A contemporary understanding of the word “romantic” evokes flowers, candlelight, and flowing capes, but in art and literature, “Romanticism” describes a style focusing on an individual perception of the world—a movement that dominated European culture at the very end of the 18th century and the first few decades of the 1800s. French sculptor Auguste Préault claimed that “two persons cannot read the same book nor can they see the same painting.” Subjectivity was the driving force of a movement that stressed individuals’ unique perception of the world as well as their right or even duty to self-governance and freedom of action and thought.
Romantics also had a renewed interest in history, whether by studying and recreating it (historical novels and paintings reached their apogee with this movement) or by observing history in action—this was a period of numerous social uprisings, revolutions, and fights for national identity or independence by various nations and social groups. Additional features of Romanticism were mysticism (a belief in spiritual forces, not necessarily based in Christianity), a yearning for introspection, a philosophers’ approach to understanding the world, and the assumption that emotions can drive reason.
All of these ideas of the Romantics underlie the art of one of the most original and yet not very popular German artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840). On the occasion of the 250th anniversary of his birth, Berlin’s State Museum mounted a large exhibition in 2024 titled Infinite Landscapes that included 60 paintings and 50 drawings, mostly from throughout Germany.
