Romanticism, XOXO
- Nov 30, 2025
- 9 min read
Throughout Europe, romanticism has been the way for artist to explore deeper thoughts, deeper senses of purity and of passion even through wars and revolutions. This intellectual and artistic movement prioritised the artist's unique, individual imagination above the strictures of classical form. Artist turned away from the cold rationalism of Neoclassicism, and sought instead the pulse of human imagination emphasised by intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience.
" Death itself was so beautiful then, so grand, so magnificent in its smoking purple! She looks so much like hope, she mowed down such green ears of corn, that she seemed to have become young, and one no longer believed in old age [...] So he sat on a world of ruins a worried youth. " --- Alfred de Musset, La Confession d'un enfant du siècle (1836). De Musset captures the image of what the was, in the dreams of those who were too young to fight, the Napoleonic era. Idem, in the Le Rouge et le Noir, Stendhal depicts Julien Sorel read with passion le Mémoriale de Sainte-Hélène. From every sides, whether monarchist, Orleanist, Legitimist, republican, or Bonapartist, 1815 marks the beginning of the nostalgic era.
I. From David’s Atelier to a New Sensibility: The David's Legacy
In France, this movement evolved from the atelier of Jacques-Louis David, where discipline and antique virtue once reigned, into a vibrant world of colour, sensuality, and pathos. David’s students were among the first to question their master’s strict moral and formal idealism. Anne-Louis Girodet, François Gérard, and Antoine-Jean Gros forged the bridge between classical restraint and Romantic expressiveness.
Girodet, for instance, opened new paths with Le Sommeil d’Endymion (1791), a lyrical vision bathed in soft lunar light, where form dissolves into sensual atmosphere. His Ossian Receiving the French Heroes (1801) portrayed fallen Napoleonic officers welcomed by the mythical bard Ossian: a poetic fusion of contemporary heroism and Celtic legend. This fascination with Ossian, whose supposed ancient poems were in fact 18th-century fabrications by James Macpherson, captivated artists across Europe. The ethereal melancholy of Ossian’s world became a perfect vehicle for Romantic sentiment: mourning, nostalgia, and sublime nature.
II. The Subversion of Genres
With Théodore Gericault, Romanticism broke completely with classical decorum. He belongs to a new generation of painters born around the time of the late 18th-century Revolution or shortly thereafter, who did not take part in the uprisings but still wish to be part of history. Most of them will criticise the Grand Army of Napoleon from Empire's failures to the Restoration. Gericault will achieve this by depicting History through collective drama and expressing passions with intense contrast. He will illustrate the theme of failed heroism, focusing on the defeated, the corpses, and the dead. The individual who failed in battle is the hero, or rather, the anti-hero. All of this is supported by an extreme sensation of passion.
His Officer of the Imperial Guard Charging (1812) blends the individualised psychology of portraiture with the dynamism of battle painting, neither simple likeness nor full narrative, but a new hybrid genre of emotional immediacy. Art critic Henri Zerner described it as a work “that belongs to no category,” since Géricault merged the private and public (in this painting, Géricault actually portrays one of his friends, Alexandre Dieudonné, a hunter of the Imperial Guard, and elevates him to the Historical genre of paintings), the intimate and epic.
One characteristic of the Romantic painters is their willingness to engage with and embrace the "Grand" genre in paintings, to be considered at the same level as the Classicists, and so they will reproduce all the academic genres of Historical paintings even if the story told is not the most glorious, nor glamorous.
In The Raft of the Medusa (1819), Géricault smashed the conventions of history painting. Drawing from a contemporary shipwreck scandal that had captured the public's imagination and outrage: the tragic shipwreck of the French frigate Méduse, which was marred by the incompetence and negligence of royal officers, resulting in a catastrophic loss of life. He replaced divine heroism with raw human tragedy. The massive canvas measuring an impressive 491 cm × 716 cm, confronts the viewer with colossal grief, political accusation, and the desperate struggle for survival. The mix of hope and despair is palpable, as the figures on the raft reach out toward an unseen ship on the horizon, symbolising a tiny glimmer of hope shining through the heavy darkness of their situation. This was a painting of the modern world, the Romantic world, where truth lay not in perfection but in suffering and resistance: depicting a sublime horror.
