Between 1793 and 1867 five French and Spanish paintings changed what political subject matter could look like in Western canvas painting. The five — David's Death of Marat, Goya's Third of May 1808, Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, Courbet's Stone Breakers, and Manet's Execution of Maximilian — together form the load-bearing seventy-four-year sequence in which Western political painting moved from Neoclassical allegory to documentary Realism.

Gustave Courbet painted The Stone Breakers in autumn 1849 in his studio at Ornans, a small village in the Doubs valley of eastern France. The 165 × 257 centimetre oil-on-canvas showed two figures breaking stones beside a country road for the construction of the Ornans-Pontarlier rural highway. The painting was the central exhibit in Courbet's 1849-50 Paris Salon and was the inaugural document of the French Realism movement.

Eugène Delacroix painted Liberty Leading the People between October and December 1830, three months after the Three Glorious Days of the July Revolution (27-29 July 1830) that overthrew King Charles X of France. The 260 × 325 centimetre oil-on-canvas hangs in the Paris collection that purchased it from the Salon of 1831 for 3,000 francs.

Francisco de Goya painted Saturn Devouring His Son directly onto the dining-room wall of his country house, the Quinta del Sordo, outside Madrid in 1819-1823. It was one of fourteen 'Black Paintings' Goya made on the interior walls of the house in the last four years of his Spanish residency. He never signed them, never titled them, never exhibited them, and almost certainly never intended anyone outside his immediate household to see them.

Caspar David Friedrich finished The Monk by the Sea in 1810 in his Dresden studio. The canvas is 110 by 172 centimetres and contains, in terms of actual painted content, almost nothing: a narrow strip of pale beach at the bottom, a wider band of dark Baltic Sea in the middle, an enormous expanse of cloudy grey sky filling the upper two-thirds, and a single small figure of a Capuchin monk standing on the beach in left profile, dressed in a brown robe.

Caspar David Friedrich painted Two Men Contemplating the Moon in his Dresden studio in 1819 — a small canvas of two cloaked figures standing on a forest path before a fallen oak, looking up at a crescent moon rising over the trees. Samuel Beckett saw the painting at the Dresden gallery in 1937 and named it, almost forty years later, as the direct visual source for the staging of Waiting for Godot.

Western painting changed in seven clear steps. Across more than 350 years, from about 1509 to 1866, it moved through the Renaissance, the Baroque, the Rococo, Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Realism, and Impressionism. Each movement answered one question in its own voice: how do you set the living world down on a flat surface and make a viewer believe it. The short version is that painting travelled from calm, measured order toward a record of feeling, labour, and the passing mom

From a single candle to a low moon on wet stone, eight masters between 1640 and 1897 found different answers to one problem: how do you make darkness visible?

The sea has never held still for a painter, and the great marine artists of the nineteenth century did not try to make it. Instead each chased a single mood and fixed it: Turner the killing storm, Aivazovsky the moment of survival, Sorolla the blaze of a Mediterranean noon, Krøyer the pale northern dusk. Placed side by side, seven canvases show the same water wearing seven different faces. None of these painters agreed on what the sea was. To one it meant terror, to another l

Caspar David Friedrich's Das Eismeer (The Sea of Ice, 1823-24) is the most uncompromising painting in the German Romantic canon: a wrecked ship buried under a pyramid of shattered Arctic ice, painted in Dresden from sketches of the Elbe river breaking up in winter. A close reading of the composition, the Parry expedition that inspired it, the painting's link to Monk by the Sea and Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, and the work's twentieth-century afterlife.

Between 1803 and 1805 William Blake took a single passage from the Book of Revelation and turned it into a monster. The Great Red Dragon watercolours, four sheets made for the patron Thomas Butts, gave prophecy a body, a turned back, and a will, and they remain among the most frightening images the age of Romanticism produced.

Eight images from William Blake’s private mythology, from the compass-wielding creator of The Ancient of Days to the Red Dragon of Revelation and the tiny gold-flecked Ghost of a Flea. What each vision shows, how Blake made it, and where each fits in the strangest career in British art.

Francisco Goya worked through fifty years of Spanish history, from cheerful tapestry cartoons for the royal palace in 1777 to the Black Paintings he applied directly to the walls of his country house in 1820. Across the same career he was court painter to four successive kings, a witness to the French invasion, a publisher of satirical etchings, a portraitist of the most fashionable women in Madrid, and the inventor of the modern picture of fear.

Caspar David Friedrich painted a single subject for forty years — the human figure, usually small, usually seen from behind, standing in a landscape too large to contain. The figure is alone. The landscape is the argument. Eight paintings from the German Romantic painter whose pictures have become shorthand for solitude itself.

Before Goya, European painters showed war as triumph. After Goya, they could no longer pretend. The Third of May 1808 ended the heroic battle picture and invented the painting of senseless violence — a tradition that runs through Manet, Picasso, and every photograph of war we have made since.

Between roughly 1800 and 1850, European painters turned away from order, reason, and the antique line and toward weather, ruin, revolution, and solitude. A reader's guide to the painters who built the Romantic image.

Caspar David Friedrich finished The Monk by the Sea in 1810 and showed it at the Berlin Academy that autumn. It was unlike any landscape painting Europe had ever seen. A flat shore. A flat sea. A flat sky that fills two-thirds of the canvas. One tiny figure of a Capuchin monk standing on the dune, looking out. No frame within the frame, no foreground tree, no Claudian arrangement of distance, no ruin, no storm. Just three horizontal bands and a man. Visitors complained. The p

Francisco Goya painted Saturn Devouring His Son between 1819 and 1823, in oil applied directly to the plaster wall of the dining room of his house outside Madrid. He was in his seventies, deaf for thirty years, recovering from a near-fatal illness, and living alone in a country property called the Quinta del Sordo — the House of the Deaf Man. He did not sign the painting. He did not title it. He did not intend it to be seen. Saturn is one of fourteen pictures Goya painted on

Searching for Francisco Goya's The Coven? This is the painting: a Black Painting from 1821-1823, a Devil in goat form presiding over a circle of witches, painted directly onto Goya's own dining-room wall. What the painting shows, why he painted it, and how to bring the fine print home.

A man in a white shirt throws his arms wide before a firing squad on a hill above Madrid. Goya painted the night six years after it happened — and built every modern war painting that came after.