The sea is one of the elemental images of Romanticism. It compelled many artists to paint it.

J.M.W. Turner was obsessed by it in all its forms, though most of all by its violent aspects.

In  The Shipwreck (1805) Turner rendered the stormy sky and sea by employing minute touches of a fine brush.

The Great Fall                                           

Romanticism in art, as well as in music and literature, was opposed to everything that Neoclassicism represented . The Romantics reasserted the autonomy of the individual, the primacy of imagination, of unrestrained intuition, emotion and feeling. Landscape painting was the most characteristich achievement of English Romantic art and it was synonymous of British freedom. A conscious appreciation of the real countryside went hand in hand with an increasing demand for paintings and engravings of it.