For many lovers of Western Art, the 1830 painting Liberty Leading the People remains the ultimate image of the Romantic Age. A contemporary, revolutionary canvas full of color and movement, it remains the masterpiece of the Frenchman Eugene Delacroix –a painter deeply aware of the Romantic spirit of the times. He was a friend of the composers Chopin and Berlioz, and was also a huge admirer of the tragic figure of Byron. It was Byron’s work that inspired The Death of Sardanapalus, one of the most abandoned and violent images of Romantic Art.

His respect for Old Masters like Rubens was strong, and his three decades of Parisian mural work was steeped in the tradition of the Renaissance and the Baroque. One short journey to North Africa also inspired a huge number of memorable canvases that captured the light of the region as no artist had done before.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was one of the most enigmatic of all English painters. Born into a brilliant family of Italian exiles, he announced his ambitions at the age of twenty. As the key member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Rossetti sought nothing less than a return to the artistic spirit of medieval times, the age before Raphael. Though the Brotherhood failed to last, a romantic medieval flavor continued to infuse Rossetti’s work, including his innovative watercolors and his bold experiments with design. He was also a substantial poet, but it is for his paintings that he is best remembered, and his images of beautiful women are amongst the most compelling created.

Rossetti’s often complex female relationships also played a large role in his personal life. Sadly, the strains that often resulted contributed to the artist’s eventual decline. Blighted by illness alcohol and drugs, Rossetti died at the age of just 53.

One of the key ideas that underpinned the Romantic Age was the notion of the sublime, and no Romantic painter captured the sublime more effectively than the German landscapist Caspar David Friedrich. A deeply pious, somber man, Friedrich hardly ever left his homeland, and his genius did not reveal itself until his thirties. But when it did, the result was landscape painting like nothing ever seen before. Rich in symbolism, Friedrich’s landscapes capture the spiritual power of nature, and it is easy for the viewer to be both overwhelmed and attracted by his painstakingly detailed scenes of silence.

In Friedrich’s sublime natural landscape, humanity is small, and mortal, as painting like Abbey of the Oakwoods confirm. Sadly, Friedrich’s own human life was blighted by bereavement, torment, sickness and obscurity. By the time of his death, he was all but forgotten. But now we can appreciate fully his huge contribution to Romantic painting.

In 1792, a famous Spanish portraitist fell victim to an illness that left him permanently deaf. This was the event that proved the turning-point in the career of Francisco Jose Goya y Lucientes. Trapped in his silent world, Goya’s portraiture climbed to new heights of achievement, but it was his increasingly dark images that are most appreciated today. The sheer horror of much of Goya’s later work was unprecedented in Western Art, and it is these paintings and etchings that secure his status as a giant of the Romantic Age.

As this fascinating program reveals, Goya’s own time gave him additional inspirational inspiration for his images of terror. The bloody war between his own homeland and Napoleonic France inspired The Third of May, the greatest canvas of his career. The continuing existence of the Spanish Inquisition also provoked Goya to create timeless works. Not even his own persecution by the Inquisition’s officers could prevent Goya from painting masterpieces into the ninth decade of a remarkable life.

Renowned for his witty banter, the work of American artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler led many critics to believe him to be the forerunner of abstract art. A talented engraver who produced numerous etchings, lithographs and dry-points, Whistler is best known for his financially ruinous libel suit with the critic John Ruskin.

The painting that was at the heart of the case, Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, was one of his near-abstract nighttime images of the River Thames. It is these nocturnal scenes, along with his highly stylized portraits that secure his reputation today. Whistler’s radical emphasis on composition at the expense of subject matter was typified when he painted his famous portrait of his mother and called it Arrangement in Grey and Black.

Gustave Courbet loved to present himself as a hard-drinking, radical-thinking peasant artist in mid-nineteenth century Paris, but his public image was largely a creation on his own, but his public image was largely a creation of his own. But with his greatest paintings his radicalism was for real. Courbet’s famous peasant scenes like his enormous Burial at Ornans were like nothing ever seen before. This was the art of Realism and many critics were outraged. How could a painter make common people the subject of High Art? But Courbet defied the critics to secure the fame that he craved and deserved

These six programs in The Great Artists series feature an in-depth look at the Romantics and Realistics