19th-Century Movements: Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism
What this domain tests
This block runs from Neoclassicism to Post-Impressionism and is best answered as a sequence of arguments about what art should do: teach (Neoclassicism), move (Romanticism), testify (Realism), see (Impressionism), construct (Post-Impressionism). Dates support the answer; the marks come from linking technique to that programme.
Core rules and concepts
- Neoclassicism: Winckelmann's "noble simplicity and calm grandeur"; drawing over colour; David's Oath of the Horatii (1784) and Death of Marat; Canova; architecture - Villanueva's Prado, Sabatini's Puerta de Alcalá.
- Romanticism: the sublime, ruin and storm; Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People (1830); Friedrich; Turner; Goya as the hinge (Third of May 1808; Black Paintings), whose brushwork and pessimism escape classification.
- Realism: Courbet's Stone Breakers and his 1855 pavilion; Millet; Daumier; in Spain, Martí Alsina; photography's new authority changes portraiture and reportage.
- Impressionism: first exhibition 1874 (Monet's Impression, Sunrise gives the name); plein-air work enabled by tube paint; broken colour, complementary contrast, modern leisure subjects; Morisot, Degas, Renoir. Sorolla and Beruete absorb it in Spain.
- Post-Impressionism: Seurat's pointillism, Cézanne's constructive stroke, Van Gogh's impasto, Gauguin's synthetism and cloisonnism, Toulouse-Lautrec's posters.
Worked example
Prompt: "Compare a Neoclassical and a Romantic treatment of a contemporary heroic subject." Reasoning: take David's Horatii and Delacroix's Liberty. Compare on four axes: composition (frieze-like figures on a shallow stage vs a surging pyramid), line versus colour (hard contour vs loaded brush), light (even and legible vs dramatic chiaroscuro) and address (an exemplum of duty vs an invitation to feel and join). Conclude that the change lies not in subject-matter but in the role offered to the viewer.
Traps that cost marks
Placing Goya wholly inside one movement; dating Impressionism before 1874; calling Sorolla an Impressionist without qualification (he is better described as luminist); confusing Realism's social subject with naturalist technique; treating Post-Impressionism as a single style rather than five divergent procedures.