Top 100 · The great century of modernity
Romanticism, realism and impressionism
One hundred painters to travel through a century of political, industrial and visual revolutions.
The 19th century turned painting upside down because it shook the world. Revolutions, industrialization, the rise of cities, railways, photography, illustrated press and new art markets changed subjects as much as the ways of seeing them. London, Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Vienna, Saint Petersburg, Rome, Copenhagen and New York became centers connected by trade fairs, travel and universal exhibitions. Romanticism gives landscape, history and emotion a new power; realism brings work, history and emotion into a new power; realism brings work, ordinary life and emotion into large formats; realism brings work, ordinary life and social tensions into large formats; impressionism observes light and modern experience in the present. Academisms, Pre-Raphaelism, symbolism, naturalism and post-impressionism complete this landscape without being reduced to a linear march towards the avant-garde. The classification combines historical influence, formal invention, quality and scale of the corpus, international influence and real importance of the artist in the visual culture of the century.
The Salon, the workshop, the outdoors and the city become competing areas of invention.
Historical landmarks
Why did the 19th century change painting so profoundly?
Academic institutions remain powerful, but they no longer control recognition alone. Official, refused exhibitions, dealers, critics, private collectors and independent exhibitions are increasing their paths to the public. Transportable tubes of paint, new pigments and the train facilitate outdoor work. Photography also frees painting from certain descriptive functions while offering framing, snapshots and new ways of studying movement.
Movements and borders
Are romanticism, realism and impressionism really opposed?
These labels help to find one's way, but the artists move around with each other. Corot prepares impressionist attention to the atmosphere while remaining linked to the Salon; Manet dialogues with the old masters by painting modern life; Degas exhibits with the impressionists without making the outdoors his principle; Cézanne starts from their experience to reconstruct the space. Romanticism does not disappear with realism, any more than academicism died out in 1874: traditions and ruptures coexist, respond to each other and compete with the public.
Classification method
How did we choose these 100 painters?
The rank takes into account the influence exerted on 19th century painting and on subsequent generations, the singularity of plastic language, the richness of the works preserved, the role in a movement or a school and the capacity to embody the transformations of the century. The selection is not limited to France: it integrates British and German romanticism, the American, Russian, Scandinavian, Italian, Spanish and Austro-Hungarian schools, as well as women artists whose place has long been undervalued.
Absolute references
Top 10 - The painters who turned the century upside down
From Turner's sublime to Cézanne's construction, these ten artists summarize the major ruptures that lead from romanticism to modern painting.
#1
William turner
Hannibal, Trafalgar and the slave ship dissolve the event into light, storm and moral meditation on power.
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#2
Claude Monet
Monet makes light an autonomous subject, observed by series and atmospheric variations. The Meules, the Cathedrals of Rouen and the Water Lilies open directly onto modern perception.
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#3
Vincent van Gogh
Van Gogh charges each touch with an intensity that animates the sky, field, face and everyday object. His letters illuminate a conscious search for expressive color, far from the sole myth of the cursed artist.
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#4
Francisco Goya
From Tres de mayo to Disasters of War, he abandons heroism to show fear, execution, starvation and brutality. His gaze makes the anonymous victim the moral center of modern painting.
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#5
Eugene Delacroix
Liberty Leading the People combines real barricade and allegory to give a face to the insurrection of 1830. Its color and movement have fixed one of the most reinterpreted political images in the world.
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#6
Gustave Courbet
He gives the peasants, workers and inhabitants of Ornans the format hitherto reserved for heroes. His realism, his action during the Commune and his refusal of institutions link aesthetic choice and political position.
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#7
Édouard Manet
Maximilian's Execution transforms a contemporary diplomatic event into a cold accusation, while his scenes of civil war avoid heroic pathos. Modern life includes his political conflicts.
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#8
Edgar Degas
Degas builds dancers, cafes and racetracks with abrupt framing nourished by photography and Japanese prints. Its rigorous drawing reveals the mechanics of the gestures behind the apparent spontaneity.
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#9
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Renoir combines impressionist vibration and a lasting taste for the figure. His outdoor scenes and portraits give modern life an instantly recognizable sensual warmth.
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#10
Paul Cezanne
Cézanne reconstructs landscape, portrait and still life in relation to unstable tones and volumes. The Montagne Sainte-Victoire becomes a laboratory for him which prepares cubism and abstraction without renouncing sensation.
See the worksNature, society and modern life
Ranks 11 to 25 - Romanticism, realism and impressionism
Landscape, history, work, urban leisure and new lights become the laboratories of a painting freed from old hierarchies.
