Art History: 18th and 19th Century Movements
What this domain tests
How art responded to revolution, industrialization, and the academy-and how to attach style labels to evidence in brushwork, subject, and exhibition context.
Core movements
- Rococo: playful asymmetry, pastel color, aristocratic leisure (Watteau, Fragonard).
- Neoclassicism: crisp contours, antique subjects, civic virtue (David's Oath of the Horatii).
- Romanticism: emotion, sublime nature, individual drama (Delacroix, Friedrich, Turner).
- Realism: ordinary labor and contemporary life (Courbet's Stone Breakers).
- Impressionism: plein-air light, broken brushwork, modern leisure (Monet, Degas, Morisot); Salon des Refusés, 1863.
- Post-Impressionism: structure and subjectivity beyond impressionism (Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat).
- Also: photography's rise, Japonisme, Arts and Crafts, Symbolism.
Worked example
A painting shows unidealized stone workers at full scale, coarse brushwork, and no heroic narrative. Reasoning: contemporary labor plus refusal of academic finish signals Realism, not "romanticized peasantry." If the same subject were rendered with shimmering broken color and cropped framing, you would argue Impressionist attention to light and modern vision.
Traps
Equating Romanticism with romance; using "realism" loosely when the exam means the movement; assuming Impressionists were untrained-many were academically trained; and ignoring the Salon system, which explains why avant-garde exhibitions mattered.