III. Delacroix, the Triumph of Imagination and the 1827's salon
Seen as the central figure of French Romanticism, Eugène Delacroix carry on Gericault's legacy while radically expanding what History painting could be. Drawing on contemporary events as much as on myth and Antiquity, he turned the Grand genre into a laboratory for modern emotions, political shocks and personal obsessions.
Delacroix is a romantic through his palette but also through his sense and appreciation for movement, colour and asymmetry. In works like The Barque of Dante or Dante and Virgil in Hell (1850) he places literacy figures at the hearth of an unstable composition, their monumental draperies embodying both poetic grandeur and the shared "mal-du-siècle" of 19th century souls. In his Greek canvases the political dimension is even more pronounced. With Massacres of Chios, he transforms the Greek War of Independence against the Turcs into a modern epic populated not by triumphant heroes but by defeated bodies, devastated landscapes, and gestures of desperate dignity, emphasised by striking details like the broken sword in the foreground. This departure from traditional heroism is shocking to some contemporaries like Gros who see it as a "massacre of the paintings". Yet, Delacroix continues with Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi where a mournful feminine figure stands in the middle of a destroyed city while a soldier in the background incarnate the enemy threat.
La Liberté guidant le peuple crystallises this fusion of present history and timeless myth. Delacroix portrays the July Revolution of 1830 as an allegory of the nation: a bare‑footed young woman brandishing the tricolour leads armed men of different ages over the corpses, with Notre‑Dame anchoring the scene in real Paris. The painting does not simply document a revolt; it forges a revolutionary icon in which political change becomes a symbolic, almost sacred narrative of popular revolt.
The Salon of 1827 marks the public triumph of this new sensibility. More than forty percent of the works shown are linked to the “new painting,” and Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus stands out as a manifesto canvas: a vast, baroque‑like scene drenched in reds, where the Assyrian king, languid in white on his red bed, calmly surveys the slaughter of women, pages, horses, and treasures he has ordered rather than leave them to the enemy. At the same Salon, Ingres offers a foil with The Apotheosis of Homer, a rigorously ordered, classically framed homage to great authors from Virgil and Pindar to Shakespeare, Racine, and Mozart, arranged around Homer like a timeless pantheon.
Around this moment, painting, literature, and theory converge. The same year, Victor Hugo publishes the preface to Cromwell, often read as the literary manifesto of Romanticism, which rethinks history in terms of ode, epic, and drama, and links modern inspiration to the Bible, Homer, and Shakespeare. Anglomania feeds the imagination of artists such as Louis Boulanger, whose Mazeppa translates Lord Byron’s romantic narrative into a feverish vision of suffering, ruins, and chiaroscuro. Thanks to patrons like the comte de Forbin (French painter, antiquary and former curator of the Musée du Louvre), Delacroix’s Romantic history painting enters official spaces such as Versailles with The Battle of Taillebourg, admired by Baudelaire, who will later champion him as the most subjective of painters and a universal master of dynamic, passionate history painting.
IV. Orientalist Dream: Reimagining the Antiquity
After Sardanapalus, Delacroix’s imagination expanded beyond Europe. His voyage to Morocco in 1832, following the French conquest of Algeria, opened a new chapter in his art and in Romantic painting more broadly. The trip offered him what he long sought: a living antiquity. In the streets of Tangier and Meknes, he encountered colours more vivid than any in the studios of Paris, gestures that reminded him of Homeric heroes, and light that dissolved the geometric certainties of classical composition.
His Moroccan notebooks, filled with rapid sketches of horses, market scenes, interiors, and tribesmen, became a lifelong reservoir of motifs.
In Women of Algiers, Delacroix presents seated women in a richly decorated interior, painted with warm, broken colour and enveloping shadow, which communicates both sensuous intimacy and quiet melancholy. The scene avoids the most sensationalised fantasies of harem life: the women are self-assurance, their world carefully described, and the atmosphere oscillates between reverie and stillness, making the "Orient" less a seductive environment than an enclosed, meditative universe. In Jewish Wedding in Morocco (1839), Delacroix shifts from the secluded intimacy of the harem to a communal celebration held in an open courtyard, where music, dance, and social ritual take centre stage. Musicians occupy the heart of the composition, flanked by groups of men and women separated along traditional lines, their layered garments, turbans, and white draperies rendered with precise, loving attention to local costume and gesture. Rather than focusing on the bridal couple, who remain offstage according to custom, Delacroix turns the wedding into a scene of shared joy and tightly knit community, capturing how marginalised Jews in Morocco preserve their identity through ceremony, song, and collective presence. The painting balances ethnographic observation with a warm, golden light and complex choreography of figures, transforming this specific celebration in Tangier into a vivid Romantic meditation on tradition, resilience, and everyday festivity.