#11
John Constable
Even when he paints Salisbury or Brighton, the architecture remains subject to climate: clouds, wind and humidity connect the city to its immediate environment.
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#12
Caspar david friedrich
Stripped trees, ruins, mist and white peaks make winter a spiritual space. Human smallness measures the immensity of the landscape as much as the inner silence.
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#13
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Oedipus, Homer and medieval subjects reveal a history painting based on drawing, quotation and a strange linear sensuality.
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#14
Théodore Géricault
The Raft of the Medusa starts from a shipwreck caused by the incompetence of those in power. By investigating survivors, he makes the great historical picture a critical report on abandonment and responsibility.
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#15
Jean-Francois Millet
It places sowers, gleaners and shepherds at the center of serious and monumental compositions. Without an explicit activist program, this dignity granted to peasant work became politically sensitive in 19th century France.
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#16
Camille Pissarro
Pissarro connects the Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist generations with intact curiosity. Its rural and then urban landscapes pay the same attention to work, air and social transformations.
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#17
Berthe Morisot
Morisot captures domestic spaces, gardens and female figures with a quick touch that lets the canvas breathe. His gaze shifts the social and pictorial conventions of his time from within.
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#18
Mary Cassatt
Her mothers, children, readers and spectators occupy spaces constructed with great intelligence of the gaze. She introduces into impressionism a modern feminine experience, attentive to gestures and distances.
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#19
Honoré Daumier
Caricatures of deputies, judges and bourgeois, scenes of transport or courts: his work follows class relations on a daily basis. Satire becomes a way of making domination, fatigue and social absurdity visible.
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#20
Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot
In his self-portraits, the man of the outdoors shows himself with a warm simplicity which accords the frankness of the face to that of his painting.
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#21
Alfred Sisley
Its snow absorbs noise and simplifies the villages of Île-de-France. The colorful shadows, the humid paths and the changing skies nevertheless retain great atmospheric finesse.
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#22
Georges Seurat
Seurat organizes the divided color with methodical slowness and almost classic ambition. A Sunday at Grande Jatte transforms modern leisure into a silent scene made of calculated light and social distances.
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#23
Paul Gauguin
Gauguin simplifies shapes and separates colors to construct mental and symbolic images. His work remains essential but must also be looked at through the colonial relationships and stories he created around Tahiti.
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#24
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Toulouse-Lautrec captures cabarets, posters and behind the scenes of the show with an incisive line inherited from the print. Its framing makes Montmartre a modern theater where fame and solitude coexist.
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#25
James Abbott McNeill Whistler
Its Thames nights reduce docks, bridges and chimneys to a few colorful chords, transforming London into visual music rather than topographical surveying.
See the worksNational fairs, symbols and schools
Ranks 26 to 50 - Academisms, symbolisms and international horizons
Worldly portrait, history painting, Pre-Raphaelitism, mythology and large landscapes show a 19th century much more diverse than just the story of the avant-gardes.
#26
John Singer Sargent
His quick brush gives fabrics, skin tones and attitudes a spectacular presence. A cosmopolitan portraitist, he captures both the social rank and the fleeting psychology of his models.
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#27
William-Adolphe Bouguereau
He applies impeccable drawing to myths, holy history and allegories, giving the great genre an immediately accessible seduction.
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#28
Rosa Happiness
Bonheur studies anatomy, gestures and work environments to paint animals, fairs and plowing with authority. Her independent career also renews the place of women in the artistic market.
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#29
Ilia Repin
Boatmen, revolutionaries, prisoners and political leaders make up a vast chronicle of Russia. Its psychological realism shows both social oppression and the individual contradictions of those who suffer or exercise it.
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#30
Gustav Klimt
Klimt unites gold, ornament and sensual line in portraits and allegories that make the Viennese Secession an instantly recognizable language.
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#31
Edvard Munch
Munch transforms anxiety, desire, jealousy and mourning into undulating lines and psychic colors. The Cry belongs to a vast Friesland of life where intimate experience takes on a universal scope.
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#32
Gustave Moreau
Moreau accumulates myths, precious stones and imaginary architecture in a sumptuous material which frees color from simple description.
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#33
Odilon Redon
Redon brings out eyes, flowers, profiles and creatures from an interior space. The transition from its blacks to the dazzling pastel shows how symbolism can renew color without abandoning mystery.
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#34
Alexandre Cabanel
Mythologies, Christian scenes and literary episodes combine precious finish, ideal beauty and narrative effectiveness of the Second Empire.
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#35
Jean-Leon Gérôme
Arenas, tribunals and oriental courts are reconstructed with an illusionist realism which lastingly fixes the popular image of Antiquity.
