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Romanticism (1800-1860)

The industrial revolution started in the later part of the 18th century. The revolution brough a new market economy, based on new technology, machine tools and machine power instead of human tools and animal power. Vilages turned into urban centres and many people took new jobs in factories. This produced cities that were dirty and crowded, the working people lived in squalor and smokestacks darkened the air with soot.

The industrialization made consumer goods cheaper and increased the production of food but many people looked back at the past longingly. Before the industrial revolution life seemed romantic, then the revolution commodified people and destroyed nature.

There was also a growing reaction against the philosophy of the enlightenment, which emphasized science, emprirical evidence and rational thought. Romantics challanged that reason was the one path to truth, judging it inadequate in understanding the great mysteries of life. These mysteries could be uncovered with emotion, imagination and intuition. Nature was seen as a classroom for self discovery and spiritual learning. Romantics emphasized a life of deep feeling, spirituality and free expression. They extolled the value of human beings, which they believed to have infinite godlike potential.

Artists tried to capture these ideas in their work. They hoped to inspire an emotional response, trying to evolve a nostalgic yearning for rural, pastoral life.

The Chancel and Crossing of Tintern Abbey, Looking Towards the East Window JMW Turner 1794

Tintern Abbey was a monastery founded in 1131 and rebuilt in the 13th century. Abandoned in 1536, it was left to decay for two centuries. Artist Joseph Mallord William Turner paid two visits to the site, and it inspired him to paint this piece which juxtaposes the smallness of man alongside and wildness of nature, the unstoppable power of which has reclaimed this man-made edifice. The haunting abbey was a popular muse for many Romantics.

Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog Casper David Friedrich, 1818

German artist Caspar David Friedrich was a quintessential Romantic artist, and this is a quintessential Romantic painting. It conveys both the infinite potential and possibilities of man and the awesome, mysterious grandeur of nature. The popular Romantic theme of the greatness of man contrasted with the sublimity and power of nature is on display. The man has climbed high and conquered much, only to see that there are infinite vistas still out there, shrouded in a fog that hides what lies beyond.

Realism (1850-1880)

The second half of the 19th century has been called the positivist age. It was an age of faith in all knowledge which would derive from science and scientific objective methods which could solve all human problems.

In the visual arts this spirit is most obvious in the widespread rejection of Romantic subjectivism and imagination in favor of Realism - the accurate and objective description of the ordinary, observable world, a change especially evident in painting. Positivist thinking is evident in the full range of artistic developments after 1850- from the introduction of realistic elements into academic art, from the emphasis on the phenomenon of light, to the development of photography and the application of new technologies in architecture and constructions. Realism sets as a goal not imitating past artistic achievements but the truthful and accurate depiction of the models that nature and contemporary life offer to the artist. The artificiality of both the Classicism and Romanticism in the academic art was unanimously rejected, and necessity to introduce contemporary to art found strong support. New idea was that ordinary people and everyday activities are worthy subjects for art. Artists - Realists attempted to portray the lives, appearances, problems, customs, and mores of the middle and lower classes, of the unexceptional, the ordinary, the humble, and the unadorned. They set themselves conscientiously to reproduce all to that point ignored aspects of contemporary life and society - its mental attitudes, physical settings, and material conditions.

The Stonebreakers Courbet, 1849

This oil painting, measuring 63 X 102 inches, was quite unlike the classical and romantic pictures of the time; it showed poor peasants from the artist's native region in a realistic setting instead of rich bourgeoisie in glamorized situations. Painting had previously been mostly reserved for the depiction of elevating themes from history and mythology. When The Stone Breakers was exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1850, it was attacked by the French establishment as being inartistic, crude, and even socialistic.

The Gleaner s Jean- Francois Millet, 1857 Millet portrays three peasant women working at the harvest. There is no drama and no story told, merely three peasant women in a field. Gleaners are poor women gathering what's left after the rich owners of the field finished harvesting. The owners and their laborers are seen in the back of the painting. Millet here shifted the focus, the subject matter, from the rich and prominent to those at the bottom of the social ladders. Millet also didn't paint their faces to emphasize their anonymity and marginalized position. Their bowed bodies are representative of their everyday hard work. Impressionism (late 1860's to late 1890's)

Impressionism is an art movement that started in the 19th century in France. Critic Louis Leroy coined the term in a satiric review on Impression, the work of art by Claude Monet. Claude Monet was the founder of the French Impressionist Painting.

Impressionist art is a style of art characterized by unique visual angles, prominently evident brush strokes and an open composition. The art form emphasizes on the changing patterns of light to indicate the passage of time. It deals with capturing an object as if someone has caught just a glimpse of it. Hence, images have lesser details. But the paintings are often brightly colored and involve an element of movement.

Impressionists of the early period went beyond the traditional academic painting. Inspired by the artists like Eugene Delacroix, they based their paintings more on color strokes rather than line drawing. Previously, paintings were done indoors. French painters like Gustave Courbet, and Theodore Rousseau paved a path for Impressionism. Impressionists showed art, the outside world. They started painting realistic scenes with the use of broken strokes of pure colors.

Paintings by the Dutch painters of the 17th century represented a vivid distinction between the subject and the background. Photography inspired the painters to capture moments in daily life. While photography could depict facts, paintings could portray an artist's interpretation of facts. Impressionists were the first to bring in subjectivity to paintings. Japanese art also contributed to the emergence of Impressionism.

