I.

Introduction

Painting, the art of applying colour, or other organic or synthetic substances, to various surfaces to create a representational, imaginative, or abstract picture or design.

II.

Media and Technique

Throughout history, painters have used a variety of media and techniques. All paint consists of both colouring matter (pigment) and a binding medium. The choice of this will affect the “technique” that the artist brings to the work. “Technique” comprises not just the physical and chemical characteristics of the paint, but the way it is applied.

A.

Fresco and Tempera

Fresco painting, which reached the height of its development in Italy during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, involves the application of paint to wet plaster. It is primarily a form of wall painting. The term mural can be applied to any painting that is used for such a purpose, regardless of medium. Tempera painting, only rarely used after the Renaissance, made use of powdered pigment mixed with egg yolk. It suits an art that stresses precision of outline and clarity of colour.

B.

Oil

Oil painting, in which the pigment is suspended in linseed oil, subsequently became the dominant medium in Western painting. Unlike the quick drying tempera, it makes possible a greater degree of detail and surface realism—as displayed in the work of Jan van Eyck, once erroneously believed to have invented the medium. Rapidity of application and improvisation become possible—as found in the oil sketches of Peter Paul Rubens, which can be as exhilarating for the spectator as a virtuoso musical performance. The greater ease of correction could free artists from the necessity of elaborate preliminary drawing. Caravaggio in the early 17th century boasted that he worked directly from the model onto the canvas without preliminary drawing and this has been confirmed by modern technical examination. The capacity of oil paint to blend colour made possible the evocation of atmosphere in the work of such great landscape painters as Claude Lorrain and Joseph Mallord William Turner. A remarkable range of surface effects is possible from the use of very thin and diluted paint (glazing) and the thick ridges and bumps of impasto. The hairs of the brush are the usual means of application, but especially since the mid-19th century the knife, fingers, scratching with the brush handle or matches, and even dripping, pouring, or throwing the paint are all found.

C.

Other Media

Other media include enamel, encaustic, watercolour, and gouache. The last two are technically very similar but, whereas the watercolourist dilutes colour with water to achieve paler shades, in gouache (as in oil) a white pigment is employed. The use of acrylic paints became popular after World War II. This water-based medium is easily applied, dries quickly, has the versatility of oil, and is believed not to darken with the passage of time. Collage, which involves the attachment of paper or other objects to a surface, might be regarded as—in the visual, if not the strictly technical sense—a form of painting. Another form of painting without brush is mosaic. Pieces of glass or other coloured fragments are imbedded in cement or plaster. This was a popular form of architectural decoration from the time of the ancient Romans to the 13th century and has occasionally been revived in more recent times as in Boris Anrep’ s floor in London’s National Gallery completed in 1952. Stained glass, which reached its apogee in the cathedrals of the Middle Ages, is also regarded as a painting technique although it is rarely encountered outside an architectural context.

D.

The Industrialization of Paint

Up until the late 18th century artists had to prepare their own colours. This either necessitated a workshop with assistants as had Rubens or Rembrandt or slowed down painting considerably. This is the partial cause of what strikes us today as the low productivity of some painters of the past. There are fewer than 40 paintings that can be securely attributed to the 17th-century Dutch master Jan Vermeer. His countryman Vincent van Gogh working 200 years later seems to have made a painting nearly every day of his short career. The industrialization of the production of paint and other artist’s materials, especially the introduction of the paint tube, was one of the factors behind the expansion of the modern art world.

The newer materials did not always have the permanence of the old. Even contemporaries of the 18th-century painter Sir Joshua Reynolds noted the fading cheeks on his portraits. Dramatic changes in the colour of their work have occurred within the lifetime of leading 20th-century painters such as Francis Bacon. At least one painting by the leading American Abstract painter Mark Rothko faded almost to invisibility between the years 1960 and 2000 because of the fugitive nature of the colour used.

E.

Painting and Drawing

In practice the exact distinction between painting and drawing is hard to make. Watercolour is classified by most museums as drawing, for conservation reasons because of its sensitivity to light, although it involves the use of the brush and colour. Most painting involves a drawing process as part of its preparation, which may sometimes be carried out with the brush. Pastel, a kind of chalky pigment fixed with gum, popular since the 18th century, can be classified as either (see Crayon).

F.

The Support

The support can be almost as important as the medium. Varieties of smoothness or roughness, resistance or spring affect the way in which the pigment is received by the surface. Wood and canvas are the most frequent to be used, but paper, stone, and metal have all been employed. Some later 20th-century painters have favoured a highly absorbent cotton that soaks in the colour.

III.

Purpose and Style

The development of painting has been influenced not only by changes in technique, but also by function and context. For instance, during the Middle Ages wall paintings and the handmade illustration of books (illumination) were the dominant form and the purpose was primarily religious. The 15th century saw the rise of the portable easel painting and the widening of subject matter to include landscape, portraiture, still life, and secular narrative painting. Although in particular contexts such as the churches of 17th-century Rome or government buildings in 20th-century Mexico, mural painting has continued to be important, the history of painting has primarily become the history of objects that can be transported, exhibited, bought, and sold.

Painting is much more than a tool for copying the appearance of things. It has always represented a hard-fought negotiation between the demands of the medium, visual convention, and perception. Images in painting can take on a symbolic function that can express anything from the artist’s most personal emotions, as in the autobiographical work of Edvard Munch or Frieda Kahlo, to a grand public statement, such as the frescoes by Ambrogio Lorenzetti depicting the effects of good and bad government (1338-1339) in the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena.

Painting is sometimes divided up by subject. The four principal categories are figure painting, portraiture, landscape, and still life.

Whereas figure painting tends towards narrative, portraiture concentrates on the depiction of individuals. In classic art theory as codified in 17th-century France, a form of figure painting known as ”history painting” was regarded as the highest form of the art. This was not just because it because it depicted “noble” subjects such as themes from Classical literature or the Bible, but because it also provided the greatest challenge for the artist in representing not just the appearance of things but the underlying emotional drama as well. The depiction of everyday life, so-called genre painting, was seen as a lower pursuit although it survived because of its popularity with collectors.

Landscape can also comprise subjects such as the sea and the city, indeed any subject in which place takes predominance over the people in it. Still life is engaged in the depiction of objects. While the representation of the figure remained at the centre of art teaching these were regarded as lower forms of art, but this hierarchy was frequently challenged and, by the late 19th century, overturned.

This development was partly the result of an increasing belief that the primary interest of a painting may not be in the subject at all but in the purely visual or technical qualities, most extremely in the abstraction that became dominant for much of the 20th century. The importance of Abstract art has led to all other painting being referred to as “figurative”.

How the painter paints is affected by visual style, which may not just be a personal matter but the style of an epoch. Historians disagree as to how far changes in style have a volition of their own or how far they are determined by broader changes and conflicts in society or the available materials and techniques. What is clear is that to the experienced spectator a particular painting will speak of a particular time and place or a particular artist in ways that have as much to do with the way that painting is executed and organized as with what it depicts.

IV.

Critical Analysis of Painting

The study of subject-matter in painting (and the other visual arts) is usually called iconology. Unlike the semiology employed in the study of the mass media it usually assumes a degree of intentionality on the part of the producer. Contrary to popular belief, paintings of the past are only very rarely mysterious in order to conceal meaning or purpose, and the task that the student of iconology undertakes is to uncover any significance that would have been apparent to original spectators. At its best it goes beyond the simple unravelling of symbols to reveal the mindset or philosophy behind the work. The process can be criticized on the grounds that the real interest of a painting does not always lie in its symbolic meaning, and that a great painting can evoke a mood or feeling that is almost impossible to verbalize. That no one has ever come up with a universally favoured explanation of the three figures in the foreground of Flagellation of Christ (1450-1460, National Gallery, Urbino) by Piero della Francesca has provided great scope for iconological analysis but has not stopped countless spectators being deeply impressed by the picture. (See also Symbolism in Art.)

Formalist analysis, by contrast, concentrates on style and technique. In its favour it can be argued that this brings us closest to the perspective of the artist. It is no accident that it was particularly prevalent in the 20th century when Abstract art came to the fore. It can help account for the fact that some of the most moving paintings, the interiors of Vermeer or the still lives of Paul Cézanne for example, seem to offer little of interest in terms of their subject as such and that it is possible for a painting to make a powerful impact even when the subject is poorly understood. However, formalism is often criticized for detaching painting too much from a larger social context and ignoring the actual functions that pictures perform. Great formalist critics such as Heinrich Wöllflin, who wrote on the Italian High Renaissance, and iconologists such as Erwin Panofsky, the author of classic studies of Albrecht Dürer and the painting of the early Netherlandish Renaissance, can equally provide powerful insights. Bad formalist analysis is limited in scope. Bad iconology makes too little distinction between pictures and literature. The distinction in method says something about the dual nature of painting, as both social communication and as material object in perception. The best contemporary art historical writing usually respects both aspects.

