Top 50 — Romanticism
Famous Romantic painters
From Géricault to Friedrich, from Delacroix to the Pre-Raphaelites, 100 years of art in a state of shock
Romanticism is a pictorial earthquake. Born in England and Germany in the 1800s, it swept over France after 1815 with Géricault and Delacroix, unsettling neoclassicism, exalting wild nature, inner storms, shipwrecks, and creatures of dream. This Top 50 takes you through 100 years of a movement that invented the modern artist — from the visionary Goya to the British Pre-Raphaelites, via the Hudson River School and the late Symbolists.
Wikimedia CommonsWikidataLouvre & Musée d'OrsayWikipedia
1800
Birth of European pictorial romanticism
100
Years of influence (1800-1900), from Friedrich to Moreau
11
Countries represented in this ranking
2026 Edition
50
Painters
100 years of European romanticism
Context
What makes these painters essential?
Romanticism in painting begins before the term itself: Francisco Goya, William Blake, Henry Fuseli, and Caspar David Friedrich break the ground as early as the 1800s, painting what Neoclassicism refused to see — nightmares, ruins, ghosts, and sublime landscapes. From 1815 onward, Géricault detonates the bomb with The Raft of the Medusa, followed by Delacroix, who turns the movement into a political and Orientalist manifesto. The rivalry between national schools — British (Turner, Constable), German (Friedrich, Runge), French (Delacroix, Géricault, Daumier) — gives Romanticism a richness and variety unmatched in art history.
This Top 50 combines three criteria: theoretical and stylistic contribution to the Romantic movement, current museum presence (Louvre, National Gallery, Prado, Alte Nationalgalerie), and the ability to still speak to us today. Each entry offers a portrait, a signature work, and a direct link to the matching collection of reproductions in our shop.
This page was designed as a reading guide, not a hit parade. The painters are grouped by generations and national schools to make visible the lineages and tensions between British, German, French, Slavic, and American Romanticisms. The numbers are indicative — rank 35 is not "worse" than rank 5, it is simply later or more peripheral.
Precursors and Founding Fathers (1750-1830)
Goya, Blake, Friedrich, Turner — the Romantic spark
It all begins in the 1800s, in a Europe that has weathered the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. Francisco Goya paints Los Caprichos (1799) and The Disasters of War (1810-1820) in Spain. William Blake invents in England a visual poetry that mingles mythology and prophecy. Caspar David Friedrich composes in Germany metaphysical landscapes where man contemplates the infinite. J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, Antoine-Jean Gros, and Philipp Otto Runge pave the way for what will become the great Romantic movement of the 1820s-1850s.
#1Francisco Goya
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#2Henry Fuseli
#3William Blake
William Blake (1757-1827) is the most unclassifiable of the British Romantics. Coming from a modest London background, he was first apprenticed as an engraver to the bas-relief artist James Basire, then studied at the Royal Academy. There he rejected official teaching, preferring to copy the Gothic and Venetian masters. In 1789, he published Songs of Innocence, a collection of poems illustrated by his own engravings. He developed a singular technique, "relief etching," which allows text and image to be reproduced on a single plate. The series of Prophetic Books (1794-1804), illustrating his personal visions, is his esoteric masterpiece. Blake blends mythology, religion, politics, and mathematics in hallucinatory compositions. His influence on Symbolism, the Pre-Raphaelites, and the 20th-century counterculture is immense, even though his contemporaries considered him mad. He died in general indifference in London in 1827. Today, Blake is recognized as one of the founding fathers of modern art, at once a poet, painter, and prophet of an inner vision that has not aged a day. It needs to include 1-2 precise and verifiable key dates (place/year). No lists or titles. Must not start with the painter's name. Just the paragraph.
