An extremely important artistic movement. While it's excesses are easily (and deservedly) mockable, it was responsible for a revolution in aesthetic perspective* and was essential to the creation of Modernity and, eventually, Modernism and beyond.
I agree that as a movement perhaps we shouldn’t be talking about it in Atlas terms. Absolutely.
I do have to disagree a little with your interpretation of what Romanticism ‘opened’ up. Landscape has always been well captured by skilled painters (and once again we have to ignore outside of Europe when talking about this) and certainly became a more prominent form of artistic expression in protestant Europe with the thankful demise of iconography which had been the de jure art form since the Byzantine era (‘Oh look, another Madonna and Child’). In iconographic works, the iconography was the landscape and so expression was best demonstrated by filling non central areas with other people; by bystanders, animals. Normalcy.
With that constraint gone, landscape painting developed. The Dutch were expertly skilled at it and influenced most of the rest of Europe. If anything, landscape became universal. It didn’t truly breathe because the legacy of icons, common bystanders, pastoral clichés and demonstrating stills of perspective through peppering it with classical artifacts still remained. However clean styles did develop. Romanticism took that as an inspiration but ended up laying down borders encouraging ‘national’ schools and styles of art which then fed back into nationalistic expression. And much of that expression, for want of a better word - was ‘tat.’ For every Friedrich there was Constable. From a Scottish perspective Romanticism in a cultural level was a British (read English) re-interpretation of what Scotland should be; Walter Scott, Balmoral and so on. It’s still at times inescapable. Landscape painting wasn’t really afforded breathing space until the Impressionist era; less is more.
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