The Romantic Movement

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.

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 perio

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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 life of the artist by the 1830s was shaped by a different view of the role of the artist from what had prevailed in the previous century. The Romantic conception of the artist implied much about vocation, artistic temperament, and the idea of the misunderstood genius. Earlier artist had sometimes been nonconformist or eccentric in their way of life. The romantic artist demanded the freedom to follow his own artistic bent. In the eighteenth century, the term "artist" had signified the professor of an art and a skilful person rather than a novice. Artists would come to see themselves as people set apart. Many of the artists of the nineteenth century entered art as a chosen vocation rather than be
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Approximate Word count = 1647
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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