Romanticism: 1790 - 1850

The art movement Romanticism actually has very little to do with the popular notion of "romantic", although love may sometimes be used as a subject of Romantic art. More accurately, it is an artistic and philosophical movement that developed and flourished from 1790 to 1850, after the need to redefine fundamentalist views in Western cultures was established. People wanted to explore what was beyond themselves and their immediate world.

The first active Romanticists were England and Germany, which is somewhat of a surprise, as one would expect such a movement to come out of either France or any other countries that speak romance languages. It was a movement that swept across the nations and especially affected the arts, as far back as 1770. In the literary world, works from Robert Burns, William Wordsworth, Coleridge and Novalis were published in this period.

The early Romantic period was right in the middle of the "age of revolutions" – and blossomed during the American (1776) and the French (1789) revolutions. It was a period of political, economic, and social challenges and transformations. This revolutionary energy was what drove Romanticism, a thought that sought to change and challenge the way we perceived the world, and manifested in poetry and in all arts.

Romanticism exalted individualism, subjectivism, irrationalism, imagination, emotions and nature – emotion over reason and senses over intellect. Romantic artists were particularly fascinated by nature, inner passions and struggles, moods and emotionality and frequently set out to investigate human nature and personality, folk culture, ethnicities, all things medieval, exotic and mysterious, and delved into occult and sometimes satanic realms.