French Romanticism

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Romanticism was the early nineteenth-century movement that set passion, imagination and movement against the cold order of Neoclassicism, favouring dramatic colour, exotic subjects and the power of nature. In France it found its champion in Delacroix, in an art of energy, feeling and the sublime.

Six dates, from a shipwreck that scandalised the Salon to the death of the painter who won the argument.

Romanticism arose in France in the 1820s as a revolt against the severe Neoclassicism of David and his school. Where Neoclassicism prized line, reason and antique restraint, Romanticism prized colour, emotion and energy. Shipwrecks and battles, wild animals and distant lands, painted with a free and passionate brush.

Delacroix was the movement's great figure, painting history, literature, exotic scenes and animals with a boldness that shocked the academy. His journey to Morocco in 1832 opened French painting to the light of the South, the seed of the entire Orientalist school.

From Géricault's dramatic realism to Delacroix's blaze of colour, French Romanticism embraced the whole range of human feeling, the heroic, the tragic, the exotic and the wild. Its subjects, battles and shipwrecks, lions and horses, scenes of the East and of legend, filled the Salon for decades and remain among the most spirited a collector can find.

For a closer look at the animalier vein that runs through the movement, see our guide to animal painting in nineteenth-century France.

Romanticism freed colour and feeling for everything that followed. The Impressionists inherited its liberated brush, and its exotic and animal subjects became whole genres in their own right, from Orientalism to the animalier tradition. Its energy still marks the most dramatic paintings of the nineteenth century.

What each attribution term claims, from signed down to after, is set out in our guide to reading attribution on an antique painting.