French Romantic Painting
Antique Late 19th Century French Romantic Paintings
Late 19th Century Romantic Portrait Paintings
Canvas, Oil
- 1
French Romantic Painting For Sale on 1stDibs
How Much is a French Romantic Painting?
A Close Look at Romantic Art
In emphasizing emotion and imagination, romantic art shifted away from the restraint of classicism and neoclassicism that had dominated art in Europe since the Renaissance. Romanticism achieved its greatest popularity in art, literature, music and philosophy between 1780 and 1830, although its expression of individual experiences ranging from awe to passion informed culture in the decades after.
Landscape painting was especially popular during the romantic period, as were nature studies of wild animals and fantasies of exotic lands. Romanticism varied across Europe as it reacted to the rise of industrialization, a more personal relationship with faith that was distanced from the church and the rationalist thinking of the Enlightenment.
British painters such as John Constable and J.M.W. Turner responded dramatically to the light and atmosphere of the natural world, while William Blake conveyed humanity’s connection to the divine in his visionary art. In Germany, the late-18th-century Sturm und Drang, or Storm and Drive, movement, with its probing of the unconscious, inspired a sense of mystery in work by romantic artists such as Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge. In France, where the French Revolution had turned tradition upside down, Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix used lush brushwork to paint monumental canvases with tumultuous scenes of nature and history.
The romantic movement and its subject matter were a significant influence on the Pre-Raphaelites, Symbolists and the American painters of the Hudson River School, as well as on other cultural movements in the 19th and 20th centuries that saw artists build on this perspective in which art was guided by emotion rather than reason.
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- 1stDibs ExpertJanuary 27, 2025The famous artist and co-founder of the Hudson River School artists who painted historical paintings and romantic landscapes was Thomas Cole. Born in England, he immigrated to the U.S. in 1818. During a trip to the Catskills, he first began producing paintings, and his work helped establish the tradition of landscape art in America. Shop a large selection of Hudson River School paintings on 1stDibs.
- 1stDibs ExpertJanuary 27, 2025The French artist who painted the famous painting which is titled Mont Sainte Victoire is Paul Cézanne. He actually produced several landscape paintings of the mountain, which was located near his birthplace, Aix-en-Provence, France. Arguably the most famous piece from the series is a 1904-6 work now in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, France. Other examples are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, New York; the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, UK; the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland; the Bridgestone Museum of Art in Tokyo, Japan; and the Princeton University Art Museum in Princeton, New Jersey. Shop a wide range of sculptures on 1stDibs.