V.

Painting, Photography, and the Mass Media

From the early 19th century onwards, the central role of painting in recording the appearance of things was challenged by photography. In the 20th century, the new media of film and subsequently television provided powerful alternatives for communicating narrative. Not only did these successfully compete in terms of visual power, they could also be disseminated and reproduced much more widely. Towards the end of the 20th century it became possible to use the computer to produce and manipulate images. The artist and theorist Victor Burgin described painting as “anachronistic daubing”, but for many artists it remained a form with possibilities not available to the newer media. This view is endorsed by studies of perception, which have demonstrated the inadequacy of mechanistic models that go no further than considering the eye as a camera.

Photography, colour printing, and now the Internet have had the effect of making the variety of the world’s painting available as never before. Writing in 1935 the German critic Walter Benjamin saw positive value in the way in which mechanical reproducibility would undermine the almost religious aura surrounding the unique original, but many art lovers would maintain that even the best reproduction is a poor substitute.

VI.

Prehistoric and Ancient Painting

The earliest known paintings were executed on the walls of caves and rock shelters some 30,000 years ago, during the Palaeolithic period. Examples of Palaeolithic art are known from sites in western Europe, southern and Saharan Africa, and Australia. In certain areas, such as the shores of the Mediterranean, the development of painting continued into the Neolithic period, but it is impossible today to trace any continuous development between the caves and the painting of early civilizations.

A.

Cave Paintings

The paintings still preserved on the walls of caves in Spain and southern France portray with amazing accuracy bison, horses, and deer. These representations were painted in earth colours composed of various minerals ground into powders and mixed with animal fat, egg whites, plant juices, fish glue, or even blood and applied with brushes made of twigs and reeds, or blown on. The paintings may have played a part in magic ritual, although their exact nature is unclear. In a cave painting at Lascaux, France, for example, a man is depicted among the animals, and several dark dots are included; although the exact meaning of such paintings remains obscure, they demonstrate a spiritual awareness and the ability to express it through images, signs, and symbols.

B.

Egyptian Painting

More than 5,000 years ago Egyptian artists began painting the walls of the pharaohs' tombs with mythological representations and scenes of everyday activities such as hunting, fishing, farming, or banqueting. As in Egyptian sculpture, two stylistic constants prevailed. First, the images, being conceptual rather than realistic, present the most characteristic anatomical features and thus combine frontal and profile views of the same figure; secondly, scale indicates importance—thus, a pharaoh is shown taller than his courtiers.

C.

Minoan Painting

The Minoans created lively, realistic paintings on the walls of their palaces in Crete and also on pottery. For example, the famous Toreador Fresco (c. 1500 bc, Heraklion Museum, Crete) shows a ritual game in which performers somersault over a bull's back. Marine life was a popular subject, as in the Dolphin Fresco (c. 1500 bc) on the walls of the palace of King Minos in Knossos, or on the Octopus Vase (c. 1500 bc, Heraklion Museum), a globular container decorated with octopus tentacles that undulate around the pot, defining and emphasizing its shape. See Aegean Civilization.

D.

Greek Painting

Except for a few fragments, Greek wall paintings and panels have not survived. The naturalistic representations of mythological scenes on Greek pottery, however, may shed light on what this large-scale painting was like. In the Hellenistic era, scenes and designs represented in mosaics are probably also echoes of lost monumental paintings in other media. See Greek Art and Architecture.

E.

Roman Painting

The Romans decorated their villas with mosaic floors and exquisite wall frescoes portraying rituals, myths, landscapes, still life, and scenes of daily activities. Using the technique known as aerial perspective, in which colours and outlines of more distant objects are softened and blurred to achieve spatial effects, Roman artists created the illusion of reality. In the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in ad 79 and excavated in modern times, a corpus of Roman painting, both secular and religious, has been preserved.

F.

Early Christian and Byzantine Painting

Surviving Early Christian painting dates from the 3rd and 4th centuries and consists of fresco paintings in catacombs. Certain stylizations and artistic conventions are characteristic of these representations of New Testament events. For example, Christ was shown as the Good Shepherd, a figural type adopted from representations of the Greek god Hermes; the Resurrection was symbolized by depictions of the Old Testament story of Jonah, who was delivered from the fish. Among the most extraordinary works of this Early Christian period are the mosaics found in the 6th-century churches in Ravenna, Italy. San Vitale, in particular, is noted for its beautiful mosaics depicting both spiritual and secular subjects. On the church's walls, stylized elongated figures, mostly shown frontally, stare wide-eyed at the viewer and seem to float weightlessly, outside time. Illuminated manuscripts both of non-Christian texts—for example, the Vatican Virgil (4th or early 5th century, Biblioteca Vaticana, Rome)—and Christian writings such as the Paris Psalter (10th century, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris) show remnants of Graeco-Roman art style.

This otherworldly presentation became characteristic of Byzantine art, and the style came to be associated with the imperial Christian court of Constantinople, which survived from ad 330 until 1453. The Byzantine style is also seen in icons, conventionalized paintings on wooden panels depicting Christ, the Virgin, or the saints, made for veneration. Mosaic was an important medium for wall decoration. The Byzantine style remained dominant in Russia and other countries in which the Orthodox Church was a predominant force.

Celtic art, which flourished from the 7th to the 9th century in monasteries in various parts of the British Isles, was largely an art of intricate calligraphic designs. Highly decorated illuminated manuscripts were produced, such as the Lindisfarne Gospels (c. 698-721, British Museum, London), which display flat, elaborate linear patterns combining Celtic and Germanic elements. (See also Calligraphy.)

VII.

Medieval Painting

Historians often date the Middle Ages from between the crowning of Charlemagne as Emperor of the Romans in 800 and the beginnings of the Renaissance in the early 15th century. The art of the Middle Ages—that produced outside the Byzantine Empire and within what had been the northern boundaries of the Roman world—is usually divided into two epochs: Romanesque and Gothic. The basic contrast is usually defined through architecture rather than painting, the rounded arch of the Romanesque against the pointed arch of the Gothic, but this stands for a wider distinction in the range of forms used.

A.

Romanesque Painting

In the Romanesque period, during the 11th and 12th centuries, no single style appeared in the manuscripts of northern Europe; some illuminations were of Classical inspiration, while others show a new, highly charged, energetic drawing style. Although the greatest artistic achievements of the period lay in architecture and sculpture some remarkable wall painting exists, notably in Catalonia.

B.

Gothic Painting

In the Gothic period that followed, from the later part of the 12th century to the beginning of the Italian Renaissance, a larger repertoire of media was introduced, and painting ceased to be entirely the product of the monasteries. During the early Gothic period, as cathedral structure gave more emphasis to windows, stained glass occupied a more prominent role in the arts than did manuscript illumination. Lay artists now established workshops in Paris and other major centres, producing elaborately illuminated manuscripts for royal patrons. In around 1300 in Italy there is evidence of the beginnings of the development of the illusionism and naturalism that was to mark the subsequent art of the Renaissance. This is associated especially with the Florentine-born artist Giotto, whose solidly rounded figures and still unsurpassed sense of human drama are seen in his fresco cycle of the life of Christ in the Scrovegni (Arena) Chapel, Padua (c. 1303-1306). Giotto did not achieve this revolution single-handedly. Historians today would acknowledge the roles played by his Florentine predecessor Cimabue and his near contemporaries the Sienese Duccio di Buoninsegna and Pietro Cavallini, who was responsible for an impressive Last Judgement of which only a fragment now survives in Rome.

Paintings of secular subjects also survive from this period, notably in Italy. Frescoes painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti from 1338 to 1339 in the Palazzo Pubblico (Town Hall) in Siena, portray 14th-century city and country life, and in the hall's Council Chamber, an equestrian portrait (1328) of a local military hero Guidio Riccio da Fogliano, traditionally but contentiously attributed to Simone Martini, is set against a backdrop of his encampment in landscape background.

C.