Read on Wikipedia William Blake
#4Caspar David Friedrich
#5Philipp Otto Runge
Philipp Otto Runge (1777-1810) is one of the founders of German Romantic painting, too often reduced to the figure of Caspar David Friedrich. Born in Wolgast in Pomerania into a family of merchants, he trained in Hamburg and at the Royal Academy of Copenhagen, before moving to Dresden where he befriended Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis) and the painter Caspar David Friedrich. He died prematurely at 33, in 1810, struck down by tuberculosis. His work blends mystical Symbolism, Jakob Böhme's theosophy, and color theory: he published the same year a treatise entitled Farbenkugel (the Color Sphere) that anticipates the research of Chevreul and Rood. His masterpieces are The Morning (1808), the central panel of the cycle The Four Times of Day, and the family portrait Wir drei (We Three, 1805). A Runge reproduction is the assurance of having at home one of the missing links between German Romanticism and European Symbolism. Wasted by tuberculosis, he died prematurely on 2 December 1810 in Hamburg, at only thirty-three years old, leaving unfinished his ambitious Tageszeiten series. His intimate journal, published posthumously, as well as his reflections on color, exerted a lasting influence on the Nazarenes and the pioneers of abstract art, his mystical Symbolism being rediscovered in the 20th century.
Read on Wikipedia Philipp Otto Runge
#6J.M.W. Turner
Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) is the most visionary of British landscape painters. The son of a London barber, he entered the Royal Academy at just 14 and exhibited his first watercolor at 15. From 1796 onward, he traveled across England and the continent to draw views that would become the basis of his later paintings. His early oils, such as Fishermen at Sea (1796), already show a mastery of the movement of waves and of crepuscular light. At the Living room of 1802, his painting Calme à la mer sparked enthusiasm in Paris. Turner traveled through France, Switzerland, and Italy, accumulating sketches of storms, shipwrecks, and burning mountains. His late works, such as Rain, Steam and Speed (1844) or the posthumous painting The Landing of Géricault, which fascinates him, become almost abstract. He anticipated French Impressionism by nearly fifty years. At his death in 1851, he bequeathed to the British nation his entire studio, namely more than 300 paintings and 19,000 drawings. Turner is the direct ancestor of lyrical abstraction and one of the rare painters to have revolutionized landscape painting twice.
Read on Wikipedia J.M.W. Turner
#7John Constable
John Constable (1776-1837) is the Romantic landscape painter who most profoundly renewed the art of the English countryside. Born in East Bergholt in Suffolk, the son of a miller, he refused the family trade imposed by his father to study at the Royal Academy. In 1819 he began The Hay Wain, a vast canvas he would rework for six years and which caused a sensation at the Paris Living room of 1824, alongside Millet's The Angelus. In it Constable shows a summer shower, storm clouds, and a farmer's wagon — something never before seen in British painting. He was elected a member of the Royal Academy in 1829, became Turner's great rival, and trained an entire generation of landscapists. His six Stour Valley views are monuments of modern landscape. A Constable reproduction, placed in a study or a bright living room, is England seen through English eyes.
Read on Wikipedia John Constable
#8Antoine-Jean Gros
#9Carl Gustav Carus
Carl Gustav Carus (1789-1869) was at once a physician, a painter, and a theorist of art — one of the most complete figures of German Romanticism. Born in Leipzig, he studied medicine and became personal physician to the King of Saxony, while pursuing a parallel career as a painter. He met Caspar David Friedrich in 1817 and became his close friend — he also published in 1815 a treatise, Nine Letters on Landscape Painting as a Symbolic Art. His own landscapes, often Alpine or coastal, extend the Friedrichian aesthetic with a more cosmic sensibility. He also painted finely observed psychological portraits, including one of Goethe. A member of several academies, Carus was elected president of the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in 1862. A Carus reproduction is the rare union of brush and scalpel.
Read on Wikipedia Carl Gustav Carus
#10Théodore Géricault
The French and British apogee (1815-1850)
Delacroix, Constable, Bonington — competing romanticisms
The beating heart of the movement: Géricault and Delacroix on the French side, Turner and Constable on the British side. Paul Delaroche invents sentimental history painting, Horace Vernet the Living room-style Orientalism, Ary Scheffer the religious melodrama. Richard Parkes Bonington, who died at 25, synthesizes in just a few luminous canvases the entire Romantic spirit of plein-air painting. Eugène Isabey, Eugène Lami, John Martin, Samuel Palmer, and Francis Danby carry the vein in very different directions.
