Curated Guides > Syllabus > 19th-Century European Art Syllabus
19th-Century European Art Syllabus
This 13-unit course focuses on artists in Europe during the 19th century. It addresses themes related to aesthetic, social, and political changes. It also explores the impact of European interaction with India, North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, and Japan.
Open All
Collapse AllTo understand 19th-century art in Europe, we need to understand its roots in the 18th century that led to the tensions and innovations of the century to come.
Hyacinthe Rigaud, Louis XIV, 1701, oil on canvas, 9 feet 2 inches x 6 feet 3 inches (Musée du Louvre, Paris, France)
- Art and the rule of kings
- Hyacinthe Rigaud, Louis XIV
- Louis le Vau, André le Nôtre, and Charles le Brun, Château de Versailles
- The Formation of a French School: the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture
- Neoclassicism and Enlightenment
- The Age of Enlightenment, an introduction
- Neoclassicism, an introduction
- The rediscovery of Pompeii and the other cities of Vesuvius
- Wedgwood factory, The Pegasus Vase
- Antonio Canova, Paolina Borghese as Venus Victorious
- Angelica Kauffmann, Cornelia Pointing to her Children as Her Treasures
- Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the Horatii
- Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Marat
- Jacques-Germain Soufflot, The Panthéon (Church of Ste-Geneviève), Paris
- What was Louis XIV’s role as an absolute monarch and how did he use art to express his power?
- What was the Age of Enlightenment?
- What was the role of academies of art like the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in France?
- What is Neoclassicism?
- Why were paintings like David’s Oath of the Horatii associated with the French Revolution?
- absolute monarch
- Royal Academy
- hierarchy of subjects
- Rome prize
- Salon exhibitions
- Enlightenment
- Neoclassicism
- Johann Joachim Winckelmann
- poussiniste
- emulation
- exemplum virtutis or model of virtue
- French Revolution
- Reign of Terror
Key Questions
Key Terms
In the wake of the French Revolution (1789–99), Napoleon Bonaparte comes to power and dominates much of Europe. This unit explores how works of art in the Romantic style could serve as propaganda in support of and resistance to Napoleon.
Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon Crossing the Alps or Bonaparte at the Saint Bernard Pass, 1800–1801, oil on canvas, 261 x 221 cm (Chateau de Malmaison, Rueil-Malmaison)
- French art as propaganda for Napoleon
- Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon Crossing the Alps
- David, The Emperor Napoleon in His Study in the Tuileries
- Baron Antoine-Jean Gros, Napoleon Bonaparte Visiting the Pest House in Jaffa
- Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Napoleon on His Imperial Throne
- Nations respond to Napoleonic invasion
- Spain
- Francisco Goya, And there’s nothing to be done from The Disasters of War
- Francisco Goya, The Third of May, 1808
- Italy
- Napoleon’s appropriation of Italian cultural treasures
- Plunder, war, Napoleon and the Horses of San Marco
- England
- William Blake, The spiritual form of Nelson guiding Leviathan
- J. M. W. Turner, The Fighting Temeraire
- Who was Napoleon and what was his impact on Europe?
- Why were Jacques-Louis David and his students important during Napoleon’s reign?
- How did the rest of Europe respond to Napoleon?
- Napoleon Bonaparte
- empire
- propaganda
- equestrian portrait
- Proto-Romantic
- Peninsular War
- etching
- drypoint
- aquatint
- Christian iconography
- Louvre Museum
- cultural looting
- Horatio Nelson
- Battle of Trafalgar
- triumphal arch
Key Questions
Key Terms
Romanticism is not a single, easily defined movement. Instead, it encompasses many approaches to subject and expression that have in common the conviction that instinct, dream, and emotion are as important as the rationality and order prized by the thinkers of the Enlightenment.
Caspar David Friedrich, The Abbey in the Oakwood, 1809–10, oil on canvas, 110 x 171 cm (Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin)
- Introduction
- A beginner’s guide to Romanticism
- Spain
- Francisco Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters
- Francisco Goya, Saturn Devouring One Of His Sons
- Germany
- Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea
- Caspar David Friedrich, Abbey in the Oak Forest
- Caspar David Friedrich, Solitary Tree (or Lone Tree)
- Caspar David Friedrich, Woman at a Window
- Runge, Hülsenbeck Children
- How can we describe the various approaches to art, music, and literature that characterize the Romantic movement? Is there one Romantic approach?
- What was the significance of political and social upheavals in the early 19th-century that affected the nature of Romantic art and its interpretation later in history?
- What are the significant differences between the artistic approaches of artists like Goya and Friedrich?
