Modern Art: Realism to Post-Impressionism

Vocabulary flashcards covering the transition from Realism to Impressionism, Post-Impressionist structural innovations, and symbolic expression in the late nineteenth century.

The Gleaners

An 1857 Rural Realist painting by Jean-François Millet portraying peasant women gleaning discarded wheat scraps from harvested fields.

The Stonebreakers

An 1850 Realist work by Gustave Courbet depicting two rural day laborers at work breaking rocks along a roadside.

Burial at Ornans

An 1849–50 monumental canvas by Gustave Courbet depicting a provincial funeral in his hometown, rendering an ordinary rural event on a grand historical scale.

Venus of Urbino

A 1538 Italian Renaissance painting by Titian depicting a reclining nude, which provided the classical compositional precedent for Édouard Manet's Olympia.

Olympia

An 1863 painting by Édouard Manet depicting a modern nude courtesan staring directly at the viewer, challenging academic ideals of female nudity.

The Third-Class Carriage

A c. 1863–65 Urban Realist painting by Honoré Daumier depicting working-class passengers riding inside a crowded modern railway compartment.

Luncheon on the Grass

An 1863 Suburban Realist painting by Édouard Manet depicting a nude female bather seated outdoors with two clothed contemporary men, based compositionally on Marcantonio Raimondi's Judgment of Paris.

Baron Haussmann's Renovation of Paris

The major mid-nineteenth-century modernization campaign that razed medieval urban quarters to construct wide avenues, public squares, and modern infrastructure such as the Avenue de l'Opéra.

Paris: A Rainy Day

An 1877 painting by Gustave Caillebotte illustrating pedestrians traversing the broad paved streets and modern architectural spaces of Haussmannized Paris.

Copy after Velazquez

An 1865 painted copy by Édouard Manet after Diego Velázquez's Jester Pablo de Valladolid, illustrating the Spanish influence on Manet's use of flat ground and contour without extensive shading.

Japanese Woodblock Prints (Ukiyo-e)

Prints by artists such as Utamaro Kitagawa and Hiroshige Utagawa that influenced nineteenth-century European painters through flattened planes, cropped compositions, and strong contours.

Orchestra of the Paris Opera

An 1868–69 painting by Edgar Degas showing orchestra pit musicians in the foreground with ballet dancers abruptly cropped on stage in the background.

Impression, Sunrise

An 1872 painting by Claude Monet depicting the harbor of Le Havre in shifting mist and light, giving the Impressionist movement its name.

Sunset in Vetheuil

An Impressionist landscape painting by Claude Monet demonstrating optical sensation, dissolved form, and light effects reflected over water.

Bathsheba

A 1654 painting by Rembrandt van Rijn examined to compare classical 'painterly' handling as defined by Heinrich Wölfflin against modern nineteenth-century Impressionist optical techniques.

La Grenouillère

A popular leisure boating resort on the Seine painted side-by-side in 1869 by Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir to capture flickering sunlight and rippling water.

Gare Saint Lazare

An 1877 series of paintings by Claude Monet documenting the industrial interior of a Parisian railway terminal bathed in steam, smoke, and sunlight.

Rouen Cathedral series

An 1894 series of canvases by Claude Monet recording the Gothic facade of Rouen Cathedral across various hours and atmospheric conditions, pushing representation toward abstraction.

Water Lilies

A c. 1920 painting by Claude Monet depicting his water garden at Giverny without a horizon line or sky, dissolving solid space into pure surface reflection.

Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte

An 1884–86 monumental Neo-Impressionist work by Georges Seurat constructed via tiny systematic dots of contrasting paint to depict Parisians relaxing on a suburban island.

Pointillism

The Neo-Impressionist painting technique pioneered by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac based on applying small, distinct dots of color that blend optically in the viewer's eye.

Chromatic Color Wheel

Michel Chevreul's 1864 color diagram detailing complementary colors and laws of simultaneous contrast, which provided the scientific foundation for Pointillism.

A Lane Through the Trees

A c. 1870–73 landscape painting by Camille Corot whose structural arrangement of foliage and path influenced Paul Cézanne's artistic evolution.

Mont Sainte-Victoire series

A group of landscapes created across 1885–95 and 1902–04 by Paul Cézanne exploring geometric spatial planes, tactile brushwork, and structured color relations in southern France.

The Black Clock

An 1867–68 still life painting by Paul Cézanne featuring a giant shell, cup, napkin, and handless mantel clock arranged into bold structural volumes.

The Large Bathers

An 1898–1905 monumental late composition by Paul Cézanne featuring architectural groupings of nude figures integrated into a vaulted tree canopy.

Shoes

An 1886 still life by Vincent van Gogh depicting a worn pair of peasant boots, functioning as an expressive symbol of manual labor and human weariness.

The Potato Eaters

An 1885 early oil painting by Vincent van Gogh showing Dutch peasant laborers gathered around an evening meal under a lamplight, rendered in dark, earthy tones.

The Sower (Van Gogh)

An 1888 painting by Vincent van Gogh produced in Arles, reinterpreting Jean-François Millet's 1850 composition with intense contrasting colors and an oversized sun.

The Artist’s Bedroom at Arles

An 1888 painting by Vincent van Gogh depicting his living quarters in Arles using exaggerated perspective and saturated, unmodulated fields of color influenced by Japanese prints.

Starry Night

An 1889 Post-Impressionist masterpiece painted by Vincent van Gogh while residing at the Saint-Rémy asylum, depicting a dynamic, swirling night sky over a quiet village.

The Calvary

An 1874 work by Alphonse Legros showing Breton women in traditional caps kneeling before a roadside crucifix, serving as a direct precedent for Paul Gauguin's religious Brittany paintings.

Vision after the Sermon

An 1888 Brittany painting by Paul Gauguin depicting Breton parishioners hallucinating Jacob wrestling with the angel across an unmodulated red ground.

The Yellow Christ

An 1889 Post-Impressionist work by Paul Gauguin portraying Breton women praying at the base of a crude, vividly yellow crucifix set within the Breton landscape.

The Night Café

An 1888 painting by Vincent van Gogh set in an Arles café, utilizing clashing reds and greens to convey a claustrophobic, psychologically charged interior atmosphere.

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

An 1897 monumental Tahitian philosophical allegory by Paul Gauguin tracing the human cycle from infancy to old age through symbolic figures in a tropical setting.