#11Eugène Delacroix
#12Ary Scheffer
Ary Scheffer (1795-1858) was the Dutch-born painter naturalized French who carried religious Romanticism to its highest degree of sweetness. Born in Dordrecht into a modest family, he settled in Paris in 1811, where he entered the studio of Pierre-Narcisse Guérin. From the 1820s onward, he specialized in literary and religious subjects: Faust and Marguerite, Francesca da Rimini, Dante, the Sufferings of Christ — scenes of restrained pathos that caused a sensation at the Living room. He became the favored portraitist of the Orléans family and the Belgian royal family. His late religious paintings, such as The Consolator Christ (1851), reach a mystical intensity that touches Catholics as well as Protestants. He died in Argenteuil in 1858. A Scheffer reproduction is the soul of European Romanticism seen through a cosmopolitan Protestant who knew how to move one to tears without brutality. Stricken by a long illness, Ary Scheffer passed away in Argenteuil on June 15, 1858, after experiencing a final period marked by religious works imbued with spirituality. His funeral, celebrated in the Madeleine church in Paris, drew an immense crowd of artists, writers, and high-ranking political figures, testifying to the esteem in which he was held. His influence on French Romantic painting was already fading at the twilight of his life, but his legacy remained vivid, notably in Holland, where he was born in 1795.
Read on Wikipedia Ary Scheffer
#13Paul Delaroche
#14Horace Vernet
Horace Vernet was born in Paris on June 30, 1789, the year of revolutionary storms, into a lineage where painting was almost a matter of genetic inheritance. His grandfather Joseph had immortalized Mediterranean ports, his father Carle reigned over equestrian painting. Horace could hardly escape such a chromatic destiny. A natural pupil of his father, he quickly distinguished himself, exhibiting at the Living room as early as 1812 and winning the gold medal in 1814 for a Combat of Nazareth. His style, at the crossroads of Romanticism and an academic vein tinged with patriotism, was marked by dazzling virtuosity and a fondness for military scenes, Napoleonic battles, and Orientalist subjects. Official painter of the armies under the Restoration, he traveled through Italy, Algeria, and Russia, bringing back abundant material from each journey. The Battle of Bouvines and The Capture of the Smalah of Abd-el-Kader count among his most striking canvases, not to mention his portraits of European sovereigns, which he executed with the ease of a cosmopolitan dandy. A contemporary of Géricault and Delacroix, Vernet occupies a singular place in Romanticism: less tormented than the first, less flamboyant than the second, he embodies an official and heroic Romanticism where military glory takes precedence over spleen. Director of the Académie de France in Rome from 1829 to 1835, he imposed a model of the traveling painter, swift and brilliant, a million miles from the cursed artist.
Read on Wikipedia Horace Vernet
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#15Richard Parkes Bonington
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#16Eugène Isabey
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#17Eugène Lami
Eugène Lami (1800-1890) is one of the great French Romantic watercolorists and lithographers. Born in Paris into a family of officers, he was first a pupil of Horace Vernet and Louis-Léopold Boilly, before entering the École des Beaux-Arts in 1816. He traveled to England, Scotland, Italy, and Spain, from which he brought back refined watercolors, regatta scenes, fox hunts, and aristocratic interiors. His illustrations for the Book of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1828) and for Balzac's Droll Stories are milestones in the history of French Romantic lithography. He became the official watercolorist of the court of Louis-Philippe, and exhibited regularly at the Living room. He died in 1890, covered in honors, after more than sixty years of career. A Lami reproduction is the aristocratic elegance of the 19th century captured in watercolor.
Read on Wikipedia Eugène Lami
#18John Martin
#19Samuel Palmer
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#20Francis Danby
Germanic, Slavic, Italian, and American schools (1810-1880)
Nazarenes, Russian school, Romantic Italy, and the Hudson River
Romanticism goes international. The German Nazarenes (Overbeck, Schnorr, Carolsfeld) reinvent medieval religious art; Carl Blechen explores the folk tale and the ruin. Karl Friedrich Lessing, Karl Bryullov, Orest Kiprensky, Vasily Tropinin, and Ivan Aivazovsky found the Russian Romantic school, between Byzantine classicism and sublime maritime storms. Ford Madox Brown paves the way for the British Pre-Raphaelites. Across the Atlantic, Thomas Cole, Asher Brown Durand, and Albert Bierstadt invent the American Hudson River School, which would make the landscapes of the New World the last great adventure of the Romantic sublime.