By contrast, The Sultan of Morocco (Moulay Abd-er-Rahman) stages the Orient as public pageant and political theatre. The sultan, mounted and dignified, emerges from the palace gate surrounded by guards, horses, and officials, all arranged in a broad, sun-drenched frieze. Here Delacroix’s interest in ceremonial movement, costume, and light converges with Romantic fascination for powerful, charismatic rulers. The painting fuses ethnographic detail, turbans, saddles, weapons, architecture, with a sweeping, rhythmic composition that elevates this precise historical moment into a timeless vision of authority and splendour.
Alongside Delacroix’s Orientalist canvases, other French painters explored antiquity and the “East” in more allegorical modes. François Édouard Picot’s Study and Genius Unveil Ancient Egypt to Greece (1827) stages an encounter not between peoples but between epochs and ideas. His work reveal the mysteries of Pharaonic Egypt to Classical Greece, embodying the 19th‑century fascination with rediscovered civilisations and archaeological revelations. Unlike Delacroix’s lived, contemporary Orient, Picot’s Egypt functions as a learned, idealised past, filtered through academic allegory and Neoclassical clarity.
Through these diverse images, Romantic Orientalism oscillates between documentary impulse and dream, between political spectacle, intimate interior, and scholarly allegory. For Delacroix, the Orient is a space where colour becomes emotion and movement becomes thought; for Picot, it is a symbolic field where ancient wisdom and modern curiosity meet.
In all cases, reimagining antiquity and the “elsewhere” becomes a way of questioning Europe itself: its rationalism, its institutions, and its waning sense of spiritual intensity.
V. XOXO in Europe
Romanticism was a truly pan-European phenomenon that transcended national borders while adapting to local traditions and sensibilities. In England, J.M.W. Turner revolutionised landscape and seascape painting with his dramatic use of light and colour to evoke the sublime power of nature. His works, characterised by swirling skies, turbulent seas, and atmospheric effects, capture nature’s overwhelming force and beauty, inviting both awe and contemplation. Turner’s art often reflected contemporary events and industrialising society, blending natural spectacle with human vulnerability.
Meanwhile, in Germany, Caspar David Friedrich approached the sublime with a more introspective and spiritual tone. His landscapes often depict solitary figures contemplating vast, mysterious natural spaces, symbolising human mortality, introspection, and the divine mystery of nature. Friedrich’s subtle symbolism and meticulous detail contrasted with Turner’s expressive brushwork, yet both shared a deep engagement with nature as a source of emotional and metaphysical truth.
Other European artists contributed to this broad tapestry of Romanticism, including the mystical phases of Philipp Otto Runge in Germany and the visionary works of William Blake in England. In Spain, Francisco Goya brought emotional intensity and social critique to his paintings and prints, creating a darker Romantic vision rooted in the human psyche and political turmoil.
Passion as Truth
At the heart of Romanticism was the conviction that passion and emotion revealed deeper truths about human existence. This aesthetic philosophy rejected cold reason and formal correctness as insufficient for exploring the complexities of life, suffering, and beauty. For Romantics, authentic art sprang from the intensity of feeling and individual imagination, whether that was joy, despair, heroism, or mystical awe.
Passion was both the subject and the method: it was the truth that art sought to reveal, and the force that shaped its creation. This meant artists were often driven by personal conviction and emotional urgency, giving rise to works that challenged conventions and provoked strong responses. The Romantic artist became a visionary figure who could transcend mere representation to express the sublime and the ineffable.
In essence, Romanticism asserted that the deepest knowledge comes not from detached observation but from engagement with the world through the heart’s passionate gaze. This legacy continues to influence how art, literature, and thought conceive of truth and beauty as intertwined with feeling and imagination.
