19th Century Art: Visual Encyclopaedia of Art

The Visual Encyclopaedia series provide up to 300 beautiful photographic and artwork images, illustrating subjects of perennial cultural interest. Images are accompanied by narrative providing background, brief criticism, and details on relevant museums, brief biographies and time lines.

The 19th century was a pivotal period in Western history, market by revolutionary phase involving not only politics but art and, more broadly speaking, taste. The roots of things change date back to the 1740s, when there was a call for a new kind of art, one that would be useful and educational, both aesthetically and morally, in contrast to the frivolous and "uncommited" tendency of the Rococo. The new model identified with ancient Greece and Rome; it was believed that through the imitation of antiquity, art could aspire to the ideal beauty of true nature.