Late 19th Century

Late 19th Century is an art period of the 1851–1900 period. The gallery holds 27,389 works in this period, including works by Thomas Eakins, Jean Baptiste Camille Corot and Gustave Courbet.

The late nineteenth century was the period in which modern painting took shape, as a succession of French-led movements dismantled the authority of the academies and the official Paris Salon. Its roots lay in the Realism of Gustave Courbet, who in 1855 erected his own "Pavilion of Realism" beside the Exposition Universelle and issued a manifesto calling for a "living art" drawn from contemporary life rather than mythology or history. Alongside him, the Barbizon painters — and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, whose silvery landscapes such as our Repose bridged classical composition and direct observation — turned to the countryside and to nature studied in the open air. The Salon des Refusés of 1863, which displayed more than two thousand rejected works including Manet's scandalous canvases, made the rupture with academic taste public and irreversible.

The decisive break came in 1874, when a group calling itself the Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs mounted an independent exhibition in the photographer Nadar's former studio on the Boulevard des Capucines. The roughly thirty participants, among them Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Camille Pissarro, were soon mockingly dubbed "Impressionists" after Monet's Impression, Sunrise. Their method prized the fleeting effects of light and atmosphere, broken brushwork, bright unmixed colour and ordinary modern subjects — sunlit gardens, racetracks, ballet rehearsals. Monet's Woman with a Parasol (1875) and Degas's Dancing Class typify the new looseness and contemporary eye, while Édouard Manet, never an exhibitor with the group, supplied its intellectual catalyst through works such as The Dead Toreador.

From the 1880s a younger generation pushed beyond Impressionism's fidelity to the passing moment. The artists later grouped as Post-Impressionists — Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Georges Seurat — sought greater structure, symbolic intensity and expressive colour; Seurat systematized this in the dotted technique of Pointillism. The label itself was coined only in 1910, by the British critic Roger Fry, for his London exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists.

The period's legacy is foundational. Its insistence on individual vision, visible facture and self-organized exhibition outside official channels prepared the ground for Fauvism, Cubism and abstraction in the twentieth century. American contemporaries such as Thomas Eakins, whose Chess Players shows a Realist's precision, attest to how widely the era's commitment to truthful observation spread beyond France.