which – roughly translated – means “pebblework Baroque,” a decorative brand of the painterly Baroque. Rather than being a continuation of the style of Rubens, the manner of Antoine Watteau, Jean-Honoré Fragonard and François Boucher conveyed a lighter mood, with more feathery strokes of the brush, a lighter palette, and even a smaller physical size of works. Erotic subject matter and light genre subjects came to dominate the style, which found favour especially among the pleasure-loving aristocrats of France, as well as their peers elsewhere in Continental Europe. The Rococo painters thus carried forward the debate between line and colour that had emerged in practice and in art theory in the sixteenth century: the argument between Michelangelo and Titian, and then between Rubens and Poussin, is a struggle that would not go away, and would return in the nineteenth century and later.
Not every artist succumbed to the Rococo. A focus in the eighteenth century on particular social virtues – patriotism, moderation, duty to family, the necessity to embrace Reason and study the laws of Nature – were themselves at odds with the subject matter and hedonistic style of the Rococo painters. In the realm of art theory and criticism, Diderot and Voltaire were unhappy with the Rococo style flourishing in France, and the days of the style were numbered. The humble naturalism of the Frenchman Chardin was based in Dutch still-life artistry of the previous century, and the Anglo-American and English painters, including John Singleton Copley of Boston, Joseph Wright of Derby and Thomas Hogarth painted in styles which, in different ways, embodied a kind of fundamental naturalism we recognise as fitting for the spirit of the age. A number of artists, such as Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and Thomas Gainsborough, incorporated into their paintings some of the lightness of touch that characterized the Rococo, but they modified its excesses and avoided some of its artificial and superficial qualities, however delightful those are.
A leitmotif of Western painting has been the persistence of classicism, and here the Rococo found its fiercest opponent. The essentials of the classical style – a dynamic equilibrium, an idealised naturalism, a measured harmony, a restraint of colour and a dominance of line, all operating under the guiding influence of ancient Greek and Roman models – reasserted themselves in the late-eighteenth century in response to the Rococo. When Jacques-Louis David exhibited his Oath of the Horatii in 1785, it electrified the public, and was applauded by the French including the King, and an international viewership. Thomas Jefferson happened to be in Paris at the time of the painting’s exhibition and he was greatly impressed. The popularity of Neoclassicism preceded the French Revolution, but once the revolution occurred, it became the official style of the virtuous new French regime. The Rococo was associated with the decadent Ancien Régime, and its painters were forced to flee the country or change their styles. A later Neoclassicism remained in vogue in France through the Napoleonic age, and the elegant linearity and exotic attitude of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres took the place of the works of David, who had softened his style later in life to create a copious, more decorative form of classicism suitable for the less bourgeois character of the French Empire.
If the eighteenth century was the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, there was, developing at the same moment, an intellectual trend towards interest in the irrational and the emotional. A group of painters, sometimes regarded together under the term Romantics, flourished in the late-eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century. Many of these painters co-existed chronologically with the classical artists, and there was a certain amount of rivalry between them. Some of the European painters from the last half of the eighteenth century to the first half of the nineteenth century were explicitly interested in the irrational, as was Henry Fuseli in his Nightmare and Francisco Goya in some of his violent or black paintings and their scenes of death and madness. Théodore Géricault explored medical insanity in some of his smaller paintings and the themes of death, cannibalism, and political corruption in his massive and turgid Raft of the Medusa. More subtle were the painters in this period who explored the emotional effects of landscape art. John Constable’s flickering light and careful study of clouds and the sunlight on trees in the English countryside yielded strikingly emotive results. The German Caspar David Friedrich conveyed the religious mysticism of the landscape, while the American Hudson River School painters, such as Thomas Cole, represented the warm autumnal colours and desolation of a wilderness in the New World that was quickly disappearing. J. M. W. Turner’s paintings of seascapes, landscapes, and historical scenes seemed to his contemporaries to be made of “tinted steam,” and he edged towards modernism in his abstractness. The most influential and acclaimed of the French Romantic painters was Eugene Delacroix. He turned to the High Baroque painter Rubens for artistic inspiration and painted canvas after canvas of tiger hunts, Passion of Christ imagery, and – for contemporary taste – the exotic world of Arab warriors and hunters in northern Africa. Like the Baroque masters before him, he used zooming spatial diagonals, cut-off compositional elements, and bravura colourism with great effect. Delacroix gained the artistic and even personal enmity of Ingres, and contemporaries recognised in their art the timeless struggle of line versus colour.
The kind of anti-Romantic realism in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary found expression in the art of the school of Realist painters. Gustave Courbet’s unadorned representation of Nature and of village life stands as his attempt to show us the world without elaboration. His statement “show me an angel and I will paint one” is the sentiment which led to the creation of his monumental Burial at Ornans, a carefully composed work that he and critics of the time convinced themselves was little more than raw réalité. More traditional, but also based on close observation of nature, were the paintings of Jean-François Millet and the Barbizon School painters, led by Theodore Rousseau. Among the other Realists were Honoré Daumier, who concerned his efforts with contemporary urban life and in depicting the folly of civic officials and lawyers, the natural goodness of labourers, and the weariness of the poor. Contemporary in time with the French Realists were the English Pre-Raphaelite painters, who turned their backs on the artful idealism they associated with the Academy; they found inspiration instead in the detailed particularism and ‘honesty’ of painting in Italy before Raphael and the High Renaissance. Dante, Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones found solace in exotic stories of the Middle Ages, in accounts of early British history, and in all manner of moralising tales and parables. They painted with oils, but with the care of tempera paints, without the broad treatment of the brush, the scumbling of the colours across the canvas, and the rapid glazing technique that the oil medium makes possible. They would not be the last painters in the West to reject the pictorial possibilities of oil paint, or to defy the conventions of the academies of art from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.
As urbanism and industrialism advanced in nineteenth-century Europe, a new and unexpected development occurred in painting with the rise of Impressionism. Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro and others in their circle painted with rapid strokes and with an insubstantiality never before seen in painting. Sometimes capturing the idylls of the countryside and at other times capturing the light, smoke, colour, and movement of urban scenes, they turned their backs on the historical and concentrated instead on conveying the evanescence of present appearances. Rejected at first by critics and the public because of their insouciance with academic rules, the Impressionists had a lasting impact on art. As their styles developed, the modernity of their art became even more apparent. Monet’s canvases became extremely abstract, and he came to finish his pictures, not in front of the visual source, but in his studio, sometimes long after contact with the natural model. Renoir eventually sought to represent the firm linearity he had discovered in Italian art, and his works became ever more planned in design, firmly based on figural models, and sugary sweet in colouring. The traditionalist painters Jean-Léon Gérôme and William Bouguereau in France and Ilya Repin in Russia achieved worldly success and acclaim with their more academic and conservative approaches, but the Impressionists had the greatest impact on the development of modernism, and their artistry soon inspired new branches of painting.
The Post-Impressionists were a group of artists who understood the potentialities of the way the Impressionists used the brush. Paul Cézanne was determined to make “something permanent” of the art of the Impressionists, endowing his pictures with the compositional solidity he found in classicism. He was intent on “redoing Poussin after Nature,” and he developed