Impression, Sunrise Claude Monet Exhibited in 1874,

Claude Monet's Impression, Sunrise gave the Impressionist movement its name when the critic Louis Leroy accused it of being a sketch or "impression," not a finished painting. It demonstrates the techniques many of the independent artists adopted: short, broken brushstrokes that barely convey forms, pure unblended colors, and an emphasis on the effects of light. Rather than neutral white, grays, and blacks, Impressionists often rendered shadows and highlights in color. The artists' loose brushwork gives an effect of spontaneity and effortlessness that masks their often carefully constructed compositions.

In addition to their radical technique, the bright colors of Impressionist canvases were shocking for eyes accustomed to the more sober colors of Academic painting. Many of the independent artists chose not to apply the thick golden varnish that painters customarily used to tone down their works. The paints themselves were more vivid as well. The nineteenth century saw the development of synthetic pigments for artists' paints, providing vibrant shades of blue, green, and yellow that painters had never used before.

Boating Edouard Manet, 1874

Edouard Manet's Boating features an expanse of the new Cerulean blue and synthetic ultramarine. Depicted in a radically cropped, Japanese- inspired composition, the fashionable boater and his companion embody modernity in their form, their subject matter, and the very materials used to paint them.

Post-impressionism (1886) Breaking free of the naturalism of Impressionism in the late 1880s, a group of young painters sought independent artistic styles for expressing emotions rather than simply optical impressions, concentrating on themes of deeper symbolism. Through the use of simplified colors and definitive forms, their art was characterized by a renewed aesthetic sense as well as abstract tendencies. The artists responding to Impressionism included Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), Georges Seurat (1859–1891), Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), and the eldest of the group, Paul Cézanne (1839–1906). They followed diverse stylistic paths in search of authentic intellectual and artistic achievements. These artists, often working independently, and today called Post-Impressionists. Although they did not view themselves as part of a collective movement at the time, Roger Fry (1866–1934), critic and artist, broadly categorized them as "Post-Impressionists," a term that he coined in his seminal exhibition. In the 1880s, Georges Seurat was at the forefront of the challenges to Impressionism with his unique analyses based on then-current notions of optical and color theories. Seurat believed that by placing tiny dabs of pure colors adjacent to one another, a viewer's eye compensated for the visual disparity between the two by "mixing" the primaries to model a composite hue. Study for A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Georges Seurat 1884 Oil on canvas The Study for "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte" embodies Seurat's experimental style, which was dubbed Neo-Impressionism. This painting depicts a landscape scene peopled with figures at leisure, a familiar subject of the Impressionists. But Seurat's updated style invigorates the otherwise conventional subject with a virtuoso application of color and pigment.

Paul Gauguin's art developed out of similar Impressionist foundations, but he too dispensed with Impressionistic handling of pigment and imagery in exchange for an approach characterized by solid patches of color and clearly defined forms, which he used to depict exotic themes and images of private and religious symbolism. Hoping to escape the aggravations of the industrialized European world and constantly searching for an untouched land of simplicity and beauty, Gauguin looked toward remote destinations where he could live easily and paint the purity of the country and its inhabitants. Ia Orana Maria (Hail Mary), Paul Gauguin 1891 Oil on canvas

In Tahiti, he made some of the most insightful and expressive pictures of his career. Ia Orana Maria (Hail Mary) resonates with striking imagery and Polynesian iconography, used unconventionally with several well-known Christian themes, including the Adoration of the Magi and the Annunciation.

Vincent van Gogh searched to create personal expression in his art. Van Gogh's early pictures are coarsely rendered images of Dutch peasant life depicted with rugged brushstrokes and dark, earthy tones.

Peasant Woman Cooking by a Fireplace, Vincent van Gogh 1885 Oil on canvas

This piece shows his fascination with the working class, portrayed here in a crude style of thickly applied dark pigments.

Through their radically independent styles and dedication to pursuing unique means of artistic expression, the Post-Impressionists dramatically influenced generations of artists, including the Nabis, especially Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, the German Expressionists, the Fauvists, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and American modernists such as Marsden Hartley and John Marin.

Symbolism (1880's)

Symbolism developed as a French literary movement in the 1880s, becoming popular with the publication in 1886 of Jean Moréas' manifesto in Le Figaro. Reacting against the rationalism and materialism that had come to dominate Western European culture, Moréas proclaimed the validity of pure subjectivity and the expression of an idea over a realistic description of the natural world. This philosophy, which would incorporate the poet Stéphane Mallarmé's conviction that reality was best expressed through poetry because it paralleled nature rather than replicating it, became a central tenet of the movement.

Symbolism was soon identified with the artwork of a younger generation of painters who were also rejecting the conventions of Naturalism. Symbolist painters believed that art should reflect an emotion or idea rather than represent the natural world in the objective, scientific manner embodied by Realism and Impressionism. Returning to the personal expressivity like the Romantics earlier in the nineteenth century, they felt that the symbolic value or meaning of a work of art stemmed from the recreation of emotional experiences in the viewer through color, line, and composition. In painting, Symbolism represents a synthesis of form and feeling, of reality and the artist's inner subjectivity.

Wanting to imbue their works with spiritual value, these progenitors of Symbolism produced imaginary dream worlds populated with mysterious figures from biblical stories and Greek mythology as well as fantastical, often monstrous, creatures. Their suggestive imagery established what would become the most pervasive themes in Symbolist art: love, fear, anguish and death.

The Symbolists sought escape from reality, expressing their personal dreams and visions through color, form, and composition. Their almost universal preference for broad strokes of unmodulated color and flat, often abstract forms was inspired by Puvis de Chavannes, who created greatly simplified forms in order to clearly express abstract ideas. His muted palette and decorative treatment of forms made a considerable impact on a new generation of artists.