As the French Revolution tore apart society in 1793, art also changed drastically. To counter Romanticism’s indulgences, the Barbizon painters turned toward more accurate portrayals of nature.
Le Brun instituted a systematic instruction system which focused on perspective and draftsmanship, emphasizing drawing as a form of reality simulation while color added only aesthetic appeal.
Cave Art
France boasts some of the earliest cave paintings ever discovered in existence, dating back 35,000 years and depicting a babirusa (a type of pig with stick legs and no tusks) depicted here as part of a human figurative painting – considered to be one of the first figurative paintings ever painted in human history.
Chauvet and Lascaux cave art was painted on a rough surface using red and yellow ochre, hematite, manganese oxide and charcoal paints, finger tracing techniques and hand stencils by artists using finger tracing techniques; subjects mostly included wild animals of both horse species as well as other scenes and hands painted onto these cave walls.
Chauvet Cave drawings demonstrate an early artistic technique called stump drawing, in which an artist scrapes or cleans walls before painting, thus prolonging pigment quality over time.
Renaissance
Renaissance (meaning rebirth) refers to the rediscovery and revival of art and literary culture from Antiquity that took place across Europe beginning with Italy during the 14th century and spreading later across. Francis I and Louis XIV of France were keen patrons of art while great court painters such as Jean Clouet, Charles Le Brun and Nicolas Poussin spread their influence widely through patronage of arts patronage and patronage of artists during this era.
Painting was also rapidly evolving from religious subject matter and portraiture to depictions of daily life and classical myths, while sculpture had also evolved beyond its Gothic period origins into more naturalistic treatments that emulated the exquisite detail found in Greek and Roman masterpieces surviving today. This new philosophy called Humanism sought to elevate humanity’s role beyond religious restrictions.
Rococo
Rococo period artists in France aimed for greater intimacy and ease of expression through art styles known as Rococo, named for the shells and pebbles encrusted on garden grottoes known as Rocaille (shells encrusted onto garden grottoes encased by glass or porcelain panels encrusted with shells), featuring arabesques with vibrant pastel tints.
Watteau and his contemporaries painted fetes galantes (i.e. scenes of elegant people relaxing in parks or gardens). Watteau frequently depicted couples and groups dressed up against picturesque backgrounds.
Fragonard painted lovers as his subjects, as evidenced by The Meeting where a young man climbs a ladder to visit his beloved at her parents’ estate. Francois Boucher created more erotica-tinged works than Fragonard; both styles began losing favor as 1740 approached, as Enlightenment thinkers such as Diderot called for nobler art while Voltaire encouraged an end to excess. By 1780 it had all but died out.
Enlightenment
Rococo gave way to something more serious with Neoclassicism as an art movement, becoming the form that could accommodate both conformity and rebellion – French artist Jacques-Louis David made this style famous through his paintings depicting scenes from the French Revolution such as one leader lying dead in a bathtub (known as The Death of Marat).
Philosophers like Voltaire promoted individual liberties and religious toleration, emphasizing humanity’s capacity for reasoning as well as its inherent ability for moral behavior.
Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica popularized empiricism as an effective way of increasing our knowledge of our universe – this was an early precursor of modern science. Artists such as Louise Bourgeois embraced this philosophy within her multidimensional oeuvre.
Impressionism
At first, it can be hard to comprehend, but in 1860s Paris the Impressionist movement was an unexpected surprise. Rejecting academic tradition’s historical subject matter and idealized treatment, Impressionist artists (Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Camille Pissarro among them) used synthetic pigments combined with loose brushwork and new techniques such as plein air painting to capture fleeting light effects and atmospheric changes on canvas canvases. They often painted scenes of everyday life such as landscapes or city streets as subjects for their paintings en plein air paintings.
As contemporary society was changing dramatically around them, these artists chronicled it through paintings like Monet’s Impression, soleil levant. The impressionist movement, coined after Monet’s painting titled Impression, soleil levant by Claude Monet, served as a precursor for other 20th-century movements like Fauvism and cubism; lasting until 1886 with independent exhibitions organized as an official challenge to Academy Salon exhibitions sponsored by state government bodies like Academie Salon.