International Gothic Style

The merging of the artistic traditions of northern Europe and Italy that took place at the beginning of the 15th century is known as the International Gothic style. Among the many characteristics that define painting in this style is an attention to realistic detail that shows the artist's acute observation of human beings and of nature. In the early 1400s the Limbourg brothers moved from Flanders to France and created a magnificent Book of Hours, the famous Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (1413-1416, Musée Condé, Chantilly, France). This manuscript, one of the greatest works in the International Gothic style, was made for their patron, Jean de France, Duc de Berry. Its remarkable calendar pages portray peasant life as well as that of the nobility, providing a brilliant record of the clothing, activities, and architecture of the times. Although these are full-page illustrations, they reflect an older medieval style, in that the figures are small and must vie for attention with other imagery.

VIII.

Renaissance Painting c. 1400-1600

The term Renaissance, meaning “rebirth”, describes the cultural revolution of the 15th and 16th centuries; it originated in Italy with the revival of interest in Classical culture and a strong belief in individualism, although the achievements of artists in Northern Europe (especially the Netherlands) were also of importance. The art of antiquity was revered, but at the same time an intellectual and cultural rebirth occurred. The range of devices by which the painter creates an illusion of reality was developed, establishing a tradition that remained central to European culture until the end of the 19th century and persists today among more stylistically conservative artists.

The developments in painting were to be powered both by far-reaching social and intellectual movements and the rise of the more versatile oil paint. The Reformation led to the loss of a role for painting in many churches in Northern Europe. At the same time there was a rise in the private collecting of painting. A consequence was the increase in secular subject-matter, Classical mythology, portraiture, and, during the 16th century, the beginnings of landscape. In the Renaissance we know (as we do not in the Middle Ages) the names of a substantial number of individual painters whose works can be identified with reasonable security. This reflects a shift from the idea that the value of a painting resided above all in its materials to one in which value derived principally from the skill and personality of the artist. As the art historians Hugh Honour and John Fleming put it: “For the first time artists took their place among the great minds of the age.” In the 16th century painting started to become an international phenomenon in Europe. Artists such as Titian and Dürer had reputations all over the continent.

A.

Early Renaissance Painting in Italy

The development of the principles of linear perspective by various architects and sculptors early in the 15th century in Florence enabled painters to achieve in two-dimensional representation the illusion of three-dimensional space. Many of the early Renaissance artists made dramatic use of perspective and foreshortening, a method of drawing used to produce the illusion of the extension of an object or figure into space. In the Brancacci Chapel of the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence, Masaccio—one of the great innovators of the period—executed in about 1427 a remarkable series of frescoes that reveal his keen observation of human behaviour and at the same time demonstrate his knowledge of ancient art. In the work The Expulsion from Paradise, Masaccio's Adam and Eve truly mourn; Eve's pose, arms attempting to hide her body, is based on a pose characteristic of Classical sculpture of the type known as the so-called Venus Pudica (modest Venus). Masaccio was a pioneer of the use of light and shadow to represent the volume of objects. His figures have a solidity and naturalism in their relationship to the space around them, which goes beyond the work of Giotto.

Knowledge of anatomy, aided by dissection as well as drawing, became a vital part of the painter’s skills. It is likely that painters cultivated virtuosity in the representation of the figure in movement for its own sake as in Martyrdom of St Sebastian (1475, National Gallery, London) by Antonio Pollaiuolo. This was part of a growing secularization of painting, a process that also saw the rise of subjects from Classical mythology such as Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (c. 1482, Uffizi, Florence).

B.

The Rise of Oil Painting in Italy

Oil painting was also coming into use, challenging the former supremacy of tempera and fresco. Painters exploiting the potential of the new medium worked by building up layers of transparent oil glazes, and the canvas surface replaced the older wood panel. Antonello da Messina, who originated in Sicily, is sometimes credited with being the first Italian painter to exploit the potential of oil. However, it was the Venetian artists who became especially associated with oil paint, the damp atmosphere of the city making fresco unsuitable. Giovanni Bellini placed his religious scenes in naturalistically observed and atmospheric landscapes.

Giorgione’s enigmatic The Tempest (1507, Accademia, Venice) discarded the religious pretexts of Bellini. Only 20 years after the painter’s death it appears that its precise subject was not understood, which strongly suggests that the appreciation of painting had reached a point in which it could be admired for its artistic qualities rather than as the bearer of a story or an idea. This artist who died young remains a mysterious figure and there is still disagreement among art historians as to whether certain works associated with him, including the celebrated Concert-Champêtre (c. 1508-1509, Louvre, Paris), are in fact the work of the young Titian.

C.

Early Renaissance Painting in Northern Europe

The Renaissance in Northern Europe at the beginning of the 15th century was based less on Classical antiquity than an acute interest in human beings and their surroundings and by a meticulous recording of natural detail in paintings. Generally speaking, an interest in ancient art and knowledge of linear perspective did not develop in the north until the 16th century.

Oil paint was developed in the Netherlands before its appearance in Italy. Its capacity for combining glowing colour with precise detail was demonstrated by the work of Jan van Eyck who, with some assistance from his brother Hubert, painted the remarkable polyptych (many-panelled) Ghent Altarpiece (completed 1432, Church of St Bavon, Ghent). Its 24 panels contain hundreds of figures, as well as a rich variety of vegetation so carefully rendered that more than 30 species of plant can be identified. Other outstanding Flemish artists of the period were Rogier van der Weyden, who focused on emotional drama in his religious paintings such as Descent from the Cross (c. 1435-1440, Prado, Madrid); Hans Memling, who created delicate, graceful figures against ethereal backgrounds; and Hugo van der Goes, who for the Florentine Portinari family painted a superb altarpiece (c. 1476, Uffizi, Florence) with a wealth of precise details. This concentration on surface appearances obviously reflected a pride in artistic skill and a mercantile materialistic culture. Yet the details also had an important symbolic role, for instance a glass of water could stand for purity. The paintings of this time and place have been an especially rich hunting ground for students of iconology. All of these painters were exceptional portraitists. In this field they more than equalled their Italian contemporaries.

The internationalism of the art scene in Europe at the period is demonstrated by the French painter Jean Fouquet whose Melun Altarpiece (c. 1450), now split between museums in Berlin and Antwerp, demonstrates knowledge of both Northern and Italian art.

D.

High Renaissance Painting in Italy

Four artists working between the late 15th and 16th centuries are often regarded as representing the climax of Italian Renaissance painting. They are Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Titian. Leonardo left only a handful of paintings, but his preoccupation with the study of nature and invention demonstrates how close art and science came in the Renaissance as tools for exploring the world. Of his few surviving paintings, some are left unfinished or in a semi-ruined state, such as his technically experimental Last Supper (1495-1497, Santa Maria Della Grazie, Milan), the result of trying to combine oil with fresco.

Raphael perfected earlier Renaissance discoveries in matters of colour and composition, creating ideal types, above all in his representations of the Virgin and Child, which were to be presented as a model for emulation to art students until the early 20th century. The modern spectator may be more impressed by his mastery of organization and narrative in complex, multi-figure compositions such as the tapestry cartoons that can be seen in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum or the vivid human presence of his portraits.

Michelangelo was as much a sculptor as a painter. His series of ceiling frescoes for the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican in Rome (1508-1512) took the expressive treatment of the human figure to new heights to tell the biblical history of the world from the Creation until the Flood and its aftermath. Adam quivering into life at the command of God’s finger—it is essential that the hands never quite touch—remains one of the most potent images in world art.

Venetian painting had, since the time of Bellini, emphasized colour and atmosphere. This reached its climax in the works of Titian. His work ranged from religious intensity as in The Entombment of Christ (c. 1523, Louvre, Paris) to the most sensual treatment of the female nude in Western art such as the Venus of Urbino (1538, Uffizi, Florence). More than any painter before, Titian exploited the possibilities of improvization in oil paint, giving rise to the unjust charge from Michelangelo that he could not really draw. Certain late paintings such as The Death of Acteon (c. 1565-1576, National Gallery, London) showed how mythologically inspired art could explore the darkest aspects of the human experience. As a portraitist he could encompass the grandeur of the equestrian Charles V at Muhlberg (1548, Prado, Madrid) and one of the most charming of child portraits, Clarice Strozzi (1542, Berlin Dahlem Museum).

E.

