Romanticism is the art movement that put strong feeling, imagination and the power of nature ahead of the calm rules of classical art, the art modeled on ancient Greece and Rome. It took shape in Europe from about 1780 and ran until the middle of the nineteenth century.
The painting to see first is The Raft of the Medusa, which the French painter Théodore Géricault showed in Paris in 1819.
Before looking at that raft, it helps to know where the movement's name comes from. It goes back to romance, the medieval word for tales of knights and marvels written in French and the other everyday languages that grew out of Latin, rather than in Latin itself.
By the seventeenth century, an English reader called something romantic when it belonged in such a tale: heroic, marvelous, far from ordinary life. Around 1800, German critics borrowed the word to name a new kind of poetry, which they set against classical poetry.
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Géricault's raft, by contrast, comes out of no old tale. It began as a recent naval disaster. In 1816 the Méduse, Medusa in English, a fast warship of the French navy, was carrying officials to Senegal, a colony France was taking back from Britain, when it struck a sandbank off the coast of Mauritania.
The lifeboats could not hold everyone. About 150 of those on board were packed onto a raft of planks and masts lashed together, so crowded that men stood in water up to their waists. The officers in the boats were supposed to tow it, but they cut the ropes and left it behind.
The raft drifted for twelve days under a burning sun. By the time a ship of the same expedition came upon it, only fifteen were still alive.
Géricault turned that disaster into a canvas almost five meters high and more than seven meters wide, with figures in the foreground larger than life. He showed it at the Salon of 1819, the great public exhibition of living artists in Paris, under a neutral title, Scène de naufrage, Shipwreck Scene.
Few visitors took that title at face value. The Méduse had been commanded by a nobleman who owed his post to his loyalty to the crown, and the abandoned raft had become a scandal for the government of King Louis XVIII. Many saw the picture as an attack on it.
What joins the knights of the old tales to this shipwreck is the feeling both stir, far beyond ordinary life. To see why such a feeling was new in painting, it helps to start with the kind of picture the Romantics were rebelling against.
Against the calm of the academies
At the end of the eighteenth century, one style ruled the art academies of Europe, the official schools that trained painters and judged their work. It was called Neoclassicism, and it copied the statues of ancient Greece and Rome: firm outlines, calm faces, stories of duty and sacrifice.
Its leader in France was the painter Jacques-Louis David, whose Paris studio trained a whole generation of artists. Some of those young painters would turn against the very ideals David stood for.
What You'll Discover
Why an Irish writer made fear respectable.
The painter who turned his figures away.
What Géricault learned from the survivors.
What happened to Delacroix's barricade.
The poet's one sentence on what Romanticism is.