ated painting from nature, but unlike the Impressionists they usually painted only studies in the open air and finished their pictures in the studio. They had a feeling for nature that approaches that of a cult, and this can be regarded as a form of Romantic revolt from the drabness of urban life, coinciding with a longing among the urban population in the growing cities to renew the contact with nature.
In the nineteenth century, the prevailing artistic style for the first part of the century in Britain 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, and religious mysticism on the other.
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 that created humanism and an emphasis on individual thought. The transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century in Britain was complicated by different ambitions and frustrations on the part of the artists. On the one hand there was the Grand Style prescribed by Sir Joshua Reynolds, a style that never took root. At the same time, the romantic spirit included deliberate attempts to emulate the great productions of another age.
Portraiture and genre painting were the most conspicuous features of early nineteenth-century painting, following the portraiture of Sir Thomas Lawrence and the genre painting of Sir David Wilkie as models. Lawrence was a child prodigy. As a portrait painter,...