#21Thomas Cole
#22Asher Brown Durand
Asher Brown Durand (1796-1886) is the leading figure of the American Hudson River School, one of the founding fathers of Romantic landscape painting in the United States. Born in Maplewood, New Jersey, he first apprenticed with an engraver, then trained in painting under Thomas Cole. He co-founded the National Academy of Design in 1826 and became its president in 1845. His 1853 trip to Europe, accompanied by the painter John Frederick Kensett, revealed his admiration for the Dutch masters and Constable. He then settled in New York and painted his grand landscapes of the Adirondacks and the Catskills, where the American wilderness is treated with the same sublime breath as Turner's Alps or Constable's countryside. Kindred Spirits (1849), his tribute to Thomas Cole who had died the previous year, is the iconic work of the American school. A Durand reproduction is the American Great North without leaving your couch. After a career devoted to American Romantic landscape painting, he retired to New Jersey, where he pursued his meticulous nature studies well into old age. Elected the first president of the National Academy of Design, he retained considerable influence over the younger generation of painters until his death on September 17, 1886, in Jefferson Village, his hometown.
Read on Wikipedia Asher Brown Durand
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#23Ford Madox Brown
#24Carl Blechen
Carl Blechen (1798-1840) is one of the most inventive German Romantic landscapists, too long forgotten in favor of Friedrich. Born in Cottbus to a family of small shopkeepers, he studied at the Berlin Academy from 1815 onward. His Italian landscapes, painted during a stay in Rome in 1828-1829, broke with Friedrich's idealism through a vibrant, almost expressionistic touch, and a new attention to light effects and industrial architecture. His views of Trier Cathedral, his harbor scenes of Berlin, his nocturnal undergrowth are astonishingly modern. King Frederick William IV of Prussia, who admired him, granted him a pension. But Blechen suffered from psychological troubles and died at 42, in Berlin, in 1840. A Blechen reproduction is Romantic Germany seen by a painter who invented electric light ahead of his time. Struck by severe depression, he had to leave his chair at the Berlin Academy in 1835 and was institutionalized several times. Exhausted by illness, he passed away in poverty in Berlin on July 23, 1840, at only forty-two. Long forgotten, his expressionistic-before-its-time work was truly rediscovered only at the beginning of the twentieth century, influencing the moderns.
Read on Wikipedia Carl Blechen
#25Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld
Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1794-1872) is one of the leading masters of the German Nazarene movement, halfway between Romanticism and a return to the Middle Ages. Born in Leipzig, he studied in Vienna and then in Rome, where he joined the Brotherhood of Saint Luke alongside Friedrich Overbeck and Peter von Cornelius. Back in Germany in 1827, he was appointed professor at the Munich Academy and later at the Dresden Academy. He is best known for his monumental Bible illustrations (Bibel in Bildern, 1860), one of the great illustrated books of the nineteenth century, reprinted more than 200 times. His large frescoes in the Hall of Patience at the Munich Palace illustrate the history of Charlemagne. A Schnorr reproduction is the Germany of the Holy Roman Empire seen by a Romantic who believed in angels. Schnorr marked the break between late Romanticism and the return to German neo-Gothic. His frescoes, stained-glass windows, and biblical illustrations fed the German national imagination into the twentieth century, in the full Wagnerian period. Retired from the Dresden Academy in 1871, he devoted himself to the definitive edition of his famous illustrated Bible, published that same year in Leipzig, which had a considerable impact in the German-speaking world. He passed away on May 24, 1872, in Dresden, leaving the image of a master faithful to Nazarene ideals to the very end.
