Romanticism
12 postsMedea about to Kill her Children
Painting · Eugene Delacroix
Delacroix's Medea about to Kill her Children (1838) brings the Greek tragedy into full Romantic register, the sorceress half in shadow at the moment before the act.Crosses Romanticism × Painting × Gre
Asgardsreien (The Wild Hunt of Odin)
Painting · Peter Nicolai Arbo
Arbo's Asgardsreien (1872) is the great Romantic painting of the Norse Wild Hunt, Odin and the host of the dead riding across the night sky.Crosses Romanticism × Painting × Norse Mythology, and connec
Bogatyrs
Painting · Viktor Vasnetsov
Vasnetsov's Bogatyrs (1898) is the defining image of Russian and Slavic folk-epic, the three heroes of the byliny rendered at monumental scale.Crosses Romanticism × Painting × Slavic Mythology, a cros
The Great Day of His Wrath
Oil on canvas · John Martin
John Martin's The Great Day of His Wrath, painted around 1851 to 1853, depicts the end of the world from the Book of Revelation. Whole mountains are torn loose and hurled through a red-black sky; a ci
The Abbey in the Oakwood
Oil on canvas · Caspar David Friedrich
Painted between 1809 and 1810, Caspar David Friedrich's The Abbey in the Oakwood is one of the starkest images of German Romanticism. Through a screen of leafless, broken oaks rises the ruined Gothic
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters
Etching (aquatint) · Francisco Goya
Plate 43 of Goya's Los Caprichos, etched between 1797 and 1799 and published in 1799. A man, a self-portrait of Goya as the engraver, slumps asleep across a writing desk, surrounded by owls, bats, and
The Nightmare
Painting (oil on canvas) · Henry Fuseli
Painted in 1781, Fuseli's The Nightmare is the founding image of Gothic-Romantic visualization of dream and the unconscious. A young woman lies sleeping across a bed, her body arched backwards in unre
Scenes from the Massacres at Chios
Painting (oil on canvas) · Eugène Delacroix
Delacroix's decision in 1824 was to paint the aftermath, not the action. The Ottoman massacre of the Greek population of Chios had occurred two years earlier, in April 1822, during the Greek War of In
The Raft of the Medusa
Painting (oil on canvas) · Théodore Géricault
On the second of July 1816 the French frigate Méduse ran aground on the Bank of Arguin off the coast of Mauritania. The frigate had been sailing under a politically appointed captain, Hugues Duroy de
Liberty Leading the People
Painting (oil on canvas) · Eugène Delacroix
Delacroix did not fight on the barricades of the July Revolution. He wrote to his brother that if he could not fight for his country he would at least paint for it. The painting that resulted is the c
Saturn Devouring His Son
Mural transferred to canvas · Francisco Goya
Goya painted Saturn on the wall of his own kitchen at sixty-eight, deaf for three decades, after surviving three regimes that wanted him dead. The reading of the Black Paintings as private therapy is
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog
Painting (oil on canvas) · Caspar David Friedrich
Friedrich's painting works by what he denies the viewer. The figure's face is turned away. The valley is consumed in fog. The mountain ridge in the middle distance breaks the surface only enough to co