- subjectivity
- emotion
- Los Caprichos
- aquatint
- "la Quinta del Sordo" (House of the Deaf Man)
- sketching from nature
- studio paintings
- rückenfigur
- nature and time
- nature as metaphor
Key Questions
Key Terms
The first factories opened in England in the middle of the eighteenth century. This unit explores how English artists in the early nineteenth century responded to these life-altering changes by retreating from the industrial world into their own imaginations or by confronting the new world of trade and manufacturing.
Watt's First Rotary Engine, engraving, illustration for Lives of the Engineers, The Steam Engine, Boulton and Watt, by Samuel Smiles (1878)
- Introduction
- What was the Industrial Revolution?
- Constable's retreat from modernity
- Constable and the English landscape
- John Constable, Wivenhoe Park, Essex
- John Constable, The Hay Wain
- John Constable, View on the Stour near Dedham
- Turner confronts modernity
- J. M. W. Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed — The Great Western Railway
- The sublime
- Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare
- J.M.W. Turner, Snow Storm
- J.M.W. Turner, Slave Ship
- John Martin, The Great Day of His Wrath
- What was the Industrial Revolution and how did it affect English life?
- What is the picturesque?
- What is the sublime as described by Edmund Burke and how does it relate to the picturesque?
- Industrial Revolution
- mills
- Richard Arkwright
- steam engine
- factory production
- canal system
- railways
- urbanization
- landscape painting
- picturesque
- Reverend Gilpin
- sublime
- Edmund Burke
Key Questions
Key Terms
After Napoleon’s defeat and exile, France entered a period of political transition. Painters engaged with life and politics with a new style that moved away from Classicism toward a more responsive, modern approach.
Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Marat, 1793, oil on canvas, 65 x 50-1/2″ (Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels)
- Introduction
- Romanticism in France
- Classic, classical, and classicism explained
- Classical lines
- Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Portrait of Madame Rivière
- Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Apotheosis of Homer
- The painterly approach
- Théodore Géricault, Raft of the Medusa
- Théodore Géricault, Portraits of the Insane
- Eugène Delacroix, an introduction
- Eugène Delacroix, Scene of the Massacre at Chios
- Eugène Delacroix, Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi
- Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People
- Sculpture
- François Rude, La Marseillaise
- What are the key features of Romanticism in France?
- How were line and color related to the concepts of Classicism and Romanticism?
- What is meant by the term “artistic genius?”
- linear
- painterly
- facture
- classicism
- Romanticism
- Bourbon Restoration
- French colonialism
- abolition
- pyramidal composition
- Revolution of 1830
- July Monarchy
- barricade
- allegory
- Phrygian cap
- Nike
Key Questions
Key Terms
In the 19th century, European nations controlled much of the globe through colonial governments and engaged in trade across the world. This unit explores how European artists depicted the world outside of Europe, how European pictorial styles reinforced colonial power, and the impact of Japanese art in Europe.
Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Snake Charmer and His Audience, c. 1879, oil on canvas (Sterling Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts)
- Orientalism
- Orientalism
- Staging the Egyptian Harem for Western Eyes
- Painting colonial culture: Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque
- Eugène Delacroix, The Death of Sardanapalus
- Delacroix, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment
- John Nash, Royal Pavilion, Brighton
- India and the British Empire
- Photographic views of nineteenth-century India, an introduction
- Recording and representing India: the East India Company’s landscape practices
- Cashmere shawls
- F.W. Stevens with Sitaram Khanderao and Madherao Janardhan, Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai
- Japan and Japonisme
- Japonisme
- Looking east: how Japan inspired Monet, Van Gogh and other Western artists
After the Revolution of 1848, French artists increasingly turned away from the emotion and drama of Romanticism and sought to accurately represent the world of real people and things. Artists responded to the growing tension between those in power and the working poor by portraying the working class.
Gustave Courbet, A Burial at Ornans, begun late summer 1849, completed 1850, 124 x 260 inches, oil on canvas (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)
- Introduction
- A beginner’s guide to Realism
- Honoré Daumier
- Daumier, Rue Transnonain
- Gustave Courbet
- Gustave Courbet, A Burial at Ornans
- Gustave Courbet, The Stonebreakers
- Gustave Courbet, The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing Up Seven Years of My Life as an Artist
- Gustave Courbet, Bonjour Monsieur Courbet
- Rosa Bonheur
- Rosa Bonheur, Plowing in the Nivernais (or The First Dressing)
- Jean-François Millet
- Jean-François Millet, L’Angélus
- Jean-François Millet, The Gleaners
- Édouard Manet
- Édouard Manet, Music in the Tuileries Gardens
- Édouard Manet, Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass)
- Édouard Manet, Olympia
- What are the key features of Realism?
- What were the Revolutions of 1848 and why was that year important to painter Gustave Courbet?
- Did all Realist painters only depict what they observed directly?
- How did Manet subvert history painting?
