n the course of its history, Western painting has taken several major forms, involving distinctive media and techniques. The techniques employed in drawing, however, are basic to all painting, except perhaps the most recent avant-garde forms. Fresco painting, which reached its heights in the late Middle Ages and throughout the Renaissance, involves the application of paint to wet, or fresh (Italian fresco), plaster or to dry plaster (see Fresco). Tempera painting, another older form, involves the use of powdered pigments mixed with egg yolk applied to a prepared surface—usually a wood panel covered with linen. Oil painting, which largely supplanted the use of fresco and tempera during the Renaissance, was traditionally thought to have been developed in the late Middle Ages by the Flemish brothers Jan van Eyck and Hubert van Eyck; it is now believed to have been invented much earlier. Other techniques are enamel, encaustic painting, gouache, grisaille, and watercolor painting. The use of acrylic paints has become very popular in recent times; this water-based medium is easily applied, dries quickly, and does not darken with the passage of time.

Over the centuries, different artistic methods, styles, and theories—ways of thinking about the purposes of art—have succeeded one another, only to appear again, generally with modifications, in other times. Thus, a method of painting thought to have been used by cave painters involved blowing pigments through tubes onto the cave walls; a somewhat analogous method is that of those 20th-century painters who dribble pigments from their brushes onto canvas. In the Renaissance, fresco painting on walls and ceilings largely gave way to easel painting in oils, but wall painting returned to popularity in the 20th century—for example, in the work of the Mexican muralists . The impulse to express intense emotion in art links painters as different as El Greco in 16th-century Spain and the German expressionists of the 20th century. At the opposite pole from expressionist attempts to reveal inner reality, there have always been painters committed to the exact representation of outward appearances. Realism and symbolism, classical restraint and romantic passion, have alternated throughout the history of painting, revealing significant affinities and influences.

The influence of the Italian Renaissance affected northern Europe at the beginning of the 15th century, but this renewal of artistic and cultural activity was not based on classical antiquity. Rather, it was marked by an acute interest in human beings and their surroundings and by a meticulous recording of natural detail in paintings. Generally speaking, an interest in ancient art and a knowledge of linear perspective did not develop in the north until the 16th century, and even then, not all artists availed themselves of the discoveries that were made in Italy.

One of the most important of 15th-century Netherlandish painters was Jan van Eyck who, with some assistance from his brother Hubert, painted the remarkable polyptych (many-paneled) Ghent Altarpiece (completed 1432, Church of Saint Bavon, Ghent, Belgium). Its 24 panels contain hundreds of figures, as well as a rich variety of vegetation so carefully rendered that more than 30 plant species can be identified. Other outstanding Flemish artists of the period were Rogier van der Weyden, who focused on emotional drama in his religious paintings; Hans Memling, who created delicate, graceful figures against ethereal backgrounds; and Hugo van der Goes, who painted a superb altarpiece (1476?, Uffizi, Florence) with a wealth of precise details for the Italian Portinari family. Characteristic of all these artists was the use of symbols, or iconography. Objects stood not simply for themselves but conveyed abstract ideas; a crystal vase, for example, meant purity. Linear perspective was unknown among the Flemish; nevertheless, their achievements with oil glazes and tempera have never been surpassed.

In France, the most important painter of this period was Jean Fouquet, a superb portraitist as well as a miniaturist, who was influenced both by earlier Flemish art and contemporary Italian painting. Evidence of his visit to Italy in the 1440s is seen in the representation of an Italian Renaissance church in the background of one of the panels (1450?) of the two-panel devotional painting known as the Melun Diptych. One panel is in Berlin, Germany, at the Staatliche Museen and the other is in Antwerp, Belgium, at the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts.