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#36
Lawrence Alma-Tadema
Roman marbles, baths and ceremonies give ancient history a seductive daily texture, nourished by archaeology.
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#37
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Dante, medieval legends and Arthurian stories are changed into suspended scenes where text, desire and personal memory respond to each other.
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#38
John Everett Millais
Religious, historical and literary episodes are rendered with a luminous precision that profoundly renews Victorian narration.
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#39
Edward Burne-Jones
Perseus, Pygmalion and Sleeping Beauty become long decorative cycles dedicated to destiny, dreams and metamorphosis.
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#40
Arnold Boecklin
Böcklin populates Mediterranean landscapes with centaurs, nymphs and funeral islands, opening a major path to the European symbolist imagination.
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#41
Adolph Menzel
Berlin streets, construction sites and factories are observed with inexhaustible curiosity; it links documentary precision, popular movement and the power of industrial production.
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#42
Peder Severin Krøyer
Krøyer observes fishermen, artists' meals and Skagen beaches in clear light. Its collective naturalism also becomes the portrait of a modern artistic colony.
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#43
Vilhelm Hammershøi
Hammershøi constructs his gray interiors like partitions of doors, walls and silence, where a figure from behind is enough to create mystery.
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#44
Joaquin Sorolla
Sorolla paints beaches, work and portraits with a speed capable of capturing solar glare. Its colorful whites and large formats give Spanish luminism an international reach.
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#45
Anders Zorn
Zorn combines economy of means, clear light and keen sense of the body. Social portraits and scenes from Dalarna share the same immediacy without artificial finishing.
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#46
Albert bierstadt
His immense views of the Rockies and Yosemite popularized a grandiose image of the West. Theatrical light celebrates nature while participating in the national narrative of expansion.
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#47
Frederic Edwin Church
From Ecuador to the Arctic, he constructs panoramas of encyclopedic precision and spectacular staging. His landscapes combine science, travel and a feeling of the sublime.
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#48
Winslow Homer
From war scenes to Prouts Neck's marines, he gradually reduces the story to the confrontation between human beings and the elements. His watercolors are among the freest of the American 19th century.
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#49
Thomas Eakins
Anatomy, sport, science and portraiture nourish a demanding painting, without easy idealization. Its medical amphitheaters make knowledge and the body major subjects of American modernity.
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#50
James Tissot
In London as in Paris, piers, parks and social interiors become the precise setting for social relationships where every item of clothing and every distance counts.
See the worksColor takes on its autonomy
Ranks 51 to 75 - From impressionism to fin de siècle modernities
Research on the key, series, point, solid areas and memory transform landscape, interior and daily scene into experiences of perception.
#51
Gustave Caillebotte
Calves, fish, fruits and displays are boldly framed, as if Parisian modernity entered the genre through the window.
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#52
Henri Fantin-Latour
Roses, peonies and dahlias emerge from neutral backgrounds with a chromatic restraint that has earned it a loyal clientele in England.
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#53
Johan Barthold Jongkind
Its ports and wet streets use fast notations and moving light that announce impressionism without losing the precise design of urban structures.
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#54
Eugene Boudin
On the quays of Le Havre or Trouville, ships, piers and silhouettes are gathered under vast skies; the port city is first measured by its climate.
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#55
Armand Guillaumin
In Crozant, he exploits the purples, pinks and oranges that winter reveals in rock and snow. Its palette transforms cold into an intensely chromatic experience.
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#56
Paul Signac
Signac systematizes the division of color while giving ports and sailboats a decorative amplitude. His critical and militant activity also ensured the international diffusion of neo-impressionism.
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#57
Henri Edmond Cross
Cross gradually releases the touch divided into large luminous mosaics. Its Mediterranean shores prepare the tawny color without losing the balance of a contemplative landscape.
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#58
Maximilian Luce
Maximilien Luce trained at the Swiss Academy in Paris, where he met Léo Gausson and briefly attended the workshops, before becoming friends with Camille Pissarro who became his master and definitively guided his path. His gesture takes up the divisionist technique by softening it: he juxtaposes the touches of complementary colors with a freedom that goes beyond the scientific rigor of Seurat, obtaining an intense luminous vibration on the...
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#59
Emile Bernard
Emile Bernard (1868-1941) is a French painter, one of the founders of partitionism and synthetism, alongside Paul Gauguin and Louis Anquetin. Formed at the Cormon workshop in Paris in 1884, he met Louis Anquetin then Vincent van Gogh, whom he introduced to synthetic and Japanese theories.
