Romanticism

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Théodore Géricault interviewed survivors and studied corpses before painting The Raft of the Medusa (1818–19), a vast canvas about a recent shipwreck and the official incompetence behind it. Romantic artists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries trusted individual vision over academic rules, and found subjects in storms, mountains, dreams, revolutions, medieval legend and the poetry of Byron and Goethe.

The look varies by country. In Germany Caspar David Friedrich placed small, back-turned figures before vast seas and mountains, as in Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (c. 1818). In Britain J. M. W. Turner dissolved ships and trains into vapour and light, while John Constable studied clouds with near-scientific care. In France Eugène Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People (1830) surges with vivid colour and movement, and Antoine-Louis Barye sculpted animals locked in combat. Francisco de Goya's The Third of May 1808 (1814) gave war its modern face.