Romanticism | Art Story and Sitemap

Let's dive into the wonderfully evocative world of Romantic art!

Romantic art, flourishing roughly from the late 18th through the 19th centuries, is a fascinating and complex movement that fundamentally shifted focus away from Enlightenment ideals of reason and order towards a celebration of emotion, imagination, and the sublime.

Eugène Delacroix | Liberty Leading the People (28 July 1830) | Musée du Louvre

20th century Art History and Sitemap

Twentieth-century art - and what it became as modern art - began with modernism in the late nineteenth century.

Nineteenth-century movements of Post-Impressionism (Les Nabis), Art Nouveau and Symbolism led to the first twentieth-century art movements of Fauvism in France and Die Brücke ("The Bridge") in Germany.

Fauvism in Paris introduced heightened non-representational colour into figurative painting.

Die Brücke strove for emotional Expressionism.

Henri Matisse | Woman on a Terrace, 1907 | Hermitage Museum St. Petersburg

George Spencer Watson | Romantic / Portrait painter

George Spencer Watson R.O.I., R.P., A.R.A., R.A. (8 March 1869, in London - 11 April 1934, in London) was an English🎨 portrait artist of the late romantic school who sometimes worked in the style of the Italian Renaissance.

• Career

He studied at the Royal Academy Schools from 1889, and exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1891.

He won Royal Academy Schools Silver Medals in 1889 and 1891, and the Landseer Scholarship in 1892.

He was elected to the Royal Institute of Oil Painters (ROI) in 1900, Royal Society of Portrait Painters (RP) in 1904, Associate of the Royal Academy in 1923, and a Member of the Royal Academy (RA) in 1932.

• Personal life

in 1909 He married Hilda Mary Gardiner, a dancer and mime artist, and follower of the actor Edward Gordon Craig. They had a daughter, Mary Spencer Watson (1913–2006), who became a sculptor.

In the year of 1923 he bought Dunshay Manor in the hills of the Isle of Purbeck, after already having spent holidays in nearby Swanage.

He died in London and a memorial exhibition was held at the Fine Art Society in the same year. There is a memorial to him in the north vestibule of St James's Church, Piccadilly.

Some of his works are held at Tate Britain, the Harris Art Gallery, Preston and collections in Bournemouth, Liverpool, Plymouth and the National Gallery of Canada.

Born in London, Watson studied at the Royal Academy from 1889; he exhibited there from 1891 and also at the Paris salon. Retrospective exhibitions were held at the Galerie Heinemann, Munich in 1912, and at the Fine Art Society in 1914.

His work A Lady in Black (1922) is owned by the Tate Collection.