Read on Wikipedia Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld
#26Karl Friedrich Lessing
Karl Friedrich Lessing (1808-1880) is one of the great history painters of German Romanticism. Born in Dresden into a family of artists — he is the nephew of the poet Gotthold Ephraim Lessing — he studied at the Berlin Academy and then in Düsseldorf under Wilhelm von Schadow. From 1830 onward, he established himself as a specialist in historical and religious subjects, in the lineage of the Nazarenes but with a darker, more dramatic intensity. His large canvas Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms (1837) made him the standard-bearer of historical Protestantism, exhibited at the Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Less well known than Friedrich or Runge, Lessing is nonetheless essential for understanding the institutionalization of German Romanticism in the 19th century. He directed the Düsseldorf Academy from 1858 to 1867 and trained an entire generation of history painters. His late landscapes, such as those of the Black Forest, display a sensibility close to the French Barbizon school. He died in 1880, leaving behind a prolific body of work, now dispersed among Berlin, Dresden and Düsseldorf, and a considerable influence on European historicism.
Read on Wikipedia Karl Friedrich Lessing
#27Karl Bryullov
Karl Bryullov (1799-1852) is the Russian master who electrified Slavic Romanticism. Born in Saint Petersburg into a family of artists (his father was a sculptor, as was his grandfather), he studied at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, then in Rome, where he spent nearly 12 years. The Last Day of Pompeii (1830-1833), his monumental canvas, caused a sensation throughout Europe: it depicts the eruption of Vesuvius at the height of the drama, with astonishing archaeological precision and a sense of the pathos that harks back to Michelangelo. Back in Russia, he became a portraitist of the aristocracy, painting officers, poets and society ladies with an elegant touch. He traveled to Spain, to Malaga, where he painted Moorish women with a discreet sensuality. Bryullov died in 1852 near Manziana in Italy. A Bryullov reproduction is the Russian Empire at its creative peak, halfway between academicism and incandescent Romanticism.
Read on Wikipedia Karl Bryullov
#28Orest Kiprensky
Orest Kiprensky was born in 1782 on the banks of the Neva, in Saint Petersburg, into a family of former court serfs. His father was a man of modest means, but his mother possessed a rare artistic instinct. Legend has it that she noted, almost ironically, the name Orest on the parish register — "so that he may be as wild as the hero." The child did not disappoint: sent to the Imperial Academy of Arts as early as 1788, he became one of its most precocious pupils, working under the guidance of Chatsky and Lossenko. In 1805, he won the grand gold medal for a Portrait of the Actor Vakhtangov, a distinction that opened the doors of the imperial pension in Saint Petersburg. He died in Rome in 1836, barely fifty-four years old, leaving behind an unfinished but decisive body of work for Russian art. His genius, matured under the Italian sky, continued to radiate long after his death. His portraits, in which vibrate an almost musical sensibility and an inner nobility, became models for the following generation, inspiring notably Bryullov and the circle of the Academy. Beyond national borders, his romantic elegance fueled the dialogue between Slavic and Western schools.
Read on Wikipedia Orest Kiprensky
#29Vasily Tropinin
#30Ivan Aivazovsky
Ivan Aivazovsky (1817-1900) is the most famous of all Romantic marine painters. Born in Feodosia in Crimea into an Armenian family, he entered the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg at 17, then departed for Italy, where he became official painter of the Neapolitan navy. Back in Russia, he painted thousands of seascapes, naval battles, shipwreck scenes, and sunsets over the Black Sea with an extraordinary chromatic virtuosity. The Ninth Wave (1850), his most celebrated canvas, is held at the Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg. He traveled to Egypt, Greece, and France, where he was made a Knight of the Legion of Honor in 1857. He painted until his death in 1900 in Feodosia, a city of which he was mayor and for which he financed the opening of an art school. An Aivazovsky reproduction is the sea as one dreams it: unleashed yet sublime.
Read on Wikipedia Ivan Aivazovsky
Successors, illustrators, and cosmopolitans (1830-1880)
Daumier, Corot, Doré — Romanticism through the long haul
At the heart of the 19th century, the Romantic spirit endures and transforms. Honoré Daumier turns it into a vehicle for social satire, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot into a pretext for the modern landscape, Gustave Doré into a mass medium through illustration. Théodore Chassériau synthesizes Delacroix and Ingres in sumptuous Orientalist nudes. François-Auguste Biard explores the Orientalist and polar margins, Thomas Couture worldly and historical scenes. Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller embodies late Romanticism in Austria, while Leonardo Alenza and Eugenio Lucas Velázquez carry on Goya's legacy in Spain.
