
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2/2/2021 Romanticism | Definition, Characteristics, History, Art, Poetry, Literature, & Music | Britannica

Alternative Titles: Romantic Style, Romantic movement

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Romanticism, attitude or intellectual orientation that characterized many works of literature,

Eugène Delacroix: Liberty Leading the People

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Ludwig van Beethoven: Violin Concerto in D Major

Musical Romanticism was marked by emphasis on originality and individuality, personal

Hector Berlioz: Harold en Italie

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Alternative Titles: Borel d’Hauterive, Joseph-Pierre Borel

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