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.

The painter of this work, Paul Cézanne, was particularly noted for his still lifes. The one in this question, "Still Life with Skull," was painted in 1898 and is particularly notable for the inclusion of a skull, a notable feature of Cezanne's later work from the 1890s on. Cézanne's use of broad brushstrokes, layered color, and different perspectives helped create a bridge from impressionism to modern art movements like cubism.

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.

Monet was one of the leading rebels of the Salon de Paris. Most of his work comes from Paris and the surrounding countryside.

The name Pointilism itself refers to the act of using small points. Mannerism and Rococo are artistic movements stemming from different centuries than Pointilism, and cubism is a very geometrical artistic style created by Pablo Picasso.