Romanticism for beginners: storms and dreams

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

Romanticism was less a style than an attitude. Romantic artists valued feeling over reason, the individual over the rule, wild nature over neat gardens, and the past, the exotic and the supernatural over everyday life. For a witch, this is home territory: moonlight, storms, ruins, nightmares and visions all come into art here.

Three layers

Historical What the works and records show. Later tradition The myths about the artists. Modern How witches and artists use these images now.

The sublime

Historical In 1757 the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke separated the beautiful, which is small, smooth and pleasing, from the sublime, which is vast, dark and terrifying, a kind of delightful horror. Storms, abysses and ruins became favorite subjects. At the same time, poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Novalis wrote about nature as alive and full of spirit, and painters read them.

Goya

Goya, Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga (1784 to 1792), 1787 to 1788. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (49.7.41). Image: Open Access, public domain (CC0).

Historical Francisco Goya (1746 to 1828) was court painter to the Spanish kings. His portrait of the child Manuel Osorio, 1787 to 1788, shows a boy in red holding a magpie on a string while cats stare from the shadows; whether it warns about the fragility of childhood is debated. Goya went deaf after an illness in 1792 to 1793. In 1799 he published Los Caprichos, eighty etchings mocking superstition, corruption and the Inquisition. Plate 43 shows the artist asleep while owls and bats swarm: “The sleep of reason produces monsters.”

Turner and Friedrich

Historical J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851) painted light and weather until his late canvases dissolved into swirling color. In Whalers, about 1845, the boat is almost lost in spray. Turner claimed he had himself tied to a mast in a storm to paint Snow Storm (1842); the story cannot be verified.

Caspar David Friedrich, Two Men Contemplating the Moon, about 1825 to 1830. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2000.51). Image: public domain.

Caspar David Friedrich (1774 to 1840) painted solitary figures seen from behind, facing mountains, seas and moonlit skies. A devout Protestant, he is often read as a painter of spiritual meditation, though how far to read him as allegory is debated.

Delacroix

Historical Eugène Delacroix (1798 to 1863) led French Romanticism with blazing color. Liberty Leading the People (1830) celebrates the July Revolution. After a trip to Morocco in 1832 he painted North African scenes, and Linda Nochlin’s essay “The Imaginary Orient” (1983) showed how such pictures presented the region as exotic and timeless, reflecting colonial attitudes.

The esoteric angle

Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, 1781. Detroit Institute of Arts (55.5.A). Image: public domain.

Historical Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (1781) made a sensation at the Royal Academy with its goblin crouched on a sleeper’s chest. Goya filled the Caprichos with witches, and between 1819 and 1823 he painted a witches’ sabbath among the Black Paintings on the walls of his house. These are satire, not portraits from the inside. William Blake (1757 to 1827) made his own mythology in illuminated books printed by a method he invented, and described visions all his life. That he had them and recorded them is documented; what they were is a matter of belief.

Later tradition Stories that Goya went mad are speculation; his deafness is documented.

Modern Blake and Friedrich are beloved by modern witches. I see why, and I explore the night side in Moon and night and Witches in art.

Try it yourself

Look at Goya’s Caprichos plate 43 on the Prado or Met website. Write down every creature you see. Then write one sentence: what monster does your own “sleep of reason” produce?

Before and after

Before this: Neoclassicism.

After this: Pre-Raphaelites.

See every movement in order on the art movements timeline, or learn to look step by step in the free Art History for Beginners course.