Neo-Classicism 1750 - 1880 AD - - Neoclassical Art and Architecture, art produced in Europe and North America from about 1750 through the early 1800s, marked by the emulation of Greco-Roman forms. Neoclassical artists tried to create a style that was logical, solemn in tone, and moralizing in character.
The work of Scottish architect and designer Robert Adam introduced the neoclassical style to Great Britain in the 1750s and 1760s. Greek-inspired architecture in England is exemplified by such constructions as the Bank of England rotunda (1796) by Sir John Soane and the British Museum portico (1823-1847) by Sir Robert Smirke. Around 1812 the Greek Revival in England was modified by the Regency style, but the neoclassical architecture of Scotland remained pristine. In France from about 1771 to about 1790, Claude-Nicholas Ledoux designed structures that are exemplars of the early phase of neoclassical architecture. After Napoleon I became emperor in 1804, architects adopted the intimidating opulence of Roman imperial architecture, known as the Empire style. German architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel was the leading neoclassicist in his country.
Romanticism 1800 - 1880 AD -(SEE RENAISSANCE ART)
Realism 1830's - 1850's AD - In the arts, the accurate, detailed, unembellished depiction of nature or of contemporary life. Realism rejects imaginative idealization in favor of a close observation of outward appearances. As such, realism in its broad sense has comprised many artistic currents in different civilizations. In the visual arts, for example, realism can be found in ancient Hellenistic Greek sculptures accurately portraying boxers and decrepit old women. The works of such 17th-century painters as Caravaggio, the Dutch genre painters, the Spanish painters José de Ribera, Diego Velázquez, and Francisco de Zurbarán, and the Le Nain brothers in France are realist in approach. The works of the 18th-century English novelists Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollett may also be called realistic.
Velázquez (or Velásquez), Diego (1599-1660).
The Waterseller of Seville 1623
Oil on canvas, 106.7 x 81 cm (42 x 31 7/8 in)
Wellington Museum, London
Impressionism 1870's - 1890's AD
French IMPRESSIONISM, a major movement, first in painting and later in music, that developed chiefly in France during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Impressionist painting comprises the work produced between about 1866 and 1887 by a group of artists who shared a set of related approaches and techniques. The most conspicuous characteristic of Impressionism was an attempt to accurately and objectively record visual reality in terms of transient effects of light and color. The principal Impressionist painters were Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot, Armand Guillaumin, and Frederic Bazille, who worked together, influenced each other, and exhibited together and independently. Edgar Degas and Paul Cezanne also painted in an Impressionist style for a time in the early 1870s. The established painter Edouard Manet, whose work in the 1860s greatly influenced Monet and others of the group, himself adopted the Impressionist approach about 1873.
These artists became dissatisfied early in their careers with academic teaching's emphasis on depicting a historical or mythological subject matter with literary or anecdotal overtones. They also rejected the conventional imaginative or idealizing treatments of academic painting. By the late 1860s, Manet's art reflected a new aesthetic--which was to be a guiding force in Impressionist work--in which the importance of the traditional subject matter was downgraded and attention was shifted to the artist's manipulation of color, tone, and texture as ends in themselves. In Manet's painting the subject became a vehicle for the artful composition of areas of flat color, and perspectival depth was minimized so that the viewer would look at the surface patterns and relationships of the picture rather than into the illusory three-dimensional space it created. About the same time, Monet was influenced by the innovative painters Eugene Boudin and J.R. Jongkind, who depicted fleeting effects of sea and sky by the means of highly colored and texturally varied methods of paint application. The Impressionists also adopted Boudin's practice of painting entirely out-of-doors while looking at the actual scene, instead of finishing up his painting from sketches in the studio, as was the conventional practice.
In the late 1860's Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, and others began painting landscapes and river scenes in which they tried to dispassionately record the colors and forms of objects as they appeared in natural light at a given time. These artists abandoned the traditional landscape palette of muted greens, browns, and grays and instead painted in a lighter, sunnier, more brilliant key. They began by painting the play of light upon water and the reflected colors of its ripples, trying to reproduce the manifold and animated effects of sunlight and shadow and of direct and reflected light that they observed. In their efforts to reproduce immediate visual impressions as registered on the retina, they abandoned the use of grays and blacks in shadows as inaccurate and used complimentary colors instead. More importantly, they learned to build up objects out of discrete flecks and dabs of pure harmonizing or contrasting color, thus evoking the broken-hued brilliance and the variations of hue produced by sunlight and its reflections. Forms in their pictures lost their clear outlines and became dematerialized, shimmering and vibrating in a re-creation of actual outdoor conditions. And finally, traditional formal compositions were abandoned in favor of a more casual and less contrived disposition of objects within the picture frame. The Impressionists extended their new techniques to depict landscapes, trees, houses, and even urban street scenes and railroad stations.
In 1874 the group held its first show, independent of the official Salon of the French Academy, which had consistently rejected most of their works. Monet's painting "Impression: Sunrise" (1872; Muse Marmot, Paris) earned the initially derisive name "Impressionists" from the journalist Louis Leroy writing in the satirical magazine Le Charivari in 1874. The artists themselves soon adopted the name as descriptive of their intention to accurately convey visual "impressions." They held seven subsequent shows, the last in 1886. During that time they continued to develop their own personal and individual styles. All, however, affirmed in their work the principles of freedom of technique, a personal rather than a conventional approach to subject matter, and the truthful reproduction of nature.
By the mid-1880's the Impressionist group had begun to dissolve as each painter pursued his own aesthetic interests and principles. In its short existence, however, it had accomplished a revolution in the history of art, providing a technical starting point for the Post-impressionist revolution in artists Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh, and Georges Seurat and freeing all subsequent Western painting from traditional techniques and approaches to subject matter.
Copyright © 1994, Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.
Although Impressionism started in the late 1800's, it is often said to have been the starting point for modern art. The Impressionists broke away from over 4 centuries of art tradition, paving the way for future artists to paint freely.
One of the Earliest Impressionists Frédéric Bazille (1841-70)
Bazille's Studio; 9 rue de la Condamine 1870
Oil on canvas
(38 1/2 x 50 1/2 in)
Musee d'Orsay, Paris
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