Other artists explored ways of dissolving recognisable forms and shapes in order to transcend the normal limits of our vision, reason and experience. Caspar David Friedrich literally dissolved his landscapes in mist and fog so that they unleashed the creative powers of the viewer’s imagination. The effect is evident in his Monk by the Sea (1809-10), Abbey in the Oak Forest (1809-10) and Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (c. 1818). Turner immersed himself in the representation of evanescent light effects and swirling mists, to the point of near-annihilation of the visible. Constable represented rainbows, sunshine and storm clouds as motifs which illuminated paintings while obscuring fine detail. While earlier eighteenth-century artists had striven to respect classical ideals of order, proportion, balance and legibility, some Romantic artists celebrated obscurity. Friedrich’s landscapes were often symmetrical in effect while subverting this symmetry with a fog of uncertainty.

The clearly-outlined forms of Neo-classicism often gave way to looser brushwork that suggested rather than defined forms (although such changes were not uniform, as the work of Ingres demonstrates). Sketchiness, haziness and incompleteness became desirable and undermined the traditional emphasis on a precise and uniform ‘finish’ or paint surface advocated by the academies. The content and possible meanings of paintings became less clearly signalled, as viewers were thrown back on their own subjective resources.

This loss of certainty was related to a changing response to the Enlightenment’s concept of the sublime. Theorised by Burke in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), the sublime was defined as a state of mind provoked by certain qualities in the objects and phenomena we observe: this state of mind was terror. Stimulants of the sublime included objects of great size that threatened our capacity to take them in all at once; objects or living creatures of great power and extreme darkness and obscurity. The Enlightenment mindset had welcomed this opportunity to catalogue and define yet another aspect of our mental capacities and generally regarded the sublime as a source of aesthetic delight (it could please and thrill us as long as we were not in any real danger when contemplating it) and human pride: our minds were challenged by it but were also inspired to raise themselves to new heights of perception.

A perfect example of the Enlightenment sublime can be seen in the detailed watercolours of Caspar Wolf, with their neatly framed, if massive, Alpine caverns and waterfalls. The Romantics were less optimistic about our capacity to rise to the challenge of the sublime and often saw it as a threat of annihilation. Friedrich’s precipices seem to position the viewer in unstable, uncertain viewpoints; Turner’s waterfalls and abysses threaten to engulf us completely. In Romantic paintings such features are more likely to appear to burst the frame and appear less subject to rational or human control. (In fact, of course, such effects were often carefully stage-managed.)

Romantic art helped to form our modern conception of what it means to be an artist. We now take it for granted that the artist is someone of rich, unlimited creativity and exceptional individuality. So accustomed are we to this notion that it can take precedence over the need to assess an artist’s work by means of any ‘objective’ or more widely shared criteria. To some present-day observers this cheapens art by excusing all in the name of originality. It is perhaps worth recalling, however, that many Romantic artists were gifted draftsmen skilled in producing the fine lines required of a Neo-classical composition or a drawing from nature. Turner was a skilled technician of colour pigments and effects. Delacroix, painter of a dramatic orgy of death and sex in his The Death of Sardanapalus (1827-8), had a strong allegiance to classical traditions of painting bequeathed by Renaissance art.

The ‘liberation’ of Romantic artists was more than an undisciplined descent into self-indulgence. It was fuelled, to a considerable degree, by the demands of a public anxious for colour and escapism in an age which produced violent revolution, entrepreneurial industrialism and the rise of a middle class existence recognisable today and challenged, more recently, in the ‘liberated’ sixties.

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