An early-19th-century European movement that prized emotion, imagination and the sublime over the ordered rationalism of the Enlightenment. Romantic painters — Turner, Friedrich, Géricault, Delacroix, Goya — turned to vast landscapes, storms at sea, ruins, revolutionary violence and the inner life of the individual. Nature was no longer a backdrop but a force, and often a moral one: the lone figure with its back to the viewer, dwarfed by mountains or sea, became one of the era's defining images. Romanticism opened the door for Symbolism, Expressionism and the modern interest in subjectivity itself.
