French Art History and Sitemap

French art consists of the visual and plastic arts (including French architecture, woodwork, textiles, and ceramics) originating from the geographical area of France.

Modern France was the main centre for the European art of the Upper Paleolithic, then left many megalithic monuments, and in the Iron Age many of the most impressive finds of early Celtic art.

The Gallo-Roman period left a distinctive provincial style of sculpture, and the region around the modern Franco-German border led the empire in the mass production of finely decorated Ancient Roman pottery, which was exported to Italy and elsewhere on a large scale.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir | Jeune fille en rose dans un paysage, 1903

Philip Hermogenes Calderon | Broken Vows, 1856

Artist: Philip Hermogenes Calderon (British painter, 1833-1898)

Medium: Oil paint on canvas

Dimensions Support: 914 × 679 Mm

Frame: 1205 × 980 × 104 Mm

Collection: Tate

Acquisition: Purchased 1947

The title of this painting suggests that the woman has recently discovered that her lover, whose initials are carved in the fence, has been unfaithful.

Further details, including the discarded necklace and dying flowers, indicate her unhappy situation. The ivy-covered wall may symbolise her previous belief that their love was everlasting.

Disappointed love was a popular theme in Victorian painting, and viewers were expected to unravel the situation from the symbols and expressions of the characters. | © Tate Britain

British Art History and Sitemap

The Art of the United Kingdom refers to all forms of visual art in or associated with the United Kingdom since the formation of the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707 and encompass English art, Scottish art, Welsh art and Irish art, and forms part of Western art history.

During the 18th century Britain began to reclaim the leading place England had played in European art during the Middle Ages, being especially strong in portraiture and landscape art.

Surrealist Artists | History and Sitemap

Surrealism originated in the late 1910s and early '20s as a literary movement that experimented with a new mode of expression called automatic writing, or automatism, which sought to release the unbridled imagination of the subconscious.

Officially consecrated in Paris in 1924 with the publication of the Manifesto of Surrealism by the poet and critic André Breton (1896-1966), Surrealism became an international intellectual and political movement.

Breton, a trained psychiatrist, along with French poets Louis Aragon (1897-1982), Paul Éluard (1895-1952) and Philippe Soupault (1897-1990), were influenced by the psychological theories and dream studies of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and the political ideas of Karl Marx (1818-1883).

Michael Alfano | Figurative and surrealistic sculptures

American Art History and Sitemap

Visual art of the United States or American art is visual art made in the United States or by U.S. artists.

Before colonization, there were many flourishing traditions of Native American art, and where the Spanish colonized Spanish Colonial architecture and the accompanying styles in other media were quickly in place.

Early colonial art on the East Coast initially relied on artists from Europe, with John White (1540-1593) the earliest example.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, artists primarily painted portraits, and some landscapes in a style based mainly on English painting.

Andrew Wyeth | Christina's World, 1948

Nabis Art | History and Sitemap

Ambitious decorative painting enjoyed a resurgence in Europe from the late 1880s through the early twentieth century.

In Paris, Pierre Bonnard🎨, Maurice Denis🎨 and Édouard Vuillard🎨 were among the most influential artists to embrace decoration as painting’s primary function.

Their works celebrate pattern and ornament, challenge the boundaries that divide fine arts from crafts, and, in many cases, complement the interiors for which they were commissioned.

Disaffected with the rigidly representational painting methods taught at the Académie Julian, Bonnard and Denis joined with other like-minded students in the fall of 1888 to form a brotherhood called the “Nabis”, a Hebrew word meaning “prophets”.

The group was spearheaded by Paul Sérusier🎨, who had visited Paul Gauguin in Pont-Aven over the summer and was now spreading an aesthetic message based on his interpretation of Gauguin🎨’s Symbolism.

Paul Sérusier - The Bois d'Amour à Pont-Aven / The Talisman (Le Talisman), 1888, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Macchiaioli Art History and Sitemap

The Macchiaioli were a group of Italian painters active in Tuscany in the second half of the nineteenth century, who, breaking with the antiquated conventions taught by the Italian academies of art, did much of their painting outdoors in order to capture natural light, shade and color.

This practice relates the Macchiaioli to the French Impressionists who came to prominence a few years later, although the Macchiaioli pursued somewhat different purposes.

Federico Zandomeneghi - Il giubbetto rosso, 1895

Art Nouveau | History and Sitemap

From the 1880s until the First World War, western Europe and the United States witnessed the development of Art Nouveau (“New Art”).

Taking inspiration from the unruly aspects of the natural world, Art Nouveau influenced art and architecture especially in the applied arts, graphic work, and illustration.

Sinuous lines and “whiplash” curves were derived, in part, from botanical studies and illustrations of deep-sea organisms such as those by German biologist Ernst Heinrich Haeckel (1834-1919) in Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature, 1899).

Other publications, including Floriated Ornament (1849) by Gothic Revivalist Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812-1852) and The Grammar of Ornament (1856) by British architect and theorist Owen Jones (1809-1874), advocated nature as the primary source of inspiration for a generation of artists seeking to break away from past styles.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir | In the Studio, 1877

Pierre-Auguste Renoir often used his friends as models for genre scenes, most of which were posed and painted in the studio.

The sitters for this small painting were the amateur critic Georges Rivière and the artist's model Marguerite Legrand, known professionally as Margot.

• Artist: Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919).
• Title: In the Studio (Georges Riviere and Marguerite Legrand).
• Date: Between 1876 and 1877.
• Medium: Oil on canvas.
• Dimensions: 35 x 25 cm.
• Collection: Dallas Museum of Art.