Late 19th Century

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The last three decades of the 19th century remade painting, with Paris at the centre. In 1874 a group of artists frustrated with the official Salon staged their own exhibition, where Claude Monet's Impression, Sunrise (1872) gave the Impressionists their name. Look for visible, broken brushstrokes, bright unmixed colour, and everyday modern subjects: Pierre-Auguste Renoir's crowded dance halls, Edgar Degas's ballet rehearsals seen from odd angles, and the villages and roads of Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley.

By the mid-1880s younger painters pushed further. Georges Seurat and Paul Signac applied colour in systematic dots; Paul Cézanne rebuilt nature from planes of colour; Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin made colour and line express feeling. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec turned Montmartre cabarets into bold posters shaped by Japanese prints, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler painted misty nocturnes as arrangements of tone. Symbolists looked inward, and Edvard Munch's The Scream (1893) gave anxiety a modern face.