Romanticism and realism in artwork

Introduction

Romanticism and realism are two competing styles of artistic and cultural thought and practice. For decades after the end of the Napoleonic wars, romanticism which emphasized heroic individual achievement, mysticism, and the power of the emotions dominated European intellectual life. Realism, which followed romanticism, returned the focus of the arts and literature to more concrete matters, and tended to glorify real individuals, work, and social justice.

These two literary terms of art are part of a larger seesaw pattern of cultural history in the western world. Romanticism and realism are two stages of a back-and-forth between cultural styles that emphasize the real and concrete and those that are more mythic and ephemeral in their focus. Romanticism preceded the era of the Enlightenment, and was in large part an attempt to break the bonds of careful reason that had defined that era (Harrison and Wood, Pp: 12-32).

The central tenets of romanticism focused on the heroic power of the individual as part of larger contexts based on heroic, social, and cultural structures. Romantics wrote passionate histories about their nations' past glories. They imagined themselves part of great peoples with a manifest destiny to reshape the world. Their works frequently featured nature, mysticism, and magic.Subject Matter

The Romantic Movement's high-water mark roughly coincided with the failed populist revolutions of 1848. Realism emerged in the grittier and more pragmatic world that followed the defeat of these idealistic uprisings. Romanticism and realism both sought to change the world, but realism employed very different techniques (Kompridis, Pp: 15).

Realism in art and literature, a trend appeared around 1830 (the term is introduced in its aesthetic sense in 1833) who forsook the romantic idealism, both in its genre in its themes, including opposition to subjectivity or paint history, to look at the scenes and customs of daily life with a concern for truth.

As a movement, it clearly occurred between 1850 and 1870. Realism was first introduced in painting the kind of landscape, thanks to the painters of the Barbizon School (Theodore Rousseau, Dupre, Diaz, and Daubigny) who also prepare the advent of naturalism and impressionism. In favor of ideological upheavals, socio-political and scientific realism looks directly at what the senses perceive. It's decreed signifies every event, object, being, or action which is worthy of pictorial and scholarly subjects, and which must be made so true (Harrison and Wood, Pp: 12-32).

The term art was applied to a realistic work that often had a pejorative connotation, but gradually ...