Great masterpieces were created in the early 1500s by painters who, more interested in the expressive value of their subjects, ignored perspective, anatomy, and correct proportions. An example is the Garden of Earthly Delights (about 1505 to about 1510, Prado, Madrid), a triptych by the Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch; it is a surreal conglomeration of sensuously suggestive human and animal shapes and strange plant forms. Another example of the characteristic 16th-century northern exaggeration of human form is the profoundly moving work, Isenheim Altarpiece (1512-1515?, Unterlinden Museum, Colmar, France), by the German painter Matthias Grünewald. In contrast, another German artist, Albrecht Dürer, truly the Renaissance genius of the north, is renowned for his superb rendition of the human figure. A Christian humanist whose scientific curiosity was comparable to that of Leonardo, Dürer was inspired by the Dutch philosopher Desiderius Erasmus and by Martin Luther—as demonstrated in the engraving Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513) and the twin paintings the Four Apostles (1526?, Alte Pinakothek, Munich), both of which display his remarkable draftsmanship. Still another renowned German-born artist was Hans Holbein the Younger, who is principally remembered for his portraits, especially those of England’s Henry VIII and Sir Thomas More.

Among the 16th-century Netherlandish painters, Pieter Bruegel the Elder is most notable; his scenes of peasant life, many of which are satirical comments on human folly, are highly esteemed. Drawing on myth, parables, and proverbs, Bruegel’s engaging paintings have charmed viewers for more than 400 years.

A revolution in painting took place in the latter half of the 18th century, as chaste neoclassicism superseded the exuberant rococo style. This classical revival in the arts was brought about by several occurrences. First, much archaeological excavation began to be done in the mid-18th century in Italy and Greece; books were published containing drawings of ancient buildings, which were eagerly copied by English and French architects. Second, in 1755 the German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann published his influential essay Gedanken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture), praising Greek sculpture. This work impressed, among others, four foreign artists living in Rome. They were the Scotsman Gavin Hamilton, the German Anton Raphael Mengs, the Swiss Angelica Kauffmann, and the American Benjamin West; all were inspired to create paintings with themes based on classical literature.

It was, however, a French painter—Jacques-Louis David—who became the leading proponent of neoclassicism. He, too, was imbued with classical influences from his stay in Rome, as well as from an earlier source, the paintings of Poussin, the 17th-century French classicist. David’s sober style was in harmony with the ideals of the French Revolution. Such a painting as the Oath of the Horatii (1784-1785, Louvre) inspired patriotism; others, such as the Death of Socrates (1787, Metropolitan Museum), preached stoicism and self-sacrifice. Not only did David’s subject matter have its sources in ancient history and classical myth, but the form of his figures was based on ancient sculpture. David’s great successor was Jean-August-Dominique Ingres, whose cool serenity of line and tone and painstaking attention to details—as in his striking portrait La comtesse d’Haussonville (1845, Frick Collection, New York City)—became identified with the academic tradition in France. Nevertheless, elements of the romantic trend soon to succeed neoclassicism can be found in Ingres’s interest in non-European subjects, as demonstrated by several paintings of odalisques (concubines or women in a harem).

Among the many other French painters influenced by David were several women who figured prominently among his followers. Some of the most outstanding were Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Marie Guillemine Benoist, and Constance Marie Charpentier. Some of the works of these painters have in the past been mistakenly attributed to David; recent scholarship has been attempting to identify their individual contributions. See Neoclassical Art and Architecture.

In turning to everyday subject matter, the mid-19th-century realist artists set a precedent for the next generation of the French avant-garde. Édouard Manet was the major innovator of the 1860s, and his style was a precursor of impressionism. Like Courbet, Manet found many of his subjects in the life around him: Parisians at ease in restaurants, in parks, or boating. Manet also borrowed themes and compositions from earlier masters—Velázquez and Goya—and reworked them in accordance with contemporary life, in his own style, flattening the figures and neutralizing the emotional expressions. For these and other innovations, such as his free, sketchy brushwork and broad patches of color juxtaposed without transition, he is often referred to as the first modern painter.

The most brilliant master of line in the late 19th century was Edgar Degas, who favored subjects in movement, as though caught by a candid camera. While the immediacy of his approach and his interest in painting contemporary life allies Degas with the impressionists, he differed from them in several ways. He did not dissolve form as radically as they did and he was more concerned with painting figures in interiors than landscapes. Degas’s style of composition was influenced by photography and by Japanese prints, which were then being widely circulated in Paris and were very popular with many artists of the day. Although his paintings of ballet dancers, musicians, laundresses, and bathing women appear casual and unstudied, the compositions, with their oblique views and asymmetrical balance, were in fact carefully calculated. Degas’s portraiture is also unique in its integration of figures with their settings and in its revelation of personality. A master of many techniques, Degas is particularly noted for his use of pastels (powdered pigments mixed with gum; see Crayon), with which he achieved unusually rich effects by roughly hatching one layer of intense color over another.

