This is coming a bit late (I initially didn’t know we needed to record a journal entry for our online class) but last week we had a long-form seminar video covering Romanticism.
I think stylistically this is a really important and visually interesting movement. I like how it grew alongside Neoclassicism and that both movements share an interest in the sublime — this intangible, overpowering reaction to the world around us.
Romantic paintings, more so than any other period we’ve looked at thus far, have a lot to say about the nineteenth-century Zeitgeist. Romantic paintings capture the emotion of important events and political movements, but not in a very uniform way. German Romantic paintings look very different from, say, English ones because German painters were reacting to and engaging different social/intellectual stimuli than the British were.