Bob Ross memes are great, but while we are talking about romantic paintings-- let's tease some stuff on the war between innocence and experience. The romantic ideal, expressed earliest and most profoundly in landscape and pastoral, concerns itself intensely with the triumph of "experience". Ross's paintings represent a later style of romantic, when the dark and terrifying side of "experience" that enabled romantic art to spawn genres like horror and the detective novel was bled down into a more universally positive "sublime", but the meme and his paintings are essentially romantic.
