Romantic > Painting > Intro

Romanticism was an important movement in the history of painting, and was ultimately to lead to the Impressionism of the later nineteenth century and the Abstraction of the twentieth. Sublime landscapes with tiny, overwhelmed human figures gave way to paintings, such as many of Turner’s, in which the sea and sky become little more than abstract fields of color. Another strain of Romantic painting was the adaptation of the Neoclassical history painting to emphasize not human heroism but the waste and destruction of war. Finally, an interest in “exotic” places or people as subjects for painting was another characteristic of Romanticism.