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#60
Paul Sérusier
Paul Serusier (1864-1927) is a French painter, one of the founders of the Nabis group alongside Maurice Denis, Paul Ranson, Pierre Bonnard, Ker-Xavier Roussel. Formed at the Julian Academy, he met Gauguin in Pont-Aven in 1888 and reported from this meeting the famous Talisman, landscape executed according to synthetic principles.
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#61
Pierre Bonnard
Bonnard transforms bathroom, table and garden into spaces of chromatic memory. Its unstable framing and delayed color make everyday life a mental experience rather than a simple observation.
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#62
Édouard Vuillard
Vuillard background figures, wallpapers and fabrics in interiors where depth becomes motif. He thus captures the emotional density of familiar places and the theatricality of bourgeois life.
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#63
Maurice Denis
Denis recalls that a painting is first of all an organized surface before being a story. Its intimate settings and scenes put this idea at the service of a clear, rhythmic and deeply constructed symbolism.
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#64
Felix Vallotton
Its engraved woods analyze demonstrations, police, press and bourgeois relations with a radical black and white economy. During the war, its landscapes of destruction remained deliberately ambiguous and distant.
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#65
Henri Rousseau
Rousseau invents mental jungles from plants observed in Paris and an imagination without academic complexes. The frontality of his figures fascinates the avant-gardes with his direct poetic power.
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#66
James Ensor
Ensor populates bourgeois society with masks, skeletons and acidic crowds. His pictorial satire announces expressionism while retaining an almost carnivalesque light.
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#67
Ferdinand Hodler
Hodler organizes figures and mountains according to parallel rhythms, sometimes reinforced by a split touch. His painting transforms the observation of the landscape into monumental order, halfway between luminous vibration and symbol.
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#68
Giovanni Segantini
Giovanni Segantini (1858-1899) is the great Italian divisionist painter. Orphaned by his father, he grew up in Milan, trained at the Accademia di Brera, then settled in the Alps, first in Savognin then in Maloja in the Engadine.
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#69
Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo
Pellizza unites naturalistic observation and color division to represent rural crowds and protest. The Quartet gives a monumental form to collective progress.
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#70
Giovanni Fattori
Fattori reduces soldiers, peasants and beasts to wide tonal ratios observed on the motif. His anti-heroic gaze shows the daily reverse side of national wars.
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#71
Telemaco Signorini
Signorini explores poor streets, prisons and asylums through daring framing. The luminous construction of the Macchiaioli becomes a tool of social investigation for him.
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#72
Francesco Hayez
Conspiracies, Sicilian Vespers and medieval figures give the Risorgimento veiled stories of patriotism and freedom.
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#73
Jules Bastien-Lepage
Bastien-Lepage combines modern framing, the outdoors and precision of figures to show rural work without flattering pastoral care. Les Foins imposes its language on an entire European generation.
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#74
Jules Breton
Breton gives work in the fields monumental dignity and twilight light. Its international success is based on the balance between social observation, poetry and academic composition.
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#75
Léon Lhermitte
Lhermitte describes harvests, markets and wage distributions with constructed sobriety. Its powerful design gives weight to repetitive gestures and peasant communities.
See the worksEuropean achievements and renewed perspectives
Ranks 76 to 100 - Russia, Central Europe, North and women artists
Russian ambulants, naturalists, salon painters and long-slimmed creators broaden the geography and issues of the painting of the century.
#76
Vasily Surikov
The decisive point in Vasily Surikov is his pictorial axis: popular fresco. The Morning of the Streltsy Execution serves as the most direct entry point; Boyarine Morozova exposes the method; Ermak's Conquest of Siberia opens the artist's broader ambition.
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#77
Ivan Shishkin
The decisive point in Ivan Shishkin is his pictorial axis: monumental forest. Morning in a pine forest serves as the most direct entry point; Rye exposes the method; In the Wild North opens the artist's broader ambition.
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#78
Isaac Levitan
Levitan transforms roads, lakes and forests into moods; its Russian landscape is based on subtle chords rather than anecdote.
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#79
Ivan Aivazovsky
The decisive point in Ivan Aivazovsky is his pictorial axis: maritime sublime. The Ninth Wave serves as the most direct entry point; Black Sea exposes the method; Battle of Tchesmé opens the artist's broader ambition.
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#80
Vasily Vereshchagin
A traveler and former witness to the fighting, he refused triumphant military painting. Fields of death, ruins and absurd trophies transform his war scenes into accusations against imperial glory.
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#81
Viktor Vasnetsov
Bogatyrs, tales and medieval chronicles give a monumental form to the Russian imagination, between archeology and epic invention.
