Romanticism

Romanticism was a European movement in the arts and ideas that arose in the late eighteenth century and was at its height from about 1800 to 1850. Reacting against the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the upheavals of industrialisation, its writers, painters and composers valued emotion, imagination, individual experience and nature. It spread from Germany and Britain across Europe and to the Americas, and shaped art, music and nationalism for generations.

Its roots lay in the German Sturm und Drang ("Storm and Stress") movement, which questioned whether reason alone could explain the world. Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), about a passionate and sensitive young artist, was imitated by young men across Europe. Other forerunners included James Macpherson's Ossian poems of the 1760s, presented as ancient Gaelic verse but largely his own work, and Horace Walpole's Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto (1764). The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars formed the backdrop; many early Romantics welcomed the revolution, and its collapse into Napoleon's dictatorship came as a shock.

In Germany the university town of Jena, where Fichte, Schelling, Schiller and the Schlegel brothers lived, became the first centre, and writers such as Novalis, Ludwig Tieck and Friedrich Hölderlin followed. Heidelberg later hosted another circle. Interest in folk culture produced the Brothers Grimm's first collection of fairy tales in 1812.

In Britain the publication of Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1798 is often taken as the start. Lord Byron and Walter Scott won fame across Europe: Byron with Childe Harold's Pilgrimage from 1812, Scott with Waverley (1814), often called the first historical novel. Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley and the older William Blake completed the leading group, and a stay by Lake Geneva in 1816 produced Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Byron's death from illness in 1824, while aiding the Greek War of Independence, sealed his legend.

French literary Romanticism developed later, in the Paris theatre of the Bourbon Restoration. Victor Hugo's play Hernani caused riotous scenes in 1830, and his Hunchback of Notre-Dame followed in 1831; Alexandre Dumas and George Sand were other leading figures. In painting, Théodore Géricault's Raft of the Medusa (1818–19) and Eugène Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People (1830) became emblems of the movement, while Caspar David Friedrich in Germany and J. M. W. Turner in England pushed landscape painting to new emotional extremes.

In Poland, Romanticism is often dated from Adam Mickiewicz's first poems in 1822 to the crushing of the January Uprising in 1863. Much of it was written in exile after the "Great Emigration" of the early 1830s, and poets such as Mickiewicz were treated as prophets of the nation. Alexander Pushkin was the chief Russian Romantic, followed by Mikhail Lermontov. In the United States, Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper led the way around 1820, and Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau later carried Romantic ideas further.

In music the Romantic era is placed between about 1800 and 1850, or extended to around 1900, and was dominated by German composers; virtuosos such as Paganini and Liszt toured as public celebrities. Romanticism also fed nationalism. Following Herder and Fichte, Romantics treated language, folklore and epic as the expression of a people, inspiring the Finnish Kalevala and Vuk Karadžić's collections of Serbian folk songs.

From the mid-nineteenth century Realism, led in France by Balzac, Flaubert and the painter Courbet, overtook Romanticism, though "Late Romantic" music continued into the twentieth century. By the First World War the movement had dissolved into newer currents. Its belief in originality, its love of wild nature and its national sentiment remain influential in art, politics and environmental thinking.

Our 1815 map shows Europe after the Napoleonic Wars, at the movement's height, including the Kingdom of Prussia and the Russian Empire.