Gustave Courbet was the figure in developing realism as a specific artistic genre, which sought clear depictions of everyday life in an uncompromising manner. Courbet's The Desperate Man makes the viewer confront the madness in the eyes of the painter himself, while The Meeting shows Courbet venturing to find his art dealer in the South of France. Both are executed with fastidious lines and clear colors that capture the image portrayed exactly.

These paintings are paragons of Impressonism done by two of its foremost practitioners. Figure 1 is one of Claude Monet's studies of Rouen Cathedral, from 1888, while Figure 2 is one of Paul Cezanne's still lifes from 1899. Impressionism sought to depict emotional realism and perceptual limitations in its works by creating less than perfect representations of images with obvious brushstrokes, and by focusing on more mundane, everyday subjects.

Édouard Manet's massive painting of a group of people having a luncheon picnic, which included a nude woman in the foreground, caused a massive scandal when it was presented to the 1863 Salon. The thematic content of the painting, which was both an everyday scene and featured a luxuriating nude, was only part of the issue. Manet's style differed greatly from the academic mastery of the previous generation of French painters, such as David, Cabanel, and Ingres, and greatly presaged Impressionism.

The Impressionists are most famous for their particular painting style, which used obvious brushwork to make a less-than-realistic depiction of a scene in order to portray movement and emotion. At the time of their emergence, the Impressionists were shocking to the academic French art world in their persistent use of everyday scenes and common items. Impressionists often showed people at cafés or in parks, and even their landscapes were usually quite small compared to previous images.

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.