Enlightenment & Romanticism · c. 1780–1850
Emotion, nature, the sublime
A passionate revolt against Enlightenment rationalism, celebrating feeling, imagination, and the overwhelming power of nature. Turner, Delacroix, Goya, and Caspar David Friedrich turned to storms, ruins, and exotic subjects to explore the sublime — the beautiful terror of the world. It was art as raw personal vision rather than classical ideal.
Explore 3 Romanticism exhibitions on now and 0 coming soon.
Until Sep 20
Constable's Hampstead years explored through paintings, prints and letters
"Others (like me) may be put off by his somewhat patrician perspective: a landowner surveying a plot in which everyone is busy at work, driving cows or ploughing fields. This small show at Hampstead's Burgh House offers something like an olive branch to Constable haters."
Until Oct 4
Landmark loans reunite The Hay Wain with Constable's own Suffolk landscape
"Constable gets caricatured as a conservative. In reality he is a conservationist. The Hay Wain, his most elegiac work, is about space and time."
Until Nov 1
A landmark survey of artistic responses to British landscapes from the 18th to 20th centuries
"The best work, by contrast, finds strangeness in the familiar, and summons a forceful, idiosyncratic poetry. Paul Nash and Ivon Hitchens are the stars, although a couple of free-and-easy drawings by Peter Lanyon, inspired by gliding above Cornwall, are thrilling – and don't deserve to be stuffed in a corner."
EndedMar 12 to May 31
Rare life-size Stubbs horse portrait 'Scrub' shown with key studies.
"A display case of Stubbs’s anatomical drawings are ghostly and strange. Here are spectral stallions, every, nerve, tendon and sinew turned inside out. More of these, please, and less of the tidy parade-ground pictures on the opposite wall."
EndedNov 27, 2025 to Apr 12
170+ works in the landmark Turner 250th anniversary show at Tate Britain
"JMW Turner is beaten by John Constable in this mighty show. But who cares when the work is so sublime you can hear the squelching and smell the river?"