The impressionist style was evolved by painters who were increasingly interested in studying the effects of light on objects—how light colors shadows and dissolves objects—and in transferring their observations directly to the canvas. Their disregard for exact details of form and their use of small, separate touches of pure color—techniques in complete contrast to the prevailing academic style—aroused the animosity of both the critics and the public. Nearly 20 years elapsed before Claude Monet, impressionism’s leading exponent, achieved recognition. Monet’s chief interest was landscape, which he rendered in all kinds of weather and in various seasons; he captured the sparkling effects of sunlight on trees in springtime and the drab light of winter on snow-tracked ground. In his late years, Monet devoted himself to painting the exquisite gardens and water lily ponds he had created at his home in Giverny; their forms became increasingly evanescent as he translated them into the shimmering play of light and color.

Camille Pissarro was also one of the creators of impressionism, as was Pierre Auguste Renoir. Pissarro’s favorite motifs were landscapes, river scenes, views of Paris streets, and figures of peasants at work. Renoir’s interests were similar to those of both Monet and Pissarro, but he also did a great number of portraits and figure paintings; his many studies of female nudes, with their pearlescent skin tones, are particularly famous.

Frequently, the impressionists worked outdoors side by side, as was often the case with Renoir and Monet. In 1869, for example, they both did renditions of La grenouillère (The Frog Pond); Monet’s hangs in the Metropolitan Museum, Renoir’s in the National Museum, Stockholm. In the early 1870s a similar relationship existed between Pissarro and Paul Cézanne; Pissarro did not dissolve forms as radically as did the other impressionists, and this may have persuaded Cézanne to work with him, for Cézanne’s interests were to lead him in other directions. While the impressionists were occupied with rendering the transitory, such as the changing effects of light, Cézanne was concerned with the eternal aspects of nature and thus sought its structural principles, as in his numerous late canvases of Mont Sainte-Victoire. Painted during the last years of his life, these studies are the result of Cézanne’s attempt to render the color and volume of a mountain form seen from a distance. Cézanne’s concern for geometric form was a major influence on the development of cubism.

For a brief period in the 1880s Pissarro was drawn to a new technique, an outgrowth of impressionism developed by Georges Seurat, known as divisionism or pointillism. Seurat and his neoimpressionist followers modified the loose brushstrokes characteristic of impressionist style into precise dots of pure pigment, juxtaposing tiny areas of complementary colors on the canvas surface. Seurat’s theories were derived from his readings in 19th-century scientific and aesthetic texts on color. The result of his painstaking technique is supremely visible in one of his most spectacular works, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte (1884-1886, Art Institute of Chicago).

Three major artists of the late 19th century showed influences of impressionism in their early works but went on to develop distinctively individual postimpressionist styles: the Dutch-born Vincent van Gogh and the French artists Paul Gauguin and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Van Gogh, like Pissarro, experimented briefly with color division. Typical of his developed style, however, was the use of pure color applied thickly in flickering strokes, conveying intense emotional expression. Many of his canvases, especially those of wind-tossed cypress trees and wheat fields under stormy skies, are expressions of his own moods as reflected in the forces of nature. Van Gogh’s style greatly influenced the northern European painters who in the early 20th century developed expressionism.

The work of his colleague Gauguin also displays distortions of line and color, but it is quite different from van Gogh’s, being symbolic rather than expressionistic. Areas of flat, bold colors form decorative patterns, heavily outlined. Gauguin was the central figure of a new movement known as synthetism or symbolism (see Symbolist Movement); his immediate followers, a group active during the 1890s, were called the Nabis.

In still another direction, Toulouse-Lautrec was largely a painter of people, choosing as his subjects cabaret singers, dance-hall performers, and prostitutes; these figures were an expression of the social decay of Paris in the so-called Gay Nineties. Like many artists—such as Manet, Degas, and the American Mary Cassatt—he was influenced by the flat style and seemingly casual composition of Japanese prints. Toulouse-Lautrec’s excellent sense of line is seen also in his drawings and color lithographs; he contributed greatly to this last medium, particularly with his posters for the Moulin Rouge and other Parisian places of entertainment. See Postimpressionism.