-  The arts of the Industrial Revolution was greatly impacted by the dual revolution (French Revolution and Industrial Revolution).  It is considered that the French Revolution inspired artists by its example, the Industrial Revolution by its horror, and the bourgeois society transformed the modes of creation.

- The arts in the Industrial Revolution depended upon the mass support of the moneyed classes.  The arts which depended on the support of the poor were hardly of great interest to the romantic artist.

Inspired by Life in the Industrial Revolution

-  During this period, many artists, from composers to authors, were in fact involved in public affairs which directly inspired their styles and creations.  For examples: Mozart wrote a propagandist opera, The Magic Flute in 1790, for the highly political freemasonry; Beethoven dedicated the Eroica to Napoleon as the heir of the French Revolution; Charles Dickens wrote novels to attack social abuses.

-  This link between public affairs and the arts is particularly strong in countries - Germany, Russia, Poland, Hungary, and the Scandinavian countries - where the movements of national liberation/unification were developing.  Such nationalism found its most obvious cultural expression in literature and in music, in which both drew on the powerful creative heritage of the common people - language and folksong.

-  There was extraordinarily wide spread of artistic achievement among the nations.  In the first half of the 19th century, Russian literature and music emerged as a 'world force', and similar but much more modest way did the literature of the USA with the emergence of authors and poets like: Fenimore Cooper (1787-1851), Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) and Herman Melville (1819-91).  Polish and Hungarian literature and music also became significant in the form of the publication of folksongs, fairy-tales and epics with famous artists like Mickiewicz (1798-1855) the greatest Polish and Petoefi (1823-49) the Hungarian poet.

-  No half-century contains a greater concentration of immortal novelists: Stendhal and Balzac in France, Jane Austen, Dickens, Thackeray and the Brontes in England, Gogol and the young Dostoivesky and Turgenev in Russia.

The Creation of Abstract Art

-  As Romantics feel the domination of imagination over reason, artists began to express their works in new ways.  They did not satisfy with their works only reaching the eyes of the audience, but pursued a deeper level in which their arts could reach the soul. 

-  Paintings, instead of portraying an object or scene realistically, took various forms and shapes of no fixed representation.

-  This was later coined the term abstract art, and continues until today.