Feeling Over Thinking

The Romantic movement (c. 1780–1850) rejected the Enlightenment's faith in reason. Where Neoclassicism valued restraint, order, and universal truths, Romanticism valued individual emotion, imagination, and subjective experience. The artist's inner world became the subject.

The Romantics rejected Enlightenment rationality as emotionally sterile. They believed intense personal feeling was a more authentic guide to truth than reason, and painting became the medium for expressing states of consciousness that words could not capture.