[22] Even amid Europe's surging national movements, another revolution was transforming the landscape — the Industrial Revolution. Europe built more in the 19th century than in all previous centuries combined. But all this had a downside: an increasingly machine-like pace of life. Artists — with their free spirits — pushed back. Nature was appreciated as never before: painters were climbing mountains, poets were hugging trees.

[23] Here in the English countryside, artists retreated to take long walks and commune with nature. Romantic painters captured the majesty of soaring clouds…an almost supernatural power, charged from within…and soul-stirring mountains and rainbows that say: Nature is big, we are small.

[24, J. M. W. Turner, 1775–1851; The Fighting Temeraire, 1838, Turner, National Gallery, London] The English artist William Turner infused his canvases with the Romantic forces of Nature — burning sun, swirling clouds, churning waves, storm-tossed souls. His old sailing ship being towed into the sunset by a steamship was a metaphor for the coming of the modern world. As he aged, Turner's brushwork became frenetic and more intense, capturing the stormy and tumultuous inner passions that defined the Romantic Age.