You prefer romanticist landscapes. Does it make you any different from a person who chooses realist, impressionist or classicist landscapes? Let’s take a closer look at what we see in these paintings. Romanticists saw the world as the realm of chaos and freedom, free from the limits imposed by reason and the morale.

The more a person strives for liberty, the more eccentric he gets, and the less trust he puts into the public opinion. A romanticist ideal is the person overwhelmed with own passions, the struggle and desires so cherished by romanticists. Now let’s see how that fundamental idea is reflected in landscapes.

Classicist nature is pieceful and “compositionally correct”, and the landscape in the background is just another way to reflect the inner harmony of a person who subdued his individual traits, passions and desires to the boundaries of the universal law, reason and the moral imperative, which is the classicist ideal.

With symbolism nature is part of the visible world that is seen as a screen which the real transcendent reality beams through in symbols that we are to decipher and grasp intuitively.

Realist landscapes represent nature as we know it, the Shishkin’s forests that are admired regardless of artistic taste, the typical landscapes that an artist pictured after he cleaned up the mess left by picnickers and drove away the cows that spoiled the view.

With romanticism nature is yet another manifestation of liberty, the chaos of unleashed desires and passions captured at a unique moment that will never happen again. Romantic is synonymous to extraordinary and eccentric, therefore romanticists usually favoured exotic eastern landscapes, and the romantic cult of struggle and dynamics was best revealed in the themes of the sea tormented by storm (Ivan Aivasovskiy) and the rugged cliffs. The ruins of ancient buildings mantled with ivy became symbolic of time fighting with nature, of the man struggling against both. The solitary figures of people against the wild waves, the ships setting sails for the long journey into the sunset – the romantic paintings become live with the passions and the emotions they portray, even more live than some people around us. Romanticist artists used rich bright colours and violent contrasts to infuse the dynamic and emotional quality, yet the most dramatic effect was achieved through the masterful application of their favourite colour – the brown, the refined and mysterious patina of time.