#31Théodore Chassériau
#32François-Auguste Biard
#33Honoré Daumier
Honoré Daumier (1808-1879) is one of the greatest French artists of the 19th century — simultaneously painter, sculptor, draftsman, and caricaturist. Born in Marseille into a modest family, he moved to Paris and became the regular illustrator of the satirical journal La Caricature, then of Le Charivari. His political lithographs — Louis-Philippe as a pear, the King of the Franks as Gargantua — earned him six months in prison in 1832. Alongside this weekly output (nearly 4,000 lithographs over forty years), Daumier painted in oil street scenes, portraits, theatrical scenes, and courtroom scenes that are absolute masterpieces. The Third-Class Carriage (c. 1862-1864), The Blind Men Playing (c. 1855-1860), and The Laundress (c. 1860-1862) are held at the Musée d'Orsay. Nearly blind in his final years, Daumier died at Valmondois in 1879. A Daumier reproduction is the art of looking at the people with the precision of an entomologist and the tenderness of a brother. Struck by blindness and poverty in his final years, he withdrew to Valmondois, where he died on 10 February 1879, nearly forgotten by the general public. It was in this village in the Val-d'Oise that a few friends, including Corot, watched over his body. His posthumous recognition began in 1878 with an exhibition, then grew when Monet organized the sale of his studio in 1883, finally revealing to the public the modernity of his sculpted and painted work.
Read on Wikipedia Honoré Daumier
#34Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875) is the landscape painter who paved the way for Impressionism while remaining faithful to the Romanticism of his youth. Born in Paris into a family of cloth merchants, he became a painter late in life: he entered Achille Etna Michallon's studio only in 1822, after his father's death, then joined the atelier of Jean-Victor Bertin. He traveled to Italy from 1825 to 1828, bringing back views of Rome and the Roman countryside in a silvery light that revolutionized French landscape painting. Back in Paris, he painted Barbizon, Fontainebleau, and the banks of the Seine in a vaporous atmosphere that foreshadows the Impressionists. He became one of the most celebrated painters of his time, exhibited seven times at the Living room, and gave many canvases to his friends. At the end of his life, he painted female figures in landscapes, weightless silvery phantoms. Corot died in 1875, mourned by all the young painters. A Corot reproduction is the light of an early French morning fixed on canvas. His final years were marked by a late but brilliant glory, crowned by the Légion d'honneur in 1867 and a second medal at the Exposition universelle. Victim of a stroke in 1874, he passed away in Paris on 22 February 1875, in his studio on rue du Paradis-Poissonnière. His twilight landscapes, bathed in silvery light, still exert a profound influence on modern art.
Read on Wikipedia Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
#35William Holman Hunt
#36Thomas Couture
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#37Gustave Doré
#38Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller
#39Leonardo Alenza
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#40Eugenio Lucas Velázquez
Symbolist, Pre-Raphaelite and Italian extensions (1850-1900)
Moreau, Rossetti, Millais, Hayez — Post-Romanticism
The last embers of Romanticism: the British Pre-Raphaelites (Rossetti, Millais, Hunt, Burne-Jones) reinvent an idealized Middle Ages. On the French side, Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, Alexandre Cabanel, and William-Adolphe Bouguereau let dream and allegory float above academicism. In Russia, Mikhail Vrubel paves the way for Symbolism and Art Nouveau. In Italy, Francesco Hayez embodies the final wave of Italian Romanticism with The Kiss (1859), a manifesto of a national sensibility that would survive until unification. Across the Atlantic, Thomas Moran brings up the rear around 1900, just as modernism sweeps everything before it.
