Romanticism

The movement peaked between about 1800 and 1850, and its painters valued awe and even terror as honest responses to the world. Behind that sat an older idea, the sublime: Edmund Burke argued in 1756 that it was separate from beauty, a mix of fear and attraction. The German painter Caspar David Friedrich put the Romantic creed most bluntly: "the artist's feeling is his law".

In painting, it showed first in landscape, as British artists from the 1760s turned to wild country and storms. Turner took English landscape to its Romantic extreme, and the critic John Ruskin held him up as proof that paint could be as sublime as poetry. Watch the hail in his Fifth Plague of Egypt, or the railway bridge of Rain, Steam and Speed, where the objects almost dissolve into weather and motion. Monet and Pissarro saw his work in London in 1870, and it left a powerful mark on both.

Goya fits less neatly. He saw himself as a man of the Enlightenment and kept much of his classical training, yet no painter of the time put his own feelings and private imagination on show more fully. A royal portraitist by profession, he also made the etched Caprichos and, late in life, the Black Paintings, oils put straight onto the plaster of his farmhouse, among them Witches' Sabbath. Look, too, at his loose, visible brushwork, a freedom he shared with many Romantic painters.