Romantic Period 1820-1900

Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog Caspar David Freidrich Germany 1818 People took inspiration from Nature and felt that spiritual lessons could be learned by observing nature. Also, people felt that the city was a place of isolation, work, industrial slavery, and to fully realize the human spirit, people would need to go to nature.

Liberty Leading the People Eugenie Delacroix France 1830 The Industrial Revolution created a class system which created an aristocracy/bouguassie and lower class/proletariot

The Lady of Shalott John William Waterhouse England 1832 Emotion/Intuition/Creativity was valued over reason. A return to the classics as valuable - moving away from science.

Miranda

Circe

Pandora

The Course of Empire Thomas Cole American 1833-36 Empires will decay to gluttony. Pastoralism is the ideal phase of human civilization

A revolt against: aristocracy, scientific advancement, and the rationalism of science Emotion and imagination valued over reason Man escapes industrialism and its effects (city, overcrowding, the masses, technology, science, classes), to find his own “nature” and self. Nature is now valued, not as something to be measured and explained scientifically, but observed spiritually. A romantic character may be expressed in the gifted, perhaps misunderstood loner, creatively following the dictates of his inspiration rather than the dictates of contemporary society

Mary Shelley

Parents: Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin Her parents' wedding Mary’s Loneliness Percy’s and Mary’s wedding occurred when Wollstonecraft was five months pregnant with Mary, and while both her parents objected to the institution of matrimony, they agreed to marry to ensure their child's legitimacy. Ten days after Mary's birth, Wollstonecraft died from complications, leaving Godwin, an undemonstrative and self-absorbed intellectual, to care for Mary. But he and Mary, like Godwin and Wollstonecraft, believed that ties of the heart superseded legal ones. In July 1814, one month before her seventeenth birthday, Mary eloped with Percy.

Tragedy Strikes Percy’s wealthy father cut him off after his elopement (while still married to Harriet) to Mary. Mary’s first child was born prematurely and died several days after her birth in 1815. Mary’s half sister, Fanny, committed suicide two years after her marriage to Percy, in 1816 Two months after that, Harriet drowned herself. Mary’s second child, William, born in 1816 died three years later of Malaria. Mary’s third child, Clara, was born in 1817, and died the next year Her fourth child, Percy, born in 1817, did survive. In 1822 Mary nearly bleeds to death from a miscarriage. In 1822 Percy drowns