19th-century Art: Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism
The 19th century is where the exam tests the shift from the academy to the avant-garde. You must link style to the political situation and to new technical conditions - the railway, the collapsible paint tube, photography, the Salon and its jury.
Core rules and concepts
- Neoclassicism. Winckelmann's "noble simplicity and calm grandeur", the excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii, outline over colour, moral subject. David's Oath of the Horatii (1784): shallow box, frieze composition, masculine straight lines against feminine curves. Canova's marble.
- Romanticism. Emotion, sublime nature, the individual, the national past. Géricault's Raft of the Medusa (1819) raises a contemporary scandal to history painting. Delacroix: colour, diagonal energy, Liberty Leading the People (1830). Friedrich: the Rückenfigur and landscape as spiritual state. Goya is the hinge - court painter, then The Third of May 1808 (1814) and the Black Paintings (1819–23).
- Realism. Courbet's Stone Breakers (1849) and Burial at Ornans (1849–50), the Pavillon du Réalisme (1855), the unidealised contemporary subject; Millet's peasants; Daumier.
- Impressionism. From the first exhibition of 1874 (Monet, Impression, Sunrise, 1872): plein air, broken brushwork, optical mixing, series, modern urban leisure.
- Post-Impressionism. Seurat's pointillism (Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884–86); Cézanne's constructive stroke; Van Gogh's impasto and expressive colour; Gauguin's synthetism and cloisonnism.
Worked example
Compare the Raft of the Medusa with the Stone Breakers. Both are large and about ordinary people, but Géricault builds a pyramid, uses the sublime storm, borrows Michelangelo's bodies and universalises. Courbet refuses the pyramid, the heroic light and the moral; his two figures turn away from us in a shallow foreground, and the canvas's rough surface is part of the statement. The argument: Realism rejects the rhetorical machinery of Romantic history painting and makes a political claim about who deserves to be painted.
Traps that cost marks
- Goya is not simply a Romantic; place each work precisely.
- Impressionism is not "sloppy painting": the broken stroke is about light and perception.
- Seurat is not an Impressionist; pointillism is a systematic method.
- Catalan Modernisme is a different phenomenon; do not force Gaudí into French style labels.