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While the Davidian Neoclassicist Jean-Dominique Ingres emphasized drawing and composition between 1800 and 1815, Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix broke with the ideas of the past, liberating their sensitivity, composition, and color, and spontaneously resorting to dramatization to strike the imagination and conscience.
Romanticism did not modify pictorial technique; it was a state of mind. Starting in 1863, the year of Delacroix's death, Édouard Manet, claiming his modernity, brought together young painters who distinguished themselves alongside him at the Salon des Refusés. The Realism of Gustave Courbet, Jean-François Millet, Honoré Daumier, and Henri Fantin-Latour also broke with Academicism, viewing daily life and reality in a naturalist, almost photographic style.
On the other hand, Impressionism—represented by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, and Berthe Morisot—was heavily criticized at its inception but marked the definitive break of so-called modern Art from the academic Art dictated by the École des Beaux-Arts, a movement still dominant in the mid-19th century. They no longer sought to imitate but prioritized their subjectivity as artists, working en plein air with form and color, and addressing subjects of daily and contemporary life in an even more intimate way than the Realists. This was an essential stage in the history of painting, and they drew other innovators in their wake.
It was Neo-Impressionism, Symbolism, Synthetism, and the Nabis who combined the perception of reality with their personal experience; they drew inspiration from nature, strongly and freely imprinting it with their imagination and a powerful spiritual dimension. Paul Cézanne, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, Émile Bernard, Paul Sérusier, Pierre Bonnard, Paul Ranson, Maurice Denis, Édouard Vuillard, and Henri-Gabriel Ibels are thus considered the precursors of the great adventure of 20th-century Modern Art.
Painters who were students at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris, trained by Jean-Léon Gérôme or Alexandre Cabanel in the last thirty years of the 19th century, are among the masters of portraiture, such as Antonio de la Gandara, who was close to the Goncourts and admitted into the inner circle of great French families.
