The Long Nineteenth Century

The Long Nineteenth Century in art stretches roughly from the French Revolution (1789) to the outbreak of World War I (1914), encompassing Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, and Post-Impressionism. Centered overwhelmingly in Paris, whose annual state-run Salon dominated official taste, the era was propelled by industrialization, urbanization, the rise of photography, and the gradual collapse of academic hierarchies that had long privileged history painting above landscape and genre scenes. Eugène Delacroix and J.M.W. Turner championed Romantic emotion and the sublime in the early decades, while Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet turned to unidealized depictions of peasants and laborers as Realism emerged after the 1848 revolutions. The pivotal rupture came in 1863 at the Salon des Refusés, where Édouard Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe and Olympia scandalized Paris, and again in 1874, when a group of independent artists including Monet, Renoir, Degas, Pissarro, and Morisot staged the first Impressionist exhibition, rejecting Salon juries in favor of self-organized shows. By the 1880s, Post-Impressionists such as Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, and Seurat pushed beyond optical naturalism toward symbolic color, geometric structure, and personal expression, laying direct groundwork for twentieth-century modernism. The period's legacy is immense: it dismantled the academy's authority, established the independent gallery and dealer system that still underpins the global art market, and produced some of the most recognizable and highly valued paintings in Western history.