Both Neoclassicism and Romanticism coincided with the democratic movements of the late 1770s, and both artistic styles placed value on emotional content and the idea of "natural man". While Neoclassicism celebrated heroism in service of the State and human reason and rationality, Romanticism emphasized imagination, intuition, and the extremes of subjective experience. The Romantic movement fostered the emergence of the modern idea of the artist as anti-authoritarian rebel genius. Romantic works depict a range of human emotions from joy and awe to terror and agony, and artists like Gericault and Turner expressed moral outrage over contemporary events in history paintings and landscape.

Realist artists also responded to contemporary events, but instead of painting from the imagination, they presented the subject matter of everyday life Ð scenes that they observed and restaged Ð on a grand scale formerly reserved for history painting. The consummate Realist painter in mid-nineteenth-century France, Gustave Courbet painted unsentimental canvasses that featured the provincial citizens of his native Ornans in works like Burial at Ornans and Young Ladies of the Village. Edouard Manet scandalized both the critics and public with works that flouted middle class morality (Le DŽjeuner sur l'Herbe; Olympia). Manet's use of broad areas of flat color with little shading or modeling (the "color patch") reasserted the two-dimensionality of painting on canvas and influenced the work of the Impressionists.

Building on the achievements of Realist artists, the Impressionists painted scenes of modern life and middle class leisure in and around Paris. They often painted directly from nature, creating canvasses "en plein air," or out-of-doors, in front of the urban or suburban landscape. They attempted to capture the transitory and ephemeral character of the modern city and landscape, with special attention to the effects of light and optical theory, as is especially clear in the serial paintings of Claude Monet. Impressionist canvasses reject traditional means of illusionism such as linear perspective, foreshortening, contour shading and modeling. Instead of creating the illusion of depth, the Impressionists reinforced the flatness of the canvas through the build-up of individual brushstrokes of pure, unblended color (optical color mixture).

The Post-Impressionists emerged as critics of the seeming lack of structure and symbolic content in Impressionist painting. They rejected the Impressionists' goal of capturing the momentary and sought to convey the permanent, but they remained indebted to the Impressionists' individualized brushstrokes and liberated color. Paul Cezanne and Georges Seurat took a more intellectual approach to painting. While Seurat utilized color theory and the Divisionist style to depict scenes of Parisian nightlife and outdoor leisure, Cezanne used cubic, "axe-cut" brushstrokes, geometricized forms, and pure color to reinterpret the "grand" themes of Western painting such as landscape and still life. Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh, by contrast, strove for greater emotional and symbolic content in their paintings. Both artists viewed the city as alienating rather than utopian. They each sought creative inspiration in the pre- industrial world, Van Gogh in the South of France and Gauguin in Brittany and Tahiti. While both artists employ anti-naturalistic colors, Van Gogh's compositions also rely for expressive effect on his characteristic gestural brushstroke and impasto surface.