Romanticism

Romantic Painters and Nature

Nature meant more than flora and fauna to the Romantics. As stated above, it was often presented as itself a work of art, constructed by a divine imagination, in emblematic language. A blade of grass was not just a blade of grass; the tiny frame of the grass encompassed the entire human experience- of love and suffering, of the cycle of life. At the same time, Romantics gave greater attention both to describing natural phenomena accurately and to capturing "sensuous nuance"-and this is as true of Romantic landscape painting as of Romantic nature poetry. Accuracy of observation, however, was not sought for its own sake. Romantic paintings were after all paintings of meditation.

Imagination –the core Romantic Quality

The imagination was seen as the supreme faculty of the mind. This contrasted distinctly with the traditional arguments for the supremacy of reason. The Romantics believed and defined imagination as our ultimate "shaping" or creative power. The ability to imagine made man what he is and therefore he has to use it to make the world a better place.

Romanticism can be seen as an unnecessarily idealistic philosophy but it would be more judicious to view it is an international artistic and philosophical movement that redefined the fundamental ways in which people in Western cultures thought about themselves and about their world.