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#82
Vasily Polenov
The decisive point in Vasily Polenov is his pictorial axis: narrative clarity. Moscow court serves as the most direct entry point; Christ and the sinner exposes the method; The Invaded Pond opens up the artist's broader ambition.
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#83
Alexei Savrasov
The decisive point in Alexei Savrasov is his pictorial axis: melancholy of the thaw. The Rookies are back serves as the most direct entry point; Spring exposes the method; Country Route opens up the artist's broader ambition.
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#84
Valentin Serov
Serov renews the Russian portrait with flexible framing, moving light and a rare ability to simultaneously capture social status and temperament.
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#85
Abram Arkhipov
Exhausted washerwomen, peasants and workers from the Russian North are painted with dense material and attention to concrete conditions. Color never masks fatigue or the hardness of work.
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#86
Konstantin Makovsky
The decisive point in Konstantin Makovsky is his pictorial axis: decorative splendor. The Bride's Choice serves as the most direct entry point; Boyard wedding party exposes the method; Social portraits opens up the artist's broader ambition.
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#87
Ivan Kramskoi
The decisive point in Ivan Kramskoi is his pictorial axis: moral conscience. Christ in the desert serves as the most direct entry point; The Unknown exposes the method; Portrait of Tolstoy opens the artist's broader ambition.
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#88
Vasily Perov
Perov uses genre scenes and satire to show poverty, bureaucracy and religious hypocrisy. His strongly characterized figures give Russian realism its critical significance.
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#89
Hans Makart
Its processions, allegories and sumptuous decorations reflect the spectacular ambition of Imperial Vienna and impose a taste that will mark the entire era of Ringstrasse.
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#90
Friedrich von Amerling
Amerling combines psychological presence and splendor of materials in portraits where Viennese society shows itself with measured elegance.
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#91
Ford Madox Brown
The Last of England and its civic frescoes tell migration, work and British history through realism dense in social detail.
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#92
William holman hunt
He searches the Holy Land for exact settings to give the parables and biblical episodes a material and symbolic intensity.
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#93
Frederic Leighton
Ancient processions and biblical subjects combine erudition, refined color and monumental construction at the height of Victorian aesthetics.
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#94
Elizabeth Thompson
It shows Waterloo, Crimea and Afghanistan from the perspective of exhausted soldiers, shifting glory toward endurance and human cost.
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#95
Marie Bracquemond
Bracquemond lightens his palette through contact with Monet, Degas and Gauguin, then juxtaposes vibrant touches in his garden scenes. Her rare work recalls the place of women in the chromatic laboratories of the end of the century.
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#96
Eva Gonzales
Her pastel self-portrait highlights the medium, concentration and elegance of an artist trained by Manet but concerned with her own voice.
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#97
Marie Bashkirtseff
Bashkirtseff observes street children, women and suburbs with ambition supported by his newspaper. Despite a very short career, she places the female experience in naturalism.
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#98
Harriet Backer
Backer constructs his interiors through light rather than anecdote. Colorful reflections, absorbed figures and silent architecture make each room a laboratory of space, rhythm and atmosphere.
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#99
Max Liebermann
Liebermann enlivens gardens, horsemen and workshops with small, light touches, often called sunspots. His painting links social observation, the outdoors and the diffusion of French modernity in Germany.
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#100
Akseli Gallen-Kallela
Gallen-Kallela translates Kalevala into powerful silhouettes, bold colors and Nordic landscapes, creating a decidedly modern national language.
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Deepen 19th century painting
Public collections make it possible to compare works, their exhibition context and the diversity of national schools. They also show that modernity is neither limited to Paris nor to a simple succession of movements.
Read on Alpha Reproduction
The 19th century taught painting to look at the present
Turner and Friedrich give the landscape mental depth; Goya, Delacroix and Géricault make history a lived experience; Courbet, Millet, Daumier, Bonheur and Répine shift attention to work, society and ordinary lives. Manet opens a fruitful crisis of representation, while Monet, Degas, Renoir, Pissarro, Morisot, Cassatt and Sisley transform the light, framing and time of the painting.
The end of the century does not close this adventure: Seurat organizes color, Van Gogh intensifies it, Gauguin flatters it, Cézanne reconstructs space, Klimt adorns it and Munch internalizes it. Around them, academicisms, symbolisms, Pre-Raphaelism, Macchiaioli, Russian Ambulants and Northern Schools offer other responses to modernity. These hundred artists form less a straight line than a network of tensions always active between observation and imagination, tradition and rupture, visible world and inner experience.
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