The art world of the 1830s was at the height of the Romantic movement. The nature of society was also changing, at different rates in different places. Britain was well into the Industrial Revolution, which was also having an effect in the United States. The way people saw themselves and their relationship to the world had changed considerably in the previous century with the various revolutions that had brought democracy to America and to Europe, and democratizing influences were also felt in the art world with more art for the masses and less reliance on patronage by the wealthy or the titled.
The Romantic movement affected all the arts and was a break from the classical traditions that preceded it. Changes in the styles of artistic expression throughout history have reflected not only developments in materials and shifting patters within the art world itself but have also reflected changing circumstances in society at large, including political changes, historical movements, altered social conditions, changed economic circumstances, shifts in religious thinking, and so on. In the nineteenth century, the prevailing artistic style for the first part of the century was romanticism, an art based on a form of "disorder," but a disorder seen as the emblem of the unfettered processes of the imagination:
In historical terms, fully developed Romanticism is the successor to the cults of nature and of feeling which sprang up in the course of the eighteenth century. . . Romanticism took pride in its own contradictions: it embraced free thought on the one hand,m and religious mysticism on the other (Lucie-Smith, 1992, 373).
Romanticism was the heir to the spirit of the French Revolution, a spirit of freedom and self-determination manifested artistically as freedom of expression. It contrasts sharply with the controlled and ordered world of classicism in the Renaissance period, but it bears a relation to the mode of thought t...