Nineteenth-Century Art: Neoclassicism to Post-Impressionism
This domain tracks the succession of movements c. 1780-1900 and, more importantly, the institutional machinery behind them: the Salon, the academy, the jury, the dealer and the critic. The exam expects you to link style to politics, to explain technical change, and to name artists and works precisely.
Neoclassicism and Romanticism
- David: Oath of the Horatii, Death of Marat; Winckelmann's ideal, firm outline, shallow space, stoic civic virtue.
- Ingres: linear refinement, elongated anatomy, academic authority in tension with Romantic subjects.
- Goya: Third of May 1808, the Black Paintings; from court painter to private darkness.
- Friedrich's sublime landscape, Turner's atmospheric dissolution, Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, Constable's empirical skies.
Realism
- Courbet: Burial at Ornans, The Stone Breakers; the ordinary and the ugly claimed as valid subject matter.
- Millet and Daumier; the rising authority of photography and the illustrated press.
Impressionism and Post-Impressionism
- 1874 first group exhibition in Paris; plein air painting, broken brushwork, modern urban leisure; Monet, Renoir, Morisot, Degas, Pissarro.
- Influences: photography, ukiyo-e Japanese prints, colour theory, portable paint tubes.
- Seurat's pointillism; Cézanne's constructive stroke and Mont Sainte-Victoire; Van Gogh's impasto; Gauguin's Synthetism; Toulouse-Lautrec's posters.
- Manet as the hinge figure: Olympia, Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, the 1863 Salon des Refusés.
Worked example. A lantern on the ground lights a white-shirted man with arms raised, marked with stigmata-like wounds, facing a faceless firing squad; a church and city sit behind. Reasoning: the light source is man-made and low, reversing conventional illumination; the victim's pose quotes crucifixion imagery; the soldiers have no faces, making them an anonymous machine; the subject is the 1808 Madrid uprising, painted in 1814 for a patriotic commission. Identify as Goya, Third of May 1808, Prado.
Traps. Treating Neoclassicism as a synonym for classical art; reducing Romanticism to romantic love; assuming Impressionism was one uniform technique; crediting pointillism to Van Gogh; forgetting the Salon system and the Rejected Salon of 1863; ignoring the political content of supposedly formal works.