Ten Famous French Painters from Watteau to Toulouse-Lautrec

Between roughly 1700 and 1900, France produced more major Western painters than any other country in Europe. Two-hundred-year stretches like this happen rarely in the history of art — the Florentines did it in the fifteenth century, the Dutch in the seventeenth, the French in the long eighteenth and nineteenth. The reasons were structural. France had Europe's largest concentrated population, the wealthiest court in Christendom for most of the eighteenth century, an academy of painting that trained painters at scale, a Paris Salon system that produced public reputations, a print-and-press industry that broadcast images, a critical class that argued about pictures in periodicals, and from the 1840s onward a fully commercial gallery trade that bought pictures from painters working outside the academic system. Almost every major shift in nineteenth-century painting — neoclassicism, Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism — was made in France first and exported afterward. Ten of the painters who made it, in chronological order. One picture each.

Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People (1830). Oil on canvas, 260 × 325 cm. A Paris collection. The picture that became the visual emblem of the July Revolution, and through it of French political painting itself — Liberty as a half-clothed figure carrying the tricolour over a barricade of the dead.

Antoine Watteau, 1684-1721 — the painter who invented the fête galante

Antoine Watteau, born in Valenciennes in what was then Spanish Flanders, was admitted to the French Academy in 1717 with a picture for which the Academy had to invent a new genre: the fête galante, or amorous outdoor party. The picture, the Pilgrimage to Cythera, shows a group of aristocratic men and women in pastoral dress on the mythological island of Venus, preparing to leave by boat at the end of a long afternoon. There is no specific narrative. The figures are arranged in pairs across the picture's diagonal. The light is the soft golden light of late summer. The atmosphere is one of gentle melancholy disguised as pleasure.

Antoine Watteau, Pilgrimage to Cythera (1717). Oil on canvas, 129 × 194 cm. A Paris collection. The reception piece submitted to the French Academy, which had to invent the new genre of fête galante to describe it — pastoral pleasure painted as a quiet leave-taking rather than a celebration.

Watteau died of tuberculosis at thirty-six. His career lasted barely a decade. But he established, in that decade, the visual language that would define French painting for the rest of the eighteenth century — the small-scale pastoral scene, the muted colour palette, the bittersweet emotional register, the use of pastel-toned costume as a structural device. Boucher and Fragonard would push the language harder, but the structural decisions belonged to Watteau.

François Boucher, 1703-1770 — the court Rococo at its most extravagant

François Boucher was the official painter to Madame de Pompadour, mistress and confidante of Louis XV, and through her the dominant