The Enlightenment encouraged reason, observation, and scientific thinking. Archaeological discoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum renewed interest in ancient Greek and Roman art and architecture. These developments helped inspire Neoclassicism and its emphasis on classical ideals, order, and clarity.

Neoclassical art draws inspiration from ancient Greek and Roman art. It often features balanced compositions, firm outlines, controlled gestures, idealized figures, historical and mythological subjects, and moral or political messages about duty, virtue, and sacrifice.

The painting presents duty, determination, patriotism, and personal sacrifice for the state as moral ideals. Its balanced composition, firm poses, and extended arms reinforce these ideas.

David presented the revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat as a martyr of the Revolution. The simple composition, restrained background, and carefully arranged body communicate the political significance of Marat's death.

Romantic art emphasizes emotion, imagination, individuality, and the power of nature. It often includes dramatic compositions, intense contrasts of light and color, historical events, revolution, suffering, and the sublime.

Goya uses dramatic lighting, emotional gestures, and a contrast between the anonymous soldiers and the frightened victims. The central figure's raised arms emphasize his vulnerability, while the scene condemns violence and highlights the suffering of ordinary people.

The painting depicts survivors struggling for rescue after a shipwreck. Its dramatic composition, expressive bodies, and emotional intensity communicate despair, hope, and uncertainty. Rather than presenting a controlled moral example, it emphasizes suffering and the limits of human control.

Liberty is represented by a symbolic female figure who leads people from different social groups during the July Revolution of 1830. Carrying the French tricolor flag, she symbolizes the struggle for freedom.

The small human figure stands before an immense, mist-covered landscape. The scale of nature and the mysterious fog create feelings of awe and uncertainty, encouraging reflection on human existence and the limits of knowledge.

Neoclassicism emphasizes order and balanced composition, as seen in David's The Oath of the Horatii, while Romanticism often uses dramatic movement and emotion, as seen in Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa. Neoclassicism draws heavily on ancient Greek and Roman ideals, while Romanticism explores nature, history, and contemporary events. Neoclassical art often emphasizes duty and sacrifice, while Romantic art frequently explores freedom, suffering, and the sublime, as seen in Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People and Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.

Industrialization, urban growth, railways, new forms of entertainment, and the development of photography changed society and the way people experienced the world.

Realism represented ordinary people, workers, peasants, and everyday life without idealizing them. It often drew attention to working conditions and social differences.

Courbet depicted ordinary workers performing hard physical labor instead of choosing a heroic, mythological, or religious subject.

Courbet used the large scale traditionally associated with important historical or religious paintings to represent an ordinary funeral and the people attending it.

Photography freed painters from the obligation to merely duplicate optical reality. Instead, painters explored optical perception, emotional light, and flattened, cropped viewpoints inspired by both snapshot cameras and imported Japanese woodblock prints.

Its contemporary subject, the woman's direct gaze, and its unconventional composition challenged traditional academic expectations. Its exhibition at the Salon des Refusés in 1863 also brought attention to disagreements about artistic standards.

Impressionism explored light, color, atmosphere, and fleeting moments. Artists often used loose brushstrokes and painted contemporary life, frequently working outdoors.

The painting was exhibited in 1874, and its title inspired the term Impressionism, which was initially used mockingly by critic Louis Leroy.

Renoir often depicted social gatherings and leisure activities, as in Luncheon of the Boating Party. Degas frequently represented movement and performers, as in The Dance Class, using unusual viewpoints and compositions.

Some artists wanted to explore stronger structure, expressive color, personal experience, and ideas or emotions that could not be communicated through direct observation alone.

Post-Impressionism emphasized structure, form, composition, expressive color, simplified or distorted forms, and individual artistic styles.

Cézanne arranges the figures and trees in a carefully organized composition, using repeated triangular shapes and simplified forms to connect the figures, landscape, and spaces.

Intense colors and energetic, swirling brushstrokes make the sky appear to move and turn the landscape into an expressive image shaped by Van Gogh's individual vision.

Gauguin arranges figures to suggest different stages of human life and uses the painting to explore questions about birth, life, death, and the meaning of existence.

Pointillism is a technique that uses small dots or touches of color placed next to one another. Seurat uses this systematic method to construct a carefully ordered scene.

Symbolist artists explored dreams, imagination, mythology, religion, literature, spirituality, the supernatural, and the mysterious aspects of human existence.

Moreau creates mysterious scenes inspired by mythology and religion. Redon combines familiar forms in dreamlike and unexpected ways. Ensor uses masks, grotesque faces, and exaggerated crowds to explore social and psychological concerns.

Art Nouveau features flowing lines, organic forms, asymmetrical compositions, decorative elements inspired by nature, and the integration of architecture, ornament, and everyday design.

Horta integrates decorative ironwork into architecture. Guimard uses organic metal forms in Paris Métro entrances. Gaudí creates sculptural, irregular architectural forms. Mackintosh combines modern design with geometry and restrained decoration.

Post-Impressionism explores new approaches to painting, Symbolism uses images to suggest deeper meanings and inner experiences, and Art Nouveau develops a modern decorative style for architecture and applied art.

Rapid technological development, urbanization, political conflict, two world wars, and the development of photography and film influenced artists and changed how people experienced the world.

They used bright, often non-naturalistic colors to create visual effects and express their responses to subjects rather than reproduce their exact appearance.

Munch uses intense colors, distorted forms, and rippling lines to communicate anxiety and emotional instability.

They broke objects into geometric shapes and represented different aspects of a subject within the same composition instead of showing it from a single, fixed viewpoint.

They celebrated speed, machines, modern technology, and industrial cities. They used repeated forms, diagonal lines, and overlapping shapes to suggest movement and energy.

Dada artists reacted to the destruction of war and challenged the social and political values they believed had contributed to it, as well as traditional ideas about art, beauty, and logic.

Duchamp presented a manufactured urinal as an artwork, questioning whether art depends on artistic skill, the object's appearance, the artist's decision, or the context in which it is displayed.

Dalí creates dreamlike scenes with realistic detail, as in The Persistence of Memory. Magritte places familiar objects in unexpected contexts and questions the relationship between images and reality, as in The Treachery of Images.

Abstract art can simplify or transform recognizable subjects, while non-representational art does not depict recognizable objects or scenes at all.

Kandinsky combines expressive colors, sweeping lines, and overlapping shapes to create rhythm and harmony. Mondrian uses horizontal and vertical lines, geometric areas, and primary colors to explore proportion and balance.

Fauvism uses intense color, as seen in Matisse's The Joy of Life. Cubism fragments forms and challenges perspective, as seen in Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Surrealism explores dreamlike situations, as seen in Dalí's The Persistence of Memory.