Mannerism

Art historians have identified a specific tendency in the painting of the 16th century in Italy and elsewhere, which has been designated as Mannerism, although no consensus has ever been reached as to its exact definition or extent, let alone how it should be accounted for. Was it a knowing self-assured courtly art or an expression of profound spiritual crisis? Both views have had vehement partisans among scholars. It certainly represented a change of direction from the Renaissance drive towards greater realism. Sometimes the result was a self-conscious artifice as in the mythologies and icy portraits of Bronzino. Sometimes there was a deliberate show of skill for its own sake as in the frescoes of Giulio Romano of an earthquake crushing giants (1526-1534, Palazzo del Té, Mantua), an effect calculated to inspire admiration rather than terror. Elsewhere, Classical harmony is disrupted and anatomical plausibility stretched, most notoriously in the so-called Madonna with a Long Neck (c. 1534-1540, Uffizi, Florence) by Parmigianino. It is more controversial as to whether the term should also be applied to works in which such distortions are in the cause of emotional impact or spiritual intensity. If so, the late paintings of Michelangelo such as The Crucifixion of St Peter (1542-1550, Pauline Chapel, Vatican) are an example, as are the massive religious compositions of the Venetian Tintoretto, such as The Last Supper (1594, Venice San Giorgio Maggiore) with their exaggerated perspectives and spectacular flying figures. The distortion in the cause of religious fervour was taken furthest by El Greco, Greek born, artistically formed in Venice, but working in Spain. Figures are unnaturally elongated to invoke spiritual ecstasy, light seems almost to emanate from behind the picture surface such is the glowing colour.

F.

16th-Century Painting in Northern Europe

In Northern Europe the exaggeration of the human form for expressive purposes often took precedence over anatomical accuracy. The most impressive example is the Isenheim Altarpiece (c.1512-c. 1515, Musée d’Unterlinden, Colmar) by the German Matthias Grünewald. The paintings of the Netherlandish Hieronymus Bosch, such as his Garden of Earthly Delights Triptych (1505-1510, Prado, Madrid), abound in fantastic and frightening imagery which, for a modern spectator, anticipate the Surrealism of Salvador Dalí.

The Netherlandish Pieter Bruegel continued Bosch’s forays into moralizing fantasy in Mad Meg (c. 1562, Mayer van den Bergh Museum, Antwerp) in which a mad woman visits the mouth of Hell. His paintings of peasant life brought a new subject into Western art, which was to be especially associated with painters from the Netherlands.

The Reformation had far-reaching consequences for painting here, and indeed for Western art in general, by taking images out of churches. This did not mean the end of religious art although certain subjects such as the Madonna and Child were downgraded and biblical narrative tended to take over from devotional images. It did, nonetheless, accelerate the tendency towards secular subject-matter, especially pure landscape. The German artist Albrecht Dürer employed the medium of watercolour to make intimately observed studies of the natural world.

IX.

The 17th Century – The Baroque Era

The 17th century is sometimes referred to by art historians as “the Baroque era” after the style that distinguishes much of its artistic practice, not only in painting but in architecture and sculpture as well. It is a dynamic, rhetorical manner, designed to impress and awe, and therefore is well suited to the needs of both political and religious persuasion. It can be regarded as reflecting the new found confidence of the Roman Catholic Church after the Counter-Reformation and it certainly found less favour in Protestant countries. Baroque painting was frequently closely integrated with architecture to achieve a kind of total environment. Yet much of the painting of the period is marked by Classical restraint or close realist observation of the everyday world. Some of the greatest figures in 17th-century painting such as Rubens, Nicolas Poussin, and Rembrandt can be Baroque, classical, and realist.

A.

Italian Painting in the 17th Century

By the 17th century the artistic centre in Italy had moved decisively from Florence and Venice to Rome. In around 1600 a definite attempt to direct Italian painting away from the artifice of Mannerism can be seen in the work of two influential artists. The Bolognese Annibale Carracci, important as a teacher as well as a painter, is sometimes described as an “eclectic” because of his combination of classicism, realism, and Venetian colour. The idea that the training of the artist demanded both drawing from life and the study of the ideal forms of Classical antiquity was codified in his studio. His major achievement was the ceiling of the Farnese Palace in Rome (1600-1601), almost a secular and mythological answer to Michelangelo’s great Sistine ceiling of a hundred years earlier, but he also excelled in landscape and the painting of humble everyday life, a kind of painting that was to be of increasing importance in the coming century.

Carracci’s contemporary Caravaggio brought a new realism into religious painting while also reviving the grandeur of the High Renaissance. Unlike the elaborate pre-planning through drawing advocated by Carracci, he seems to have been highly improvisational in his approach. X-rays reveal drastic changes made in one of his most ambitious works The Martyrdom of St Matthew (1599-1600, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome). His “Tenebrist” manner, based on dramatic contrasts between dark and light, quickly spread around Europe even among artists who are highly unlikely ever to have seen his work at first hand, such as the Spaniard Diego Velázquez. It fitted the often violent subject-matter popular at this time, as with the gruesome Judith Beheading Holofernes (c. 1620, Uffizi, Florence) by Artemisia Gentileschi, for example.

Baroque painting in Italy could be closely integrated with architecture. The ceiling paintings of Gianfranco Lanfranco and Pietro da Cortona produced a literal illusion of the sky opening up.

B.

French Painting in the 17th Century

The two outstanding figures of 17th-century French painting were Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain, both of whom worked in Rome. Each was supported by private patronage, church commissions generally going to Italian painters. Poussin was noted for austere paintings, full of references to antique culture, on learned and moral themes such as Diogenes Throwing away his Bowl (1648, Louvre, Paris), while Claude’s atmospheric landscapes set in the countryside around Rome were to be imitated for the next two centuries.

Caravaggio’s influence affected French painting, most notably in the dramatically lit works of Georges de La Tour. A single light source, a candle or a torch, illuminates an entire picture. Louis Le Nain painted scenes of peasant life with a monumental classic gravity.

Later in the century, painting alongside the other arts became increasingly a tool for the glorification of the French state, especially the king, Louis XIV. To this end the profession of painting was organized almost like a civil service with state-sponsored training and examination. Under Charles Lebrun a formulaic art theory, above all modelled on the example of Raphael and Poussin, was established, which was especially geared to the production of history painting. Lebrun established a system for codifying the representation of the passions (affetti) and, like the studios in Rome, required the study of antique Classical art. As the idea of a state-sponsored academy became established the ground was laid for an almost institutionalized conflict between academic and anti-academic painting, one claiming the authority of tradition, the other claiming a superior access to reality or to the artist’s personal response to it.

C.

Spanish Painting in the 17th Century

Religious subject-matter predominated in 17th-century Spain, a period often referred to as “the golden age” of painting in that country. In Spain, Jusepe de Ribera and Francisco de Zurbarán absorbed Caravaggio's Tenebrism. Ribera could be brutally realistic, as in the Clubfooted Boy (1652, Louvre, Paris) or some of his gruesome martyrdoms. Zurbarán imbued his religious paintings with Spanish mysticism; like Caravaggio, he also excelled in still life. Velázquez, court painter to Philip IV, was the greatest Spanish painter of the age and a consummate master of tone and colour. More than any previous painter he exploited the power of oil paint to suggest spontaneity and immediacy. Seen from close-up paintings such as Philip IV in Brown and Silver (1631-1632, National Gallery, London) appear as almost abstract patterns of shimmering colour. He approached his subjects with detachment, dispassionately but realistically portraying members of the royal family. The royal entourage can be seen in his masterpiece, Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour, 1656, Prado, Madrid); as a symbol of its veracity, it even includes a portrait of Velázquez himself at his easel.

D.

Flemish Painting in the 17th Century

In this period art historians follow political history by dividing the Netherlands into a Flemish school occupying territory similar to that of the modern Belgium and the more northerly Dutch school (the United Provinces). The Flemish Rubens travelled to Italy in his youth taking back to his native Antwerp the message of the powerful new Baroque style, which he proceeded to demonstrate in two great altarpieces for the cathedral. Such was his popularity that Rubens established a large workshop of assistants in Antwerp to help him carry out the great number of commissions he received from the city, the Church, royalty, and private patrons. His enormous oeuvre includes portraits; a great outpouring of religious paintings; and treatments of mythological themes, Classical legends, and history—all expressing the exuberance of the Baroque style and attesting to the painter's own vitality of spirit. Rubens was equally masterly in large-scale paintings in the grand manner and more intimate portraits and landscapes. His way of contrasting light and shadow, as well as his wide range of themes, can be seen by considering just two of his paintings: The Descent from the Cross (1611-1614, Antwerp Cathedral), with its great compositional sweep, and the tender portrait of a beautiful young woman in Le Chapeau de Paille (c. 1620, National Gallery, London).

