Movements in Art
1800-1900 Artistic Movements - Romanticism
The Romantic movement - in which individual emotion and expression became very important - flourished within the arts in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
In British painting, landscape became the main preoccupation of artists. Although a closer observation of nature was part of the movement, the landscapes often looked as if they came from a dream world and were sometimes influenced by the poetry and literature of the time.
The Romantic era also coincided with the newly defined medium of watercolour painting. What had previously been simply a means of recording things seen, became a study in atmospherics. However, all the major painters using watercolour as the medium for representing air and light - Turner, Constable, Cox and Bonington - also worked in oil. The fascination with atmospherics gave British Romanticism much of its vital force. Climate, as Constable said of the sky, became "the chief organ of sentiment".
