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.

In order to achieve the visible, overlapping brushstrokes that give The Slave Ship its sense of movement and action, JMW Turner worked extremely quickly. Turner was able both to apply wet paint on wet paint, building up a texture, and create actual motion with his paint application. For these reasons, Turner always worked fast in an attempt to capture what he considered the "sublime" aspect of nature.

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Drypoint is highly related to etching, in that to create art with the medium, an artist must carve the desired image into a piece of metal that is then printed onto a piece of paper by a printing press. Mary Cassatt made The Coiffure a color print by adding aquatint, a chemical ink that could both attach to the metal print, but also leave a lasting image. This very European style of printing was favored by Cassatt because of its resulting images similarity to Japanese woodblock printing.

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Divisionism, also associated with Pointillism, creates a larger image from many smaller dots of color, dots that the eye mixes when standing at a distance from the painting. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood sought to emulate works from the Renaissance. Realism was a mid-19th century movement in which painters rejected Romanticism; symbolism drew on mythology and dreams as its defining feature; and pictorialism was a movement in photography emphasizing beauty rather than reality.

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)

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.

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.

Impasto is the technique of using thick layers of paint on the canvas, often mixing colors directly on the work, and allowing the glob to dry. This creates depth and changes the way the light hits the painted surface; it is a favored technique of Impressionists.

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.