Anthony van Dyck, one of Rubens's assistants, became famous for his portraits of members of the court of Charles I of England. These paintings are imbued with an elegance and attention to detail characteristic of Rubens; they had enormous influence on the style of 18th-century English portraiture.

E.

Dutch Painting in the 17th Century

Dutch painting in the early 17th century was deeply affected by the influence of Caravaggio. Some painters such as Hendrick Terbrugghen and Gerrit van Honthorst spent time in Italy where they saw his work at first hand. In the Catholic centre of Utrecht where they worked, religious subjects remained popular, but elsewhere the mercantile Protestant culture of the country produced a different kind of painting. Rembrandt’s biblical subjects, taken as often from the Old Testament as the New, were presented above all as psychological dramas.

Painters tended to become specialists in particular subjects. Jacob van Ruisdael and Meindert Hobbemma were leading landscape painters, Pieter Saenredam painted church interiors, others concentrated on seascapes or still life. The most distinctive form of Dutch painting was the domestic interior, of which the greatest exponent was the Delft-based Vermeer.

X.

The 18th Century

The painting of the 18th century was dominated by two great stylistic currents, Rococo and Neo-Classicism. Rococo art, which flourished in France, Germany, and Italy in the early 18th century, was in many respects a lighter, more playful continuation of the Baroque, particularly in the use of light and shadow and compositional movement. Neo-Classicism was a more austere high-minded manner, influenced by the new excavations of ancient Greece and Rome.

A.

The Rococo in France

The first of the great masters of the French Rococo, Antoine Watteau is known for his ethereal pictures of elegantly dressed lovers disporting themselves at fêtes galantes (fashionable outdoor gatherings); such pastoral fantasies were much emulated by other French artists like Nicolas Lancret and Jean-Baptiste Pater, but never with Watteau’s painterly delicacy and psychological subtlety. The breach with the Grand Manner promulgated by Lebrun in the previous century was announced in Watteau’s L’Enseigne de Gersaint (1720, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin), in which an official portrait is banished to a packing case while fashionable men and women enjoy the mythological and pastoral scenes that were to dominate much of the later painting of the 18th century in the work of François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Such art could be overtly erotic, but later there was also a more sobre tendency. Jean-Siméon Chardin portrayed women in his genre scenes as good mothers and household managers; he was also an outstanding painter of still life. Jean-Baptiste Greuze contrived to have it both ways. His paintings of young girls had none too subtle sexual implications. One such is entitled The Broken Pitcher (1785, Louvre, Paris) and alludes to loss of virginity. On other occasions he achieved acclaim with moralizing themes such as The Wicked Son Punished (1778, Louvre, Paris). It is hard in retrospect not to see in 18th-century French painting the conflict between aristocratic and middle-class values that was to lead to the French Revolution.

B.

The Rococo in Germany, Italy, and Britain

The Rococo style in Germany is exemplified by the work of the Venetian painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, who spent some time in Würzburg; his huge illusionistic ceiling frescoes (1743-1752) decorate the staircase hall and the Kaisersaal (the main reception hall) of the Residenz, the episcopal palace in Würzburg. The decline of the Venetian republic from imperial power to object of curiosity to visitors was marked by the last great flourishing of its school of painting in the views of the city made for tourists. Canaletto and Francesco Guardi, the one precise and methodical, the other poetically atmospheric, summed up twin aspects of the potential of the oil paint in the development of which their city had played such a vital role.

Paralleling the Rococo tradition of the continent were the works of three major artists of 18th-century England. William Hogarth was known for his moralistic narrative paintings and engravings satirizing contemporary social follies, as in his famous series Marriage à la Mode (first painted in 1734, later engraved in 1745), which traces the ruinous course of marriage for money. Thomas Gainsborough and Reynolds, following the tradition of van Dyck, concentrated on portraits of the English aristocracy. The verve and grace of these paintings and their astute psychological interpretations raise them from mere society portraiture to an incomparable record of period manners, costumes, and landscape moods. Landscape itself became an important subject. Richard Wilson remade the British landscape in the manner of Claude. The idyllic image of rural life established in Gainsborough’s paintings was arguably of greater long-term cultural significance than his portraits.

C.

Neo-Classical Painting

A revolution in painting took place in the latter half of the 18th century, as chaste Neo-Classicism superseded the exuberant Rococo style. This work impressed, among others, four foreign artists living in Rome. They were the Scotsman Gavin Hamilton, the German Anton Raphael Mengs, the Swiss Angelica Kauffmann, and the American Benjamin West; all were inspired to create paintings with themes based on Classical literature.

It was, however, a French painter—Jacques Louis David—who became the leading proponent of Neo-Classicism. He, too, was imbued with classical influences from his stay in Rome, as well as from an earlier source, the paintings of Poussin, the 17th-century French classicist. David's sober style was in harmony with the ideals that were to underwrite the French Revolution. Such a painting as the Oath of the Horatii (1784-1785, Louvre, Paris) inspired patriotism; others, such as the Death of Socrates (1787, Metropolitan Museum, New York), preached stoicism and self-sacrifice. Not only did David's subject matter have its sources in ancient history and Classical myth, but the form of his figures was based on ancient sculpture. One aim of Neo-Classicism was to give contemporary subjects the dignity of Classical ones. As well as history and mythology David depicted directly the events of the French Revolution. The murdered Jean-Paul Marat was given the aura of a martyred saint. Later a series of paintings established a heroic image of Napoleon, which has enhanced the French emperor’s reputation to the present day.

David's great successor was Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, whose cool serenity of line and tone and painstaking attention to detail—as in his striking portrait La Comtesse d'Haussonville (1845, Frick Collection, New York)—became identified with the academic tradition in France. Nevertheless, elements of the Romantic trend soon to succeed Neo-Classicism can be found in Ingres's interest in non-European subjects, as demonstrated by several paintings of odalisques (concubines or women in a harem).

XI.

Romantic Painting

The Romantic movement introduced a taste for the medieval and the mysterious, as well as a love of the picturesque and terrifying in nature. It had its precedence in the 18th-century cult of the sublime, a kind of shadow of reason and enlightenment, but it erupted as the dominant international movement in the early 19th century. The play of individual imagination, giving expression to emotion and mood, superseded the reasoned intellectual approach of the Neo-Classicists. Romanticism was a mood or way of looking at the world rather than a style. It could be colourful and painterly or steely and precise, and did not preclude close attention to visual facts. In artists as varied as Théodore Géricault, J. M. W. Turner, and Caspar David Friedrich, landscape could become as important a vehicle for feeling as the figure had been in classic history painting. Narrative subjects from literature took their place alongside historical and religious themes and largely replaced Classical mythology as the inspiration for ambitious figure painting. From the Romantic period onwards it becomes more problematic to talk of any one dominant style in Western painting. Historians tend to pick out particular tendencies, for instance Impressionism, over the more academic and conservative art of the late 19th century, on the grounds that they are more representative of the “real” spirit of the time, more “progressive” in terms of pointing to the future or simply “better”.

A.

French Romantic Painting

A follower of David who ultimately turned more to the Romantic style was his pupil Baron Antoine-Jean Gros, noted for his portrayals of Napoleon in full regalia and for large canvases vividly depicting Napoleonic campaigns. Gros's colleague Géricault was especially renowned for his dramatic and monumental interpretation of an actual event. His most celebrated painting, The Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819, Louvre, Paris), endows the suffering of the survivors of a shipwreck with a heroic quality. This painting deeply impressed Eugène Delacroix, who pursued the theme of suffering humanity in such energetic, intensely dramatic works as Massacre at Chios (1822-1824) and Liberty Leading the People (1830), both in the Louvre. Delacroix drew his subject-matter from literature and from travels to the Middle East. Delacroix's divided-colour technique (that is, colour laid on in small strokes of pure pigment) was to influence the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists later in the 19th century.

Delacroix’s rivalry with Ingres personified the opposed schools, Romantic versus classic, colour versus drawing. Most painting in France in the early 19th century abjured both extremes occupying a middle ground (juste milieu); more restrained in colour and handling than Delacroix, but less austere than Ingres. Paul Delaroche was a leading figure at the time, and his historical paintings such as Edward V and the Duke of York in the Tower (1831, Wallace Collection, London) combined the Romantic appeal to the emotions in its subject with a refined and detailed execution.

