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c. 1800–1850
Romanticism celebrated emotion, nature, and the individual spirit against Enlightenment rationalism. Goya, Delacroix, and Tidemand each channelled an era of revolution, nationalism, and sublime grandeur.
Artists & Works
Carl Spitzweg
Carl Spitzweg trained as a pharmacist before turning to painting, and brought a chemist’s eye for small detail to his gently humorous scenes of eccentric bachelors, dreamers, and small-town German life. The Poor Poet, his best-known work, remains one of the most beloved and reproduced images of German Romanticism.
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Albert Bierstadt
Albert Bierstadt travelled with survey expeditions into the American West and translated what he saw into vast, luminous canvases of the Rocky Mountains and Yosemite that made the frontier’s sublime scale visible to an East Coast public who would never see it themselves. His theatrical light and operatic grandeur made him the best-paid painter in America at his peak.
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