As a reaction against the perceived excess of Rococo, Neoclassicism (c. 1760–1850) drew inspiration from the art of Classical Greece and Rome, emphasizing order, symmetry, and moral virtue. The movement was shaped by Enlightenment ideals that prized reason and civic responsibility. The leading French Neoclassical painter, Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), embodied these values in works such as Oath of the Horatii, which depicts Roman loyalty and self-sacrifice, and The Death of Marat, a portrait that transforms a contemporary political assassination into a scene of austere heroism.
By the early nineteenth century, Romanticism emerged as a counter-movement that emphasized emotion, imagination, individualism, and the sublime power of nature. Where Neoclassicism appealed to reason, Romanticism celebrated passion, mystery, and the exotic. The French painter Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) became the leading Romantic with vivid color, expressive brushwork, and dramatic subjects; his Liberty Leading the People (1830) became an iconic symbol of revolutionary freedom. In Germany, Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) explored the spiritual vastness of nature in paintings like Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, while the British painter J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) created luminous, atmospheric seascapes whose increasingly abstract handling of light anticipated Impressionism. In England, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, founded in 1848 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt, rejected industrial modernity in favor of the detail and color found in art before Raphael.
The Realism movement (c. 1840–1880) rejected both Neoclassical idealism and Romantic drama in favor of truthful depictions of everyday life and ordinary people. Its champion, Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), declared that art should only depict things the artist could see and touch, scandalizing the establishment with monumental canvases like The Stone Breakers, which portrays laborers with unflinching honesty, and A Burial at Ornans, which elevated a mundane provincial funeral to the scale traditionally reserved for history painting. This commitment to depicting the visible world set the stage for the even more radical departures of Impressionism.