Romanticism in Romantic Painting

In the painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818) by Caspar David Friedrich, a quintessential Romanticist painting, the expression of Romanticism is innate as the painting itself was created in an era known as Romanticism, centered in Germany in the early 19^th century. The entire idea of Romanticism in this movement revolved around many of the ideas listed by Robin: Emotion over Logic, etc.

The Romantics of this time also established the importance of the “sublime” or a feeling where terror and awe meet in response to stimulation.

The emphasis on this “sublime” quality is very important to the structure of this painting, and in other Romanticist paintings.

In this way the idea of what is ‘romantic’ or the ‘structure of feeling’ is directly related and established by a group of individuals, specifically artists and art critics. The idea itself is subjective, and therefore not universal by any means, however the ideas behind the Romanticist movement have been widely used in reference to other scenarios that would be seen as Romantic by way of their sublime nature.

It should be noted that this Romanticist movement began in Germany and spread from there, by which other Artists took on the ideas that were presented, the ideas that had to be formulated by a group of individuals: these ideas were not and are not presently innate in the observation of the world by people.

I feel it’s necessary to link the idea of ‘Life Imitates Art’, because it is so relevant to the idea of a constructed structure of feeling, to the idea that anything regarded as romantic is, as stated earlier, a construction: something that was defined as beautiful by others and was then taken up as a fact of existence.

The philosophical idea that Life imitates Art basically argues that the things we see as beautiful in the world: nature, the moon, the ocean, etc. are only beautiful to us because they have been presented in a manner to us where we can see it that way.

Proponents of this idea state that Artists had to show people, through the lens of their experience, what was beautiful in their artwork, and by consequence we find these things beautiful. In this way the things we find beautiful are the things artists have shown us are beautiful. The beauty we find in life is imitating the beauty that we find in art.

This is obviously a subjective philosophical idea that could be argued about further in terms of semantics, and the possibility of it. I simply used it as a stepping-stone to further my point about how Romantic paintings, or art that we see today as ‘Romantic’ is not innately romantic, but was expressively conceived as such.

The political and ideological ideas behind this, or the argument, of the Romantics was directly related to a reaction regarding the Industrial Revolution, and the Age of Reason, where the artists of the movement saw the need to express and show the beauty and sublimity of parts of life that they saw as having more worth and of bring about an emotional reaction, as well as an expression of pure emotion, or to instill an emotion in someone. Following the French Revolution this new movement, centered on emotion, and the recesses of the human mind, developed in opposition to established ideas of reason, and science.