Chapter 12 Projecting Inner Light

The Romantic revolution turned aside from traditional lore to find inspiration within the mysteries of the human imagination. Well, it turned away to a degree. Wordsworth was pretty well versed in literary tradition. Friedrich drew on traditional painterly craft to seek the Sublime. Even the Impressionists remained more or less connected to the notion of a painting as a window on the world.

But what if one followed one’s inner vision far enough to prefer the dream to the reality? What if a painter reversed the direction of the image: not an impression of what one sees, but an expression of an inner vision? What if a storyteller began to narrate, not “actual” story events, but the phantasms of the mind? In this chapter, we will explore late 19th Century artists who began to shift their task from reflection to expression.