Men of the brush include the obvious Gauguin or Modigliani. The latter, died of tuberculosis, exacerbated by poverty, overwork and addiction to alcohol and narcotics.
Almost as debauched, the former too expired young, supposedly of a heart attack following a morphine overdose.
On our shores the sublime social commentator and visual artist Michael Illingworth springs to mind, as of course do his magnificently colourful contemporaries Philip Clairmont, Tony Fomison and Napier's Allen Maddox.
Of music's dark romantics, singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen is a no-brainer.
I once drove with his Live in London album on repeat from Hastings to Rotorua. Despite it having played five times over, my only regret was the drive was too short.
At night, when the kids are in bed and I can commandeer the living room, I occasionally turn off the lights, pour myself some plonk and get lost in the lyrics of this part angel, part wolf.
If I were honest when I said I leaned towards these guys, I really meant I fawn over them. In that sense, I'm a serious romantic.
Yet here's the thing. Ask anyone who studies current literary theory and it becomes obvious that romantic idealism isn't taken too seriously. It's an out-moded taste. A beatnik-blip on a disused radar.
Contentment is the new black.
That scares me. Where has art's counter-culture gone? Where are our heroes, the visceral individuals who lived for their art, and died because of what they gave to it?
In 1897, Gauguin painted his favourite work, with an inscription in French adorning the top left corner: D'ou venons nous, Que sommes nous, Ou allons nous. Its title, translated - "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?"
At the risk of sounding self-righteous (though I suspect I'm well past that), why does art now avoid these questions?
It's of course why the affluent continue to haunt art galleries (one of Illingworth's pet hates).
The rich attempt to ward off the sterility of their suburbia by purchasing a piece of bohemia for the living room.
Yet latterly, in a rather lovely twist of consequence, many of those with means are now the artists. The bohemian has disappeared.
Today's creative shuns the damp and drafty garden hovels where the real deal once wrote, painted (check out Maddox's glorious old cottage on Napier Hill), or composed, with one local making headlines recently for an award-winning studio he'd enlisted an architect to create for him.
Give me strength.
"Happy people have no history," Leo Tolstoy said. I say a resounding amen to that comrade.
The assumed link between melancholy and creativity is, of course, a tenuous one. I'll admit that. It's equally as romantic to claim artists need to suffer for their art, or self-flagellate as did Baxter.
But I'd hazard it's a far more plausible theory than suggesting contentment and "an ideal space in which to paint and draw" act as some sort of muse. In fact I find the notion repugnant.
Thus the essence of this column. Artists, surely, aren't here to engage the public in jolly-hockey-sticks discourse. You know the scenario I mean, where you stumble across someone you haven't seen for a while and pretend to be interested in them pretending to be interested in you. Sh*t and feathers.
I have zero confidence these people, these artists, have anything to say. Art should spark change. Ask Gauguinesque questions. Argue with the status quo. On this melancholy Monday, compose, pen or paint us something in blood and fur - do as Dylan Thomas did and "rage, rage against the dying of the light".