#41Francesco Hayez
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#42Albert Bierstadt
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#43Thomas Moran
#44Alexandre Cabanel
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#45William-Adolphe Bouguereau
William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) is the absolute master of French academic painting of the second half of the 19th century. Born in La Rochelle, he won the Prix de Rome in 1850 and spent his entire career in Paris. His mythological female nudes, biblical scenes, portraits of children, and religious compositions attained a technical virtuosity matched by no other, earning him immense fame in his lifetime — he was a member of the Institut, a Commander of the Legion of Honor, and exhibited worldwide. At the same time, he was one of the favorite targets of modern painters — Manet, Degas, Monet, and the Impressionists considered him the embodiment of stuffy academicism. Long forgotten, his work has enjoyed a renewed interest since the 1980s for its formal perfection. He also represents an extension of Romanticism: his nymphs, angels, and madonnas retain the intimate emotion and taste for pathos that animated Géricault and Delacroix. He died in 1905, leaving more than 800 paintings, now scattered across museums worldwide. His long career ended in the serenity of a recognition won over a wide public, while the avant-garde preferred Manet and the Impressionists. Afflicted with heart trouble, he passed away on August 19, 1905, in his native La Rochelle, at the age of eighty, leaving a monumental body of work of more than eight hundred paintings.
Read on Wikipedia William-Adolphe Bouguereau
#46Gustave Moreau
Born in Paris in 1826, Gustave Moreau grew up in a family where art coursed through the veins rather than being poured into them: his father, an architect, and his mother, a musician, gave him an ideal breeding ground in which to flourish as a thwarted aesthete. A mediocre student at the Collège Sainte-Barbe, he already preferred drawing mythological figures in his notebooks to listening to his Greek professors. It was in 1846, after his father's death, that he finally entered the École des Beaux-Arts in the studio of François-Édouard Picot, where he learned the rigor of classical drawing. He completed his training with a long journey to Italy, notably to Rome, where he copied Raphael and Michelangelo with fervor while absorbing the Renaissance. Back in Paris, he deliberately chose marginality: no showy official career, no annual Living room.
Read on Wikipedia Gustave Moreau
#47Odilon Redon
Redon, Odilon (Bertrand-Jean Redon, called Odilon)". Born in Bordeaux in 1840, this son of bourgeois steeped in provincial ease might have led a peaceful life in his father's business had a childhood illness — notably a case of measles complicated by a nervous collapse around the age of eleven — not forced him into long months of solitude, during which he discovered, in the reading of Buffon and the marginal drawings he scribbled, the interior territories that would become his preferred material. Enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1864, he endured the academic teaching of Rodolphe Bresdin, a fantastic and bohemian engraver, who infected him with the virus of the black and the fantastical. Rejected by the official Living room, refusing the triumphant Impressionism, Redon devoted two decades to an art deemed marginal: his charcoals and lithographs, gathered in collections such as In Dreams (1879) or The Closed Eyes (1890), conjure up a bestiary of nightmare in which titanic spiders, Cyclopean profiles, and metaphysical flowers meet — evoking Goya as much as Gustave Moreau. The meeting with his wife Camille Falte in 1880, followed by the influence of botany and Japonism, brought him after 1890 a second chromatic wind: his vivid pastels, laden with peonies, poppies, and floating bouquets, reveal a chromatic sensuality that contrasts with the earlier darkness.
Read on Wikipedia Odilon Redon
#48Mikhail Vrubel
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#49Dante Gabriel Rossetti
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#50John Everett Millais
John Everett Millais was born in 1829 in Southampton, into a family originally from Jersey. Prodigiiously precocious, he entered the Royal Academy Schools at the age of eleven, becoming the youngest student ever admitted to that venerable institution. His talent blossomed so early that Charles Dickens himself remarked, not without a touch of envy, on this "little prodigy" already capable of unsettling the most seasoned juries. Millais died in London on 13 August 1896, worn down by throat cancer. The first painter to be raised to a baronetcy in 1885, he received the supreme honor of being interred in St Paul's Cathedral, alongside the glories of the Empire. He spent eleven years at the Royal Academy in London, where he became the youngest student ever admitted. In 1848, he co-founded, with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a movement that championed a return to the sincerity of the Italian primitives. His early works, such as Christ in the House of His Parents in 1850, sparked fierce controversy for their raw realism. The masterpiece Ophelia, painted in 1852 from a model lying in a bathtub, illustrates his collaboration with John Ruskin and became an icon of the movement. President of the Royal Academy from 1896, knighted in 1885, he received the honors of the British Crown. He died in London on 13 August 1896, leaving an abundant body of work that profoundly shaped Victorian painting.
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