- What was important about painting modern life for Realist artists?
- lithograph
- government censorship
- foreshortening
- Revolutions of 1848
- Karl Marx
- Communist Manifesto
- social classes
- Paris Salon
- Pavilion of Realism
- allegory
- rural labor
- gleaners
Key Questions
Key Terms
While French artists looked hard at the contemporary world around them, in England another group, the Pre-Raphaelites, brought a similar commitment to veracity to their subjects. Soon after, artists brought a new focus to the ideals of beauty with the Aesthetic Movement.
John Everett Millais, Isabella, 1848–49, oil on canvas, 103 x 142.8 cm (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool)
- First and second generation Pre-Raphaelites
- A beginner’s guide to the Pre-Raphaelites
- Sir John Everett Millais, Christ in the House of His Parents
- Sir John Everett Millais, Ophelia
- William Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience
- Ford Madox Brown, The Last of England
- Ford Madox Brown, Work
- Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ecce Ancilla Domini
- Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, The Golden Stairs
- William Dyce, Pegwell Bay, Kent – a Recollection of October 5th 1858
- The Aesthetic Movement
- The Aesthetic Movement
- William Morris, The Green Dining Room
- James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket
- What was the significance and role of the Royal Academy for painters like the Pre-Raphaelites?
- What does Pre-Raphaelite mean?
- How do ideas associated with Realism, such as accurate, concrete depictions of people and things relate to the Pre-Raphaelites?
- Who was William Morris and what was his impact on design?
- What was the Aesthetic Movement and who was J.M. Whistler?
- Raphael
- Old Masters
- John Ruskin
- Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
- Wet white ground technique
- Aesthetic Movement
- Oscar Wilde
- Arts and Crafts
- "Art for art's sake"
- "Ten O'Clock Lectures"
- Chartism
Key Questions
Key Terms
Photography fundamentally changed the nature and availability of images for everyone. One no longer needed to have a drawing or painting made to depict people, places, or things because photography made those types of images more widely available.
Eadweard Muybridge, The Horse in Motion ("Sallie Gardner," owned by Leland Stanford; running at a 1:40 gait over the Palo Alto track, 19th June 1878), 1878, daguerreotype
- Early Photography: Niépce, Talbot, and Muybridge
- Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, View from the Window at Le Gras
- Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, Paris Boulevard or View of the Boulevard du Temple
- Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, The Artist’s Studio / Still Life with Plaster Casts
- David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Newhaven Fishwives
- John Whipple, William Bond, and George Bond, The Moon, No. 37
- Anna Atkins and the cyanotype process
- Lady Clementina Hawarden, Clementina and Florence Elizabeth Maude
- Édouard Baldus, Cloister of St. Trophîme, Arles
- Julia Margaret Cameron, Mrs. Herbert Duckworth
- Honoré Daumier, Nadar Elevating Photography to the Height of an Art
- Eadweard Muybridge, The Attitudes of Animals in Motion
Getty Conversations - Did photographers consider their work a science or an art?
- What effect did photography have on the art world and practice of painting?
- How did Nadar’s aerial photography change the way people saw Paris?
- camera obscura
- exposure period
- copper plate
- hypo
- daguerreotype
- calotype
- glass plate
- wet collodion process
- dry plate method
- dry gelatin roll film
- George Eastman
- cyanotype
- shutter
Key Questions
Key Terms
During the Second Empire (1852–70), the French government fundamentally changed Paris from a medieval place with narrow streets to the modern city with wide boulevards and sidewalk cafés that we know today. Artists like Édouard Manet and the Impressionists who followed created a new type of painting that focused on modern life in and around Paris.
Camille Pissarro, The Boulevard Montmartre on a Winter Morning, 1897, oil on canvas, 64.8 x 81.3 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
- Introduction
- Haussmann the Demolisher and the creation of modern Paris
- Impressionism, an introduction
- Impressionism: painting modern life
- Édouard Manet
- Édouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère
- The Impressionists
- Edgar Degas, At the Races in the Countryside
- Edgar Degas, The Dance Class
- A summer day in Paris: Berthe Morisot’s Hunting Butterflies
- Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street; Rainy Day
- Auguste Renoir, Moulin de la Galette
- Auguste Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party
- Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise
- Claude Monet, The Gare Saint-Lazare
- Mary Cassatt, In the Loge
- How was Paris transformed during the Second Empire?
- Why do some people think of Édouard Manet as one of the first Modern artists?
- Who were the Impressionists and what did they have in common?
- What impact did the art of Japan have on artists such as Degas and Cassatt?
- How did some of the Impressionists understand the relationship between light and color?
