In the first half of the nineteenth century, French art was dominated by an academic system that favored history scenes depicted on an epic scale on wall-sized canvases. Courbet's "A Burial at Ornans" flew in the face of these trends by presenting an ordinary burial, Courbet's uncle's funeral, in Courbet's hometown. To heighten the sense of realism, Courbet used actual townsfolk as his models and included a dog prominently in the foreground.

Jacques-Louis David was a French painter trained before the French Revolution. He was a close friend of Revolutionaries, making his career uncertain through the 1790s. His fortunes changed, however, when he caught the attention of Napoleon Bonaparte due to his precise portraiture and ability to handle large-scale scenes. One of his most famous works, The Coronation of Napoleon, portrays the Emperor's ascension to the title, and depicts a number of luminaries of the time.

The Hudson River School was arguably the first well-known, distinctive American art movement, beginning in the 1820s and remaining influential through the post-Civil War Era. Thomas Cole was the progenitor of the style, as his trips through the Hudson River Valley encouraged him to paint sweeping landscapes in a realistic depiction of the sites. The Hudson River School's use of light and frequent inclusion of extreme weather showed their debt to the ideas and theories of romanticism.

Claude Monet was part of a group of artists, including Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Camille Pisarros, Paul Cézanne, that challenged the artistic conventions of the time with scenes of everyday life painted with vivid brushstrokes. At a gallery exhibition of 1874, Monet presented a scene of the harbor at Le Havre entitled Impression, Sunrise. Derisively, the critic Louis Leroy gave the entire group the name "the Impressionists" after viewing the exhibition, based on the title of Monet's painting.

The American painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler was famous for his advocating the so-called "art for art's sake" ethos. This meant that Whistler mostly abjured political or social themes, and often compared his work to musical compositions in terms of mood and tone. Whistler's famous portrait of his mother was actually officially entitled Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1.

Francisco Goya was a significant portrait painter at the end of the eighteenth century. For most of his life, Goya was best known as the court painter for the Spanish King Charles IV. After the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century, Goya made darker paintings reflecting the realities of the invasion. Starting in 1819, over his last years Goya's work became darker still, culminating in the so-called "Black Paintings," which were fourteen disturbing images that are united by a dark palette and proto-surrealist imagery.

Gustave Courbet first articulated the ideas of "realisme" in the 1850s as he gained fame in the Paris art scene. For Courbet, realism was less about a perfect imitation of the human form as it was a reflection of authentic human experience. This meant Courbet painted in a grittier style than many of his contemporaries, and focused his attention on subjects generally seen as too commonplace for prevailing French thoughts on fine art.

Paul Gauguin was an important Post-Impressionist whose early work experimented with color and symbolism, but Gauguin's work took on a new form after visiting Tahiti in the 1880s. Gauguin began capturing the culture of Polynesia and started using symbols of Polynesia and images of Polynesians themselves in his art. In the 1890s, he permanently moved to the island of Punaauia in French Polynesia, and painted more and more symbolic paintings that played with color and structure.

This painting, Edgar Degas' "The Dance Lesson," was painted in 1879 and is a classic representation of impressionism. With its visible and broad brush strokes and its detached point of view, this painting features the hallmarks of impressionism, a painting style developed in France in the late nineteenth century. Degas preferred to call his artistic style "realism," because he believed his method of painting captured the realistic emotion of a scene, if not an exact representation of it.

Impressionism was a significant artistic movement developed in France during the late nineteenth century that utilized visible brushstrokes, representations of natural light, and everyday scenes. Challenging traditional ideas of art, the movement was initially derided by critics, but proved hugely influential. Its leading artists included Éduouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Paul Cézanne. Henri Matisse was a full generation younger than the impressionists, and was highly influenced by them, but helped develop modern art in the early twentieth century.