Romanticism is born against the overly wise frameworks of classicism and triumphant reason. He wants momentum, night, solitude, the sublime, history, the irrational, nature that surpasses man and emotion that does not apologize for existing. Painters no longer just seek balance: they want experience. A revolutionary wave, mountain or crowd becomes capable of shaking a room better than a very well-combed speech.

Eugène Delacroix embodies French romanticism at its most colorful, nervous and political. Liberty Leading the People, The Death of Sardanapalus, Dante and Virgil or the oriental scenes give color dramatic force. At Delacroix, the reds burn, the gestures tense, the bodies pile up, and the composition advances like a crowd not asking permission to pass.

Théodore Géricault gives the movement one of its founding shocks with The Raft of the Medusa. The painting mixes current affairs, drama, exhausted bodies, fragile hope and monumental composition. Nothing is decorative: the sea, the sails, the muscles, the looks and the raised arms speak of survival. It is a painting that does not knock on the door; she enters with the storm still in her hair.

Caspar David Friedrich opens a quieter, but equally intense, path. His travelers, abbeys, seas of clouds, cemeteries and cliffs not only tell the story of a landscape: they show consciousness facing infinity. Man seems small, but not useless. He looks, doubts, meditates. Friedrich paints this very special moment where we understand that nature does not need us to be spectacular, which is vexing but very beautiful.

Turner and Constable give British romanticism two different weathers. Turner dissolves form in light, steam, fire, sea, speed and sublime disasters. Constable observes clouds, fields and rivers with almost affectionate attention. One explodes the atmosphere, the other breathes it for a long time. In both cases, the sky ceases to be a polished blue background: it finally gets a real role.

Goya, Blake, Füssli, John Martin, Hayez, Chassériau, Scheffer, Doré or the Pre-Raphaelites show that romanticism does not have a single mood. It can be political, visionary, fantastic, religious, literary, erotic, moral, nocturnal or heroic. Goya watches violence and human madness, Blake invents spiritual worlds, John Martin paints apocalypses where architecture has clearly had a bad day. Reason keeps its coat near the exit.

The romantic landscape also extends to America with Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran and the Hudson River School. Mountains, waterfalls, valleys, sunsets and wide open spaces become theaters of the sublime. These painters do not just show beautiful panoramas: they seek an almost spiritual presence of the territory. The landscape becomes immense, and the setting does its best to remain calm.

In a decoration, a romantic painting brings breath. Delacroix gives fire, Friedrich gives deep silence, Turner gives moving light, Constable gives atmospheric poetry, Goya gives powerful gravity, Cole or Bierstadt gives a grandiose opening. It's a style for walls that love horizons, strong stories and emotions that have stopped speaking in a low voice. Even a wise room can suddenly look towards an imaginary cliff.

This Top brings together works where the sublime, passion, landscape, revolt, fantasy, literature, history and solitude form the heart of pictorial romanticism. Some images are pre-romantic, others late or close to symbolism and pre-Raphaelitism, but all share this ambition: to enlarge the human experience until the eye feels the wind, the dizziness or the night. And sometimes all three at the same time, because romanticism rarely likes to do things by halves.