- Second Empire
- Baron Haussmann
- Haussmannization
- Charles Baudelaire
- "The Painter of Modern Life"
- flâneur
- café concert
- Café Guerbois
- "modern life"
- bourgeois
- Franco-Prussian War
- Montmartre
- en plein air
- light and color
Key Questions
Key Terms
While the Impressionists often captured a single moment of changing light and color in their paintings, sculptors like Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux and Auguste Rodin also left behind the classical timelessness that had governed sculpture to create works that reflected split seconds of motion and emotion.
Antonio Canova, Paolina Borghese as Venus Victorious, 1804-08, white marble, 160 x 192 cm (Galleria Borghese, Rome)
- Neoclassical sculpture—the conservative approach
- Antonio Canova, Paolina Borghese as Venus Victorious
- Modern sculpture
- Charles Garnier, The Paris Opéra
- Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Dance
- Auguste Rodin, The Walking Man
- Auguste Rodin, The Age of Bronze
- Auguste Rodin, The Burghers of Calais
- Auguste Rodin, The Gates of Hell
- Camille Claudel, The Age of Maturity
- Paul Gauguin, Oviri
- A moment’s monument, Medardo Rosso, Ecce puer (Behold the Child)
- Why was Carpeaux’s group La Danse considered very modern and controversial?
- How did the work of Carpeaux and Rodin differ from the approach of Neoclassical artists like Canova?
- Why was Rodin's The Age of Bronze so controversial?
- What was Rodin’s creative process and why were his plasters important?
- Why is the idea of capturing a single moment in time important in the art of Rodin, Claudel, and Rosso?
- relief sculpture
- nymph
- contrapposto
- fragment
- modeling (clay)
- plaster
- bronze casting
- patina
- Michelangelo
- Dante, Divine Comedy—Inferno
- allegory
- personification
Key Questions
Key Terms
The luminous paintings of artists like Claude Monet, with their depictions of ever-changing light, led another group—the Post-Impressionists—to seek an approach that re-engaged with structure, myth, and emotion.
Claude Monet, Wheatstacks (Snow Effect, Morning), 1891, oil on canvas, 64.8 x 100.3 cm (Getty Museum, Los Angeles)
- Monet and Late Impressionism
- Claude Monet, Wheatstacks (Snow Effect, Morning)
Getty Conversations - Georges Seurat
- Introduction to Neo-Impressionism, Part I
- Neo-Impressionist Color Theory
- Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte – 1884
- Vincent van Gogh
- Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear
- Vincent van Gogh, Irises
Getty Conversations - Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night
- Paul Gauguin
- The Pont-Aven School and Synthetism
- Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait with Portrait of Émile Bernard (Les misérables)
- Paul Gauguin, Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
- Paul Cézanne
- Paul Cézanne, The Basket of Apples
- Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire
- What aspects of Impressionism did artists like Seurat and Cézanne find troubling?
- What was the nature of the color theory that interested Georges Seurat?
- What was the role of color in the art of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin?
- In what ways does Cézanne address the problem of presenting a single, static view of an object in painting?
- Neo-Impressionism
- Chevreul color theory
- pointillism
- optical mixture
- divisionism
- Theo van Gogh
- Japonisme
- Katsushika Hokusai
- Synethetism
- form and color
- Cubism
Key Questions
Key Terms
In the late 19th century, as artists were increasingly freed from the demands of representation, they began to explore the possibility of using color and imagery to express ideas and emotions more closely allied to the world of the imagination than the tangible world. In the decorative arts, designers sought to use new forms and materials often rooted in the natural world.
Paul Ranson, Christ and Buddha, 1890, oil on canvas, 66.7 x 51.4 cm (private collection)
- Symbolism
- The Nabis and Symbolism
- Gustave Moreau, Jupiter and Semele
- James Ensor, The Intrigue
- Gustav Klimt, Beethoven Frieze
- Gustav Klimt, The Kiss
- Edvard Munch, The Scream
- Fernand Khnopff, I Lock my Door Upon Myself
- Art Nouveau
- Art Nouveau
- Antoni Gaudí, Park Güell
- Hector Guimard, Cité entrance, Métropolitain, Paris
- Louis Comfort Tiffany, Vase
- The Wanderers (Peredvizhniki)
- Ilya Repin, Krestny Khod (Religious Procession) in Kursk Gubernia
- What were some of the important themes and ideas that interested Symbolist artists like Gustave Moreau?
- Why can we also consider Gauguin a Symbolist artist?
- What are some important design features of Art Nouveau?
- Art Nouveau is known by other terms in different cities—what are these other names for similar movements?
- pure subjectivity
- Symbolism
- iconography
- matter and spirit
- Nabis
- Art Nouveau
- Jugendstil
- Catalan Modernism
- Vienna Secession
- Rudolph Bing
- Victor Horta
- The Wanderers
- Soviet socialist art
