19th Century
Art made between 1800 and 1899: Romanticism, Realism, the arrival of photography, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, and iron-and-glass building.
1,124 works · 10 related artists
About
The 19th century opened with revolution and war, and painters answered with the emotion and drama of Romanticism. Francisco de Goya showed a Madrid firing squad in The Third of May 1808 (1814), Théodore Géricault painted shipwreck survivors in The Raft of the Medusa (1818–19), and Eugène Delacroix made colour and movement carry political passion. In England J. M. W. Turner dissolved storms and steam trains into light, and in Japan Katsushika Hokusai's prints turned landscape into bold design.
Photography, announced in 1839, changed how everyone saw. Gustave Courbet painted ordinary people at monumental size, and Édouard Manet's Olympia (1863) shocked Paris with a frankly modern nude. The Impressionists worked outdoors in broken touches of colour, Georges Seurat built A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884–86) from dots, and Henri Rousseau painted dreamlike jungles. Iron and glass buildings, from London's Crystal Palace (1851) to the Eiffel Tower (1889), announced an industrial age.
