"The Fighting Temeraire" by J.M.W. Turner

Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia

Oil on canvas at National Gallery, London; "English landscape painter whose Romanticism was expressed in vibrant color and improvisatory brushwork. Astonishingly prolific, his painting influenced Impressionism." [Kloss: World's Greatest Paintings] "From the insights of individuals such as Rousseau, Walpole and Goethe, a new world-view was created. What eventually became known as the ‘romantic revolution’ opposed emotion to reason, faith to scepticism, intuition to logic, subjectivity to objectivity, historicism to natural law, and poetry to prose. In the view of the romantics, the Enlightenment and its scientific method had analysed and analysed until the world lay around them in a dismantled, atomized and meaningless heap. It was a common accusation that the Enlightenment ‘could explain everything, but understand nothing.'" [Blanning: Pursuit of Glory, p. 519-20]