The Impressionists as a group sought to focus the subject of paintings on everyday life and to use more emotional techniques, like vivid brushstrokes. Paul Cézanne took these approaches to the traditional still life to turn it on its head. Cézanne's still lifes had unique uses of light and shadow and included strange objects such as skulls and rotting fruit.

Francisco de Goya was the court painter for the Spanish monarchy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. As the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte of France invaded Spain in the first decade of the nineteenth century, Goya's work saw a major transformation. In particular, Goya began painting haunting and disturbing images of scenes from the Napoleonic Wars in France.

Impressionism was inaugurated as a result against the standards of Paris' Salon, which was France's biggest art prize and show in the late nineteenth century. Impressionists like Paul Cézanne, Édouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Claude Monet sought to paint people in cafes, scenes of everyday life, and basic landscapes. These artists also departed from the stark realism popular at the time to convey images with more emotional intensity by using more visible brushstrokes.

Each of these paintings reflect some aspect of everyday life, as well as portraying that with non-representational, emotional painting techniques. These are hallmarks of the movement known as Impressionism, which arose in the 1860s and 1870s as a reaction to history painting and realism. Van Gogh, however, took these aspects to further extremes, with more representational images and basic depictions of his own life, and as such is usually dubbed a post-impressionist.

Figure 1: The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh (1889)

Figure 2: Portrait of Père Tanguy by Vincent van Gogh (1887-8)

Jacques-Louis David, before becoming Napoleon's official painter during the Empire, was noted as a painter of history works, which usually focused on stories from Ancient Greece and Rome. In creating these works in the late eighteenth century, David was the preeminent neo-classicist in France, using the clean lines and bright colors notable of the genre. These aspects are present as well in his Napoleon Crossing the Alps, especially the Roman tablet crushed in the bottom left corner of the painting.

Figure 3: Napoleon Crossing the Alps by Jaques-Louis David (1801)

Figure 4: Portrait of Sir Arthur Wellesley, First Duke of Wellington by Sir Thomas Lawrence (1814)

Pointilism was developed by George Seurat, who began his career as a traditional impressionist around 1880. Seurat created his massive canvases by putting images together through many small dots, or "points," of paint. This post-impressionist style is best exemplified in Seurat's Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte – 1884 (A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte), which depicts a massive scene of Parisians relaxing by the Seine, all composed with small dots of color.

Engravings were the most common type of "quick" art created in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When images had to be provided for newspapers or flyers, an engraving could be made quickly. Engravings were also cheaper and easier to create than early types of photographs.

Both of these works by Gustave Courbet feature Courbet himself. Above, from early in his career in 1845, is Le desespere (The Desperate Man); below is the 1854 painting La recontre (The Meeting); both of these are non-traditional self-portraits. The Desperate Man portrays the artist as a man who is nearly insane, and is an important development in Courbet's signature realism, which is shown in the everyday scene of Courbet greeting his art dealer in The Meeting.

Amid increasing industrialization and urbanization, many intellectuals and artists in the nineteenth century saw an idyllic past open to them in rural life. Deemed "pastoral," images of rural life were prevalent in mid-nineteenth-century painting. Courbet's The Meeting demonstrates a few different aspects of the pastoral, including its setting in a field, the inclusion of a dog in the scene, and the image of the horse drawn carriage going away from the scene.

Paul Cezanne became immensely famous for his still-life paintings, of which Figure 4 is a key example. Still life as a genre of painting goes back to antiquity, but Cezanne's approach was highly individualistic and brand new for his time. Cezanne focused on the geometric shapes of the elements in his paintings and used specific, "just-off," colors to give the paintings an emotional depth.