B.

English Romantic Painting

Romantic landscape painting also flourished in England; the trend had its roots in the art of Wilson and Gainsborough in the 18th century and is exemplified in the works of John Constable and Turner. Although distinctly different in their styles, both artists were ultimately concerned with depicting the effects of light and atmosphere. Despite Constable's factual and scientific approach—working outdoors, he painted numerous studies of cloud formations and made notes on light and weather conditions—his canvases are poetic, sometimes expressing the cultivated gentleness of the English countryside, elsewhere evoking nature’s threatening moods. Turner sought the sublime in nature, painting cataclysmic snowstorms or depicting the elements—earth, air, fire, and water—in a sweeping, nearly abstract manner. His way of dissolving forms in light and veils of colour was to play an important role in the development of French Impressionist painting.

C.

German Romantic Painting

Of Germany's Romantic artists, Friedrich was the leading figure. Landscape was his favoured vehicle of expression and he imbued his hypnotic pictures with religious mysticism, portraying the earth undergoing transformations at dawn and sunset, or in the fog and mists, perhaps alluding thereby to the transience of life. Philipp Otto Runge also devoted his brief career to painting mystical landscapes, as illustrated by Morning (1808-1809, Kunsthalle, Hamburg) part of an unfinished allegorical landscape cycle, The Four Phases of the Day.

D.

American Romantic Painting

America's first truly Romantic artist was Washington Allston, whose paintings are mysterious, brooding, or evocative of poetic reverie. Like other Romantics, he was inspired by the Bible, poetry, and novels, as is evident in many of his works. Several artists working between 1820 and 1880 formed a homogeneous group that came to be known as the Hudson River School; their enormous canvases reveal their reverence for the beauty of the American landscape. Thomas Cole, the most noteworthy of these painters, charged his scenes with moral implications, as is evident in his epic series of five allegorical paintings, The Course of Empire (1836, New York Historical Society, New York).

In mid-19th-century landscape painting there appeared a new trend, now defined as Luminism, an interest in the atmospheric effects of diffused light. Among the Luminist painters were John F. Kensett, Martin J. Heade, and Fitz Hugh Lane. A sense of “God in nature” is apparent in their pictures, as in the earliest works of the Hudson River School. In contrast to the smaller and more intimate Luminist works—for example, Kensett's scenes along the Rhode Island shore—Frederick E. Church and Albert Bierstadt painted on enormous canvases the spectacular scenery of South American jungles and the American West. See American Art and Architecture.

E.

Spanish Romantic Painting

The career of Francisco de Goya, the most important Spanish painter of his age, links the end of the Rococo to the beginnings of Romanticism. He was noted as a superb portrait painter and for his brutal vision of the consequences of war in The Third of May 1808 (1814, Prado Madrid). His final paintings such as Saturn Devouring one of his Children (1820-1823, Prado, Madrid) are an extreme manifestation of the Romantic fascination with the world of nightmare.

XII.

The Later 19th Century

The period was marked by a belief in the possibility and desirability of objective realism. The invention of photography had set up a challenge to painters either to compete with its supposed veracity or to provide a radical alternative that went beyond the visual world to the realm of dream and imagination. Sympathy for socialist and other radical movements was also a motive for depiction of the lives of working people. What classical art theory had denigrated as a lower form of art, the depiction of the everyday world, became the central task for many painters. In terms of the career patterns of painters, the later 19th century saw the rise of what has been described as the “dealer-critic” system, still substantially in operation today, in which the private art market takes precedent over state commission and reputations tend to be made through critical debate rather than the acceptance of the academy.

A.

Realism

In France in the mid 1850s, the painter Gustave Courbet, rejecting both Neo-Classicism and Romanticism, proclaimed a one-man movement called Realism. He had no interest in history painting, portraiture of heads of state, or exotic subject matter, for he believed that the artist should be realistic and paint everyday events involving ordinary people. Essentially, Courbet was rejecting totally the academic demand that the ideal must interpose itself between the painter and the subject. The milieu chosen by Courbet for many of his canvases was Ornan, his native village in eastern France; there he portrayed labourers building a road, townspeople attending a funeral, or men sitting around the dinner table listening to music and smoking. Despite his self-proclaimed individualism Courbet was not alone in his Realism. The atmospheric peasant subjects of Jean-François Millet depicted graphically the experience of labour. Stylistically, Honoré Daumier owed much to the Romanticism of Delacroix, but he took as his subject-matter the experience of contemporary urban life.

Elsewhere in Europe modern Realism was an important tendency. In Britain, Work (1852-1865, Manchester City Art Gallery) by Ford Madox Brown took road works in a still identifiable site in north London as the starting point for an elaborate statement about social inequality. The middle-class public taste for art in Britain tended to demand a high degree of surface realism as evidence of the artist’s labour even when the subject was not contemporary. William Holman Hunt travelled to the Holy Land for authentic background for his religious paintings. Highly detailed and elaborate depictions of contemporary life such as William Powell Frith’s Derby Day (1856-1858, Tate Britain, London) were enormously popular, especially when disseminated through prints. In Belgium, Constantin Meunier made a heroic image from the miner. In Germany, Adolph von Menzel took an iron-rolling mill as the subject for a dramatic large-scale painting (The Iron Rolling Mill, 1875, Staatliche Museum, Berlin). At the end of the century the paintings of cabaret performers and prostitutes by the French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec continued the rejection of the ideal and the depiction of modernity.

B.

Late 19th-Century American Painting

Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and Albert Pinkham Ryder, three prominent American painters, worked in the late 19th century independently of the major art movements on the Continent. In numerous oil paintings and watercolours of the sea and the seashore, Homer explored humanity's struggle against the forces of nature; like the Luminists before him and the Impressionists of his own day—with whom he was otherwise not aligned—Homer showed a keen interest in light and atmospheric effects. Eakins also used light with great effectiveness in his powerful realistic paintings of surgeons—for example The Gross Clinic (1875, Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia)—and a series of portrayals of rowers on the Schuylkill River, meticulously planned and executed in every detail. Ryder, on the other hand, turned from reality to explorations of the interior self; his reduction of objects to patterns and silhouettes has affinities with Symbolism. Favourite motifs were boats, the sea, and the night sky, which Ryder infused with romantic and mystical feelings.

C.

Development of Impressionism

In turning to everyday subject matter, the mid-19th-century Realist artists set a precedent for the next generation of the French avant-garde. Édouard Manet was the major innovator of the 1860s, and his style was a precursor of Impressionism. Like Courbet, Manet found many of his subjects in the life around him: Parisians at ease in restaurants, in parks, or boating. Manet also borrowed themes and compositions from earlier masters—Velázquez and Goya—and reworked them in accordance with contemporary life, in his own style, flattening the figures and neutralizing the emotional expressions. For these and other innovations, such as his free, sketchy brushwork and broad patches of colour juxtaposed without transition, he is often referred to as the first modern painter.

The Impressionist style was evolved by painters who were increasingly interested in studying the effects of light on objects—how light colours, shadows, and dissolves the outline of objects—and in transferring their observations directly to the canvas. Their disregard for exact details of form and their use of small, separate touches of pure colour—techniques in complete contrast to the prevailing academic style—aroused the animosity of both the critics and the public. Nearly 20 years elapsed before Claude Monet, Impressionism's leading exponent, achieved recognition. Monet's chief interest was landscape, which he rendered in all kinds of weather and in various seasons; he captured the sparkling effects of sunlight on trees in springtime and the drab light of winter on snow-tracked ground. In his late years, Monet devoted himself to painting the exquisite gardens and water-lily ponds he had created at his home in Giverny; their forms became increasingly evanescent as he translated them into the shimmering play of light and colour.

Camille Pissarro was also one of the creators of Impressionism, as was Pierre Auguste Renoir. Pissarro's favourite motifs were landscapes, river scenes, views of Paris streets, and figures of peasants at work. Renoir's interests were similar to those of both Monet and Pissarro, but he also looked back towards a classical tradition in many of his nudes and in Les Parapluies (1883, National Gallery, London) tried to combine an Impressionist immediacy with a sense of the monumental.

