Realism to Impressionism

The second half of the nineteenth century, when painters turned from history and myth to the world in front of them. Courbet and Millet painted peasants and workers at the scale once kept for heroes; in Russia the Peredvizhniki took the same road. From 1874 the Impressionists went further, painting modern Paris and the countryside in quick strokes of pure colour to catch passing light, and after them Seurat, Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin each pulled painting in a new direction. Alongside them the official Academy kept its polished history paintings and nudes, the Pre-Raphaelites in England painted medieval dreams in jewel colours, and Symbolists everywhere turned to myth, mystery and the soul.

What to look for: ordinary people and modern life as subjects; visible brushstrokes, outdoor light and bright, unmixed colour as the period goes on.

21,923 works in the quiz. Play a round on Realism to Impressionism.

Artists

Vincent van Gogh · Pablo Picasso · Claude Monet · Gustav Klimt · Edvard Munch · Paul Gauguin · Henri Matisse · John Singer Sargent · J. M. W. Turner · William Morris · Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec · Wassily Kandinsky · Katsushika Hokusai · Piet Mondrian · Raja Ravi Varma · Camille Claudel · Paul Cézanne · Auguste Rodin · Pierre-Auguste Renoir · Édouard Manet · Edgar Degas · Alphonse Mucha · Gustave Doré · Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll · Ivan Aivazovsky · Georges Seurat · Paul Klee · Dante Gabriel Rossetti · Samuel Finley Breese Morse · Eugène Delacroix

Best-known works

“The Scream” — Edvard Munch, 1893
“The Starry Night” — Vincent van Gogh, 1889
“Stańczyk” — Jan Matejko, 1862
“Impression, Sunrise” — Claude Monet, 1872
“Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks” — Ilya Repin, 1890–1891
“Luncheon on the Grass” — Édouard Manet, 1863
“A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” — Georges Seurat, 1884
“Ophelia” — John Everett Millais, 1851
“Sunflowers” — Vincent van Gogh, 1888
“Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” — Paul Gauguin, 1897
“Morning in a Pine Forest” — Ivan Shishkin, 1889
“The Ninth Wave” — Ivan Aivazovsky, 1850
“Bal du moulin de la Galette” — Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1876
“Whistler's Mother” — James McNeill Whistler, 1871
“Madame X (Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau)” — John Singer Sargent, 1884
“Olympia” — Édouard Manet, 1863
“Barge Haulers on the Volga” — Ilya Repin, 1870
“The Card Players” — Paul Cézanne, 1893
“The Potato Eaters” — Vincent van Gogh, 1885
“Dante and Virgil in Hell” — William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1850
“Battle of Grunwald” — Jan Matejko, 1878
“Portrait of an Unknown Woman” — Ivan Kramskoi, 1883
“The Apotheosis of War” — Vasily Vereshchagin, 1871
“Café Terrace at Night” — Vincent van Gogh, 1888
“Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan on November 16, 1581” — Ilya Repin, 1883
“Boyarina Morozova” — Vasily Surikov, 1887
“The Angelus” — Jean-François Millet, 1858
“The Lady of Shalott” — John William Waterhouse, 1888
“The Sleepers” — Gustave Courbet, 1866
“Self-Portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle” — Arnold Böcklin, 1872