Romanticism: the sublime, the storm and the loaded brush

Romanticism is the hardest movement in this track to pin down, because it is not a technique. Neoclassicism can be defined by how the paint goes on; Romanticism cannot. Caspar David Friedrich paints with glassy, almost invisible touch and Eugène Delacroix slathers the canvas, and both are Romantics. Tate’s definition is deliberately about attitude rather than appearance: feeling, individualism and the imagination, set against rule and authority.

So you spot it by a cluster. Any one tell might mislead; three together rarely do.

The cluster

Structure that refuses to settle. A Neoclassical composition is a relief: shallow, frontal, balanced. A Romantic one is built on diagonals, spirals and voids. The mass sits off-centre, the horizon tilts or disappears, the eye is pulled into a vortex of weather or up a pyramid of bodies that leads nowhere secure.

The figure-to-landscape ratio. In Romantic landscape the human being is small, often tiny, and the point is the disproportion. This is the visible sign of the sublime, the eighteenth-century category — given its most influential statement in Edmund Burke’s Enquiry of 1757 — for grandeur that overwhelms and half-terrifies, as opposed to the merely beautiful, which pleases. Mountains, storms, chasms, polar ice and burning buildings all qualify. A pretty valley with a picnic does not.

Weather as subject. Storm, mist, blizzard, sunset, avalanche. If the meteorology is doing more narrative work than the people, suspect Romanticism.

Ruins and the passage of time. Gothic abbeys with the tracery open to the sky, graveyards, bare oaks, wrecks. The mood is elegiac: things end.

Subjects from feeling, not from Plutarch. The Middle Ages, Shakespeare, Dante, Byron, Faust, madness, revolt, and above all the Orient and North Africa — Delacroix’s Moroccan journey of 1832 supplies decades of saturated, half-invented exotica. And contemporary catastrophe, handled with the grandeur formerly reserved for antiquity.

Colour and touch, where they are loose. Where a Romantic painter does work loosely, the strokes are left unblended and complementary colours are juxtaposed rather than mixed, so the surface vibrates. The visible mark is not laziness: it is evidence of the individual hand, which is the whole point.

The people, and what each one gives you

Francisco Goya (1746–1828) is the bridge and the darkest case. The Third of May 1808 (painted 1814) puts a man in a white shirt in the pose of a martyr before a faceless firing squad, and grants him no redemption whatever. The Disasters of War etchings and the Black Paintings made on the walls of his own house around 1819–23 go further: no heroism, no setting, no consolation.

Théodore Géricault (1791–1824): The Raft of the Medusa, 1819. History-painting scale and a pyramidal composition applied to a recent shipwreck caused by an incompetent political appointee. Heroic machinery, accusatory content.

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863): The Massacre at Chios (1824), The Death of Sardanapalus (1827), Liberty Leading the People (1830). Crowded, seething, colour laid on in separate strokes, drawing subordinate. He is the standard-bearer for the colour party.

J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851): begins in the topographical tradition and ends with the object dissolved. The Fighting Temeraire (1839, National Gallery) is the accessible masterpiece, an old warship under tow to the breaker’s yard against a spectacular sunset; Snow Storm, Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842) and Rain, Steam and Speed (1844) are the extreme. Note the dates. This is the 1840s, and it is not Impressionism.

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840): the corrective example. Precise, cold, hard-edged, with a lone Rückenfigur — a figure seen from behind, standing in for the viewer — before fog, sea or ruin. Nothing about the handling is loose; everything about the content is Romantic.

Ingres against Delacroix

The nineteenth century staged its own version of the argument for you, which makes it a gift for the quiz. Ingres held that drawing is the foundation and the honesty of painting: contour first, colour applied afterwards as a kind of tinting. Delacroix held that colour and touch constitute the picture, and that a contour is something the eye infers. Their partisans called each other the party of line and the party of colour, and everybody recognised it as a rerun of the seventeenth-century quarrel between the Poussinistes and the Rubénistes.

Practically, this gives you a two-second test on any French canvas of 1820–60. Follow an edge. If it is continuous, smooth and drawn, you are in Ingres’s camp. If the edge exists only where two patches of colour happen to meet, you are in Delacroix’s.

Neoclassical or Romantic

Traps

They are contemporaries, not successors. Ingres and Delacroix hung in the same Salons. Neoclassicism does not stop in 1800, and it is entirely normal for two pictures painted in the same year to belong to opposite camps.

Victorian afterlife. Shipwrecks, medieval knights, moonlit ruins and stags at bay go on being painted until 1900, but with tight, glossy, photographic finish and a great deal of anecdote. Romantic subject plus high Victorian polish means it is late and it is not Romanticism proper.

Turner is not an Impressionist. He dissolves form through atmosphere and light-as-drama, working largely in the studio and from memory, decades before 1874, and his subjects are sublime rather than everyday. Monet admired him; that does not make him a precursor in any tidy way.

Constable is the near-miss. English landscape of the same decades can be Romantic in feeling but is often naturalistic in ambition: observed cloud studies, working countryside, no terror. Weather that is accurately observed rather than theatrical points to naturalism.

Goya is not French and not tidy. He is court portraitist, satirist and Romantic at once, and his long career crosses everything. Date him by the work, never by the movement.

How to spot it in ten seconds

1. Look for stability. If nothing in the composition is level or centred, that is your first signal.
2. Measure the people against the setting. Tiny figures under a vast sky means the sublime.
3. Check the weather. Storm, fog, blizzard or sunset doing narrative work.
4. Look for a ruin, a wreck, a bare tree or a grave.
5. Read the subject. Medieval, oriental, literary, insurrectionary, or a recent disaster at heroic scale.
6. Test the edges. Dissolving into colour and atmosphere pushes towards Delacroix and Turner; razor-sharp pushes towards Ingres and the classical line.
7. Look at the colour temperature. Saturated complementaries vibrating against each other, rather than grey, buff and white.
8. Remember Friedrich before you rule it out on tight handling alone: check the content instead.
9. Then date it. Roughly 1800 to 1850, but expect Neoclassical pictures alongside it.
10. Screen for Victorian pastiche. Glassy finish, storytelling detail and a sentimental dog mean 1870, not 1820.