Romanticism has nothing to do with love stories. Its painters wanted pictures that shook the people standing in front of them, and they found them in shipwrecks, revolutions, massacres and storms at sea. Behind each of these twelve canvases lies a real event, a poem or a play, and a painter who had to imagine what he had not seen.
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How These Were Chosen
The word Romanticism comes from the medieval romance, a tale of adventure. It names the movement that ran through European and American art from the late 1700s into the mid-1800s, when painters put feeling before the calm subjects of Greece and Rome.
A storm suited them, because in a storm nobody poses. A wave, a firing squad or a cloud decides what happens. Each painting here is built around such a force, weather, the sea, war, a crime, a myth or a machine, at its height, just passed or still coming.
Most of these painters were not there when their storm broke. They worked in the studio, from sketches, from memory, from a survivor's account or from a play, sometimes years after the event.
12. John Constable, The Hay Wain (1821)
The raincloud over the millpond in The Hay Wain is already drifting off, and white clouds and patches of blue are taking its place. Below it, an unloaded farm cart stands in the shallow water with two farmhands in it, a black and white dog watches from the bank, and on the left a brick cottage sits half hidden behind dark trees.
John Constable painted a place he had sketched for years. The pond lies at Flatford, on the River Stour in Suffolk, in the east of England, and the cottage was home to Willy Lott, a tenant farmer who lived there in Constable's time.
The house still stands. Yet the picture was made far from the pond, in Constable's London studio in 1821, from those sketches of Flatford, and in the finished canvas tiny haymakers are already at work in a sunlit meadow near the horizon.
London saw it that same year. The canvas went on show at the Royal Academy under the plain title Landscape: Noon, and The Examiner wrote that it "approaches nearer to the actual look of rural nature than any modern landscape whatever." Even so, nobody bought it.
The picture's luck turned in France. In 1824 an art dealer, John Arrowsmith, bought the canvas and sent it to the Paris Salon, the official state exhibition of living artists. There it caused a sensation, and King Charles X awarded Constable a gold medal, chiefly for this picture.
The French had in fact noticed it before the medal. In 1821, at the Royal Academy, Théodore Géricault had stood in front of it and, according to Delacroix, came away "quite stunned." One of the calmest pictures on this list had first struck the man who had just painted the raft at number 3.
At a Glance
Artist: John Constable (1776 to 1837)
Painted: 1821
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 130.2 × 185.4 cm (51.3 × 73 in)
Where to see it: The National Gallery, London
11. Eugène Delacroix, The Death of Sardanapalus (1827)
On a huge bed draped in red, the king of The Death of Sardanapalus lies propped on one elbow while smoke rolls in from the right. Eugène Delacroix took the scene from a play, Lord Byron's Sardanapalus, published in 1821, and painted it in 1827.
Its hero is the legendary last king of Assyria, an ancient empire in present-day Iraq. Women are being stabbed beside his bed and his horse is being dragged in, yet the king watches it all without a flicker.