Frequently, the Impressionists worked outdoors side by side, as was often the case with Renoir and Monet. In 1869, for example, they both painted La Grenouillère (The Frog Pond); Monet's canvas hangs in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, Renoir's in the National Museum, Stockholm. In the early 1870s a similar relationship existed between Pissarro and Cézanne; Pissarro did not dissolve forms as radically as did the other Impressionists, and this may have persuaded Cézanne to work with him, for Cézanne's interests were to lead him in other directions. While the Impressionists were occupied with rendering transitory effects, such as the changing effects of light, Cézanne was concerned with the eternal aspects of nature and thus sought its structural principles, as in his numerous late canvases of Mont Sainte-Victoire. Painted during the last years of his life, these studies are the result of Cézanne's attempt to render the colour and volume of a mountain seen from a distance. Cézanne's concern for geometric form was a major influence in the development of Cubism.

While the immediacy of his approach and his interest in painting contemporary life allies Degas with the Impressionists, he differed from them in several ways. He did not dissolve form as radically as they did and he was more concerned with painting figures in interiors than landscapes. Degas's style of composition was influenced by photography and by Japanese prints, which were then being widely circulated in Paris and were very popular with many artists of the day. Although his paintings of ballet dancers, musicians, laundresses, and bathing women appear casual and unstudied, the compositions, with their oblique views and asymmetrical balance, were in fact carefully calculated. Degas's portraiture is also unique in its integration of figures with their settings and in its revelation of personality. A master of many techniques, Degas is particularly noted for his use of pastels, with which he achieved unusually rich effects by roughly hatching one layer of intense colour over another.

D.

Post-Impressionist and Symbolist Movements in France

Although the term “Post-Impressionism” is not universally popular with art historians, it is a useful umbrella to cover painting in the late 19th century, which took advantage of the freedoms claimed by Impressionism while rejecting its dedication to purely visual phenomena, looking instead towards an expression of social, emotional, or symbolic ideas.

Some artists such as Georges Seurat experimented with a quasi-scientific application of patches of divided colour in a style known as Neo-Impressionism or Divisionism. Whereas the Impressionists generally cultivated an air of spontaneity, the mathematical calculation behind Seurat’s painting is obvious.

Van Gogh, like Pissarro, experimented briefly with colour division. Typical of his developed style, however, was the use of pure colour applied thickly in flickering strokes, conveying intense emotional expression. Many of his canvases, especially those of wind-tossed cypress trees and wheat fields under stormy skies, are expressions of his own moods as reflected in the forces of nature. Van Gogh's style greatly influenced the northern European painters who in the early 20th century developed Expressionism.

The work of his colleague Paul Gauguin also displays distortions of line and colour, but it is quite different from van Gogh's, being symbolic rather than expressionistic. Areas of flat, bold colours form decorative patterns, heavily outlined. Gauguin was the central figure of a new movement known as Synthetism or Symbolism; his immediate followers, a group active during the 1890s—including Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard—called the Nabis. Gauguin’s eventual flight from France to the South Seas, where he spent his last years, was an early instance of that disillusion with the Western artistic tradition that was to influence early 20th-century painters to seek inspiration in African Art or Oceanic Art.

E.

Symbolist Currents Outside France

Elsewhere in Europe a conservative academic technique was often combined with an exploration of the world of the imagination. In Britain the “aesthetic movement”, based on the philosophy of “art for art’s sake”, inspired the stylized visions of an age of chivalry and romance in the paintings of Edward Burne-Jones, which appealed to the disillusion with the modern world in the country that had industrialized first.

The Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin worked in Italy. By applying a vivid naturalism to mythological themes, he appears to question the place of these subjects in a modern world.

XIII.

Painting in the Early 20th Century

It is usual to think of painting in the 20th century in terms of a series of “isms”, each with its own distinctive styles and theories. Some of these, such as Futurism, represent fairly tight-knit groups of artists, linked socially and professionally. Others such as Expressionism are more general tendencies. Whatever the differences it is possible to identify certain consistent themes in the history of painting in this period.

One of these is the widespread rejection of any notion that painting should seek as its aim to be a literal mirror of the visible world. This may take the form of an emphasis on the means of representation over subject as in Cubism, or an enhanced willingness to distort for expressive purpose as in the work of the German Expressionists or much of the later work of Pablo Picasso. Neither of these was entirely new in painting and the difference was one of degree, made to appear especially novel by the implied claims of 19th-century realism to a quasi-scientific objectivity. What was more radical was to take this to the point of abstraction in which any resemblance to visible world disappeared completely and the belief that such a painting could have a more than decorative value.

Another important theme is the questioning of painting itself. This was partly a matter of the introduction of new media such as collage, but it could take the form of an attack on the very institution of art itself as in Dada (see below).

These radical or modernist forms did not replace traditional figuration although the nature of even this was changed by the simple-minded tendency to think of photography as the ultimate arbiter of representational truth. At more than any other time there seemed to be a division between an innovative avant-garde in painting and more conservative forms, which usually retained widespread public support.

A.

Fauvism and Cubism

The Fauves (from the French Les Fauves, meaning “wild beasts”) were a loose-knit group of artists who first exhibited together in Paris in 1905. The work of Henri Matisse, André Derain, and Maurice de Vlaminck was dominated by brilliant colour and exuberant handling of paint, influenced especially by Van Gogh and Gauguin. Their “wildness” was a rejection of the systematic procedures of Divisionism, although Matisse said that his ideal was for painting that was like “a good armchair”. Derain and Vlaminck admired African sculpture, which was one of the formative influences behind Cubism alongside the work of Cézanne. Initially developed by Picasso and Georges Braque, Cubist painting departed further from illusionist representation by the fragmenting and flattening of forms. After Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon (1907, Museum of Modern Art, New York), an ambitious multi-figure composition, Picasso’s Cubism concentrated on smaller still life and figure subjects, but other Cubists, such as Fernand Léger or Robert Delaunay, attempted to match Cubist style to heroic themes of contemporary life. From 1912 onward Picasso and Braque began to incorporate collage. Both Fauvism and Cubism emphasized painting as two-dimensional surface rather than three-dimensional depth. The Futurists in Italy, such as Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini, the Vorticists in Britain, led by Wyndham Lewis, and the American Precisionists, such as Joseph Stella, all drew on the influence of Cubism to find an appropriate means to represent a mechanized world.

B.

Expressionism

Especially associated with Germany and Austria in the early years of the 20th century, Expressionism tends to place expressive power above representational accuracy or visual pleasure. The theme of urban alienation was common to the work of the Norwegian Edvard Munch and the German Die Brücke group, which included Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Erich Heckel. The portraits of the Austrian Oskar Kokoschka were concerned above all with the inner life of his sitters. The emphasis on the expressive quality of line and colour in the work of Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc was to bring both artists close to abstraction by 1914. There was a significant Expressionist movement in Belgium during the 1920s, of which Constant Permeke's monumental pictures of peasant life were the outstanding products. The term Expressionism has been applied to developments in literature, architecture, and cinema as well as painting.

C.

Abstract Painting

Abstract painting was based on an even more extreme rejection of what the eye sees, to the point to which the recognizable object vanishes completely. Developed in a number of countries between 1910 and 1920, its early manifestations were influenced by an idealist philosophical view that the essence of reality went beyond appearance. It is not possible and, because of difficult issues of definition, perhaps not very significant, to determine who made the first Abstract painting but in December 1915 the Russian Kasimir Malevich exhibited a whole group of what he called “Suprematist” paintings based on simple geometric forms. Early Abstract painters frequently found affinities with advanced architects and designers in promoting a utopian vision of a new world, notably the Dutch De stijl group. The painters Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg shared with the architect Gerrit Rietveld a common language of horizontals, verticals, and primary colours. Some Russian artists of the 1920s argued for the complete abolition of the easel painting as a bourgeois form inappropriate to post-revolutionary society.

D.

Dada and Surrealism

Dada, an international movement that was launched in 1916, attacked traditional forms of art including painting as part of a wider attack on a society. Jean Arp invoked the “laws of chance” in his collages, Francis Picabia and Max Ernst depicted absurd machines, and Marcel Duchamp added a moustache and beard to the most sacred icon of high art, the Mona Lisa. While Dada could provoke by sheer inconsequentiality and nonsense, Duchamp was also responsible for one of the most technically and intellectually elaborate paintings of the century, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (1923, Philadelphia Museum of Art).

The Surrealist movement, which recruited many ex-Dadas, was founded in Paris in 1924 by the poet André Breton. It did not see itself as a movement in painting but as an attempt to liberate the unconscious. Nonetheless, it attracted many of the most significant painters of the time. Some Surrealist painting, such as that of Salvador Dalí, used a conventional academic technique to depict the world of dreams and trances and was consciously informed by the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud. Others, such as Max Ernst, Joan Miró, or André Masson, tried to reach the unconscious more directly through automatic procedure. René Magritte was less concerned with dream and the unconscious than provoking the spectator’s expectations through paradox and incongruity. In both Dada and Surrealism there was a strong element of political protest in the assault on convention and the Surrealists shared with the Abstract painters the desire to provide an alternative to the world of appearances. The exploration of fantasy and the inner life was an important theme in painting of the early 20th century and so, many outstanding artists with few formal links to the group have been associated with Surrealism, such as the Russian Marc Chagall, the Swiss Paul Klee, the Belgian Paul Delvaux, and the Mexican Frieda Kahlo.

E.

The Classical Revival and Figuration

In the years that followed World War I, many painters who had been associated with advanced tendencies, such as Derain, Severini, and even Picasso, turned to a revival of the classical tradition. Cubism itself was adapted into a fashionable and readily accessible style in the work of Tamara de Lempicka. By the 1930s, in Germany and the Soviet Union, both of which had previously had thriving avant-gardes, a combination of political pressures and the ambitions of artists marginalized by innovation led to the effective imposition of an illusionistic painting, which treated politically approved themes in a celebratory manner. In the Soviet Union this was known as Socialist Realism.

In the United States, some figurative painters such as Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton, known as regionalists, turned to the rural scene. Others, such as Reginald Marsh and Edward Hopper, painted the life of the city. The latter’s Nighthawks (1942, Art Institute of Chicago), a garishly coloured night scene that has become an icon of urban loneliness, is an exemplar of just what could still be achieved by ambitious figurative painting.

XIV.

Painting Since World War II

Experimental tendencies in art gained increasing public acceptance in the Western world after World War II. At the same time, the centrality of painting as a visual medium was rivalled, not just by the mass media but as a form of high culture by artists who rejected what they saw as painting’s limitations in favour of video or installation.

A.

Abstract Expressionism and Informal Abstraction

Before World War II, most abstract painting had been concerned with geometry and had implicitly promoted an anti-individualistic, utopian world view. In the years after 1945 a form of abstraction that rejected this impersonal ethos was established in New York. The painters were influenced by the Surrealist interest in automatic procedure and the unconscious. They emphasized gesture and usually worked on a large scale. The style of the work varied from the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock to the broad expanses of colour in the work of Mark Rothko and Barnet Newman. Not all Abstract Expressionist painting was strictly abstract. Willem de Kooning painted a whole series of “Woman” pictures and even Rothko wrote that “I think of my pictures as dramas”.

In Paris, which remained a vital centre for modern art until the 1960s, Wols, Jean Fautrier, and Hans Hartung among others, similarly emphasized the painterly gesture. Other painters, such as Maria Elena Vierra da Silva, Nicholas de Stäel, and Jean Bazaine, occupied a kind of hinterland between figuration and abstraction, evoking rather than representing light, atmosphere, and landscape.

Technical experimentation with the medium of painting was a strong feature of European abstraction in the 1950s. The Spaniard Antoni Tàpies mixed sand with paint; the Italian Lucio Fontana slashed and punched holes in his canvases.

B.

Post Painterly Abstraction and Minimalism

Some Abstract painting adopted the imposing scale of Abstract Expressionism, but rejected its rhetoric in favour of an exploration of pure colour. Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler, and Kenneth Noland soaked highly absorbent cotton grounds in pure colour to eliminate the visible marks of the brush. Minimalism reduced painting to a bare physical essence. The paintings of Ad Reinhardt appear as pure black squares at first sight, a residual cross form becoming apparent only gradually to the spectator. The all-white paintings of Robert Ryman reduce image to a minimum to encourage a concentration on gesture and paint as substance.

C.

Figurative Art in the Post-War Years

Figuration in post-war art could be as innovative and challenging as abstraction. The French artist Jean Dubuffet took inspiration from what he called “art brut” (graffiti, the art of children and the insane) to produce a kind of painting that was a radical assault on polite cultural values. The paintings of Balthus are artistically conservative but they could only have been produced in the wake of Sigmund Freud's writings on sexuality.

Some figurative painting was explicitly associated with socialist politics. The French painter Fernand Léger, a veteran of the Cubist movement, painted idealized simplified images of working-class life while André Fougeron and Renato Guttuso included in their works Communist-inspired attacks on the dominance of American culture.

In Britain the “kitchen-sink school”, including Jack Smith and John Bratby, tended to concentrate on the raw facts of daily existence (see Kitchen-Sink Painters). Whatever the artist’s intentions the work was interpreted as politically motivated. Francis Bacon presented a far more individualistic view of human solitude sometimes interpreted as horrific, in a kind of figuration that cultivated accident just as much as Surrealism had done. In the paintings of Frank Auerbach, the struggle to find a painterly equivalent for the figure or landscape is literally experienced in terms of thick layers of impasto.

D.

Pop Art and Photorealism

From the 1950s much art in the West took as its source the images of the consumer society. In Britain there was Richard Hamilton who was fascinated by contemporary American culture as an exotic import and Peter Blake whose approach was more nostalgic. American Pop artist Andy Warhol painted contemporary icons such as Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, while Roy Lichtenstein took images from comic strips, which he subtly adjusted for aesthetic purposes, as a basis.

Some painters confronted directly the assumption that photography represented a more objective way of representing the world. Chuck Close’s portraits were mechanical blow-ups of deadpan photographs of his subjects. The German Gerhard Richter satirized the pretences of photography by meticulously reproducing its approximations and blurrings in paint.

E.

Conceptual Art

Painting itself came under attack by the late 1960s both on political grounds (it was a precious luxury object) and philosophical ones (that the essence of art was an idea rather than a medium). Conceptual artists such as Lawrence Weiner argued that art might just be a simple statement or set of instructions. The term is now commonly used for any kind of art that abandons traditional media, but in its origins it had a more restricted application to work that places intellectual inquiry above visual satisfaction and rejects the necessity for the art object.

F.

Neo-Expressionism and Narrative

By the early 1980s there was a revival of figurative painting although much of it did not please traditionalists. In the United States, the one-time Abstract Expressionist Phillip Guston had embarked on a series of cryptic images, often involving mysterious hooded figures that could alternatively be interpreted as penitents or Ku Klux Klansmen. In Germany, Georg Baselitz looked back to Expressionism while Anselm Kiefer and Jörg Immendorff used painting to reflect on their country’s past. In other painters such as the British-based, Portuguese-born Paula Rego there was a concern for psychological narrative, in Rego’s case frequently referring to the repressions of her native country, especially with regard to the role of women. Carlo Mariani very self-consciously revived Neo-Classicism. The cool figuration of Alex Katz tells ambiguous tales of the power struggles of the wealthy and privileged. Behind all this was a sense that both abstraction and conceptual art had sold short the power of painting to make statements about the world, although it has also been observed that these tendencies coincided with a revival in the art market and a new appetite by collectors for objects.

G.

Painting for Reproduction

Since the Renaissance it has been possible to reproduce paintings through print techniques such as line engraving and, from the 18th century, the mezzotint. However, these were always dependent on the skills and interpretative ability of the printmaker.

The increased sophistication of colour reproduction since the early 20th century has led to the rise of a kind of painting, usually aimed at a popular non-specialist audience, which has its main function in being reproduced for purposes such as illustration or as interior decoration. Examples include works by the American artist Norman Rockwell, whose paintings regularly featured as covers for the Saturday Evening Post between 1916 and 1973, or the Scottish painter Jack Vettriano, whose success since the 1990s has been measured by greetings cards and calendars rather than in the art museum.

H.

Painting in the 21st Century

By the beginning of the 21st century painting again appeared threatened with marginalization in the face of newer media. Leading painters have been as concerned with the limitations of their medium as its power. Glen Brown parodies the claim that the act of painting might provide a privileged access to self-expression by meticulously reproducing the textured surfaces of Rembrandt and Auerbach. Luc Tuymans presents spare, cryptic images that both fascinate but also confront the spectator with the need for clues as to their meaning, which can only be provided verbally.

See also Canadian Art and Architecture; Collage; Folk Art; Latin American Art and Architecture; Miniature Painting; See also Nordic Art and Architecture. For non-Western painting, see African Art and Architecture; Chinese Art and Architecture; Indian Art and Architecture; Iranian Art and Architecture; Islamic Art and Architecture; Japanese Art and Architecture; Korean Art and Architecture; Oceanic Art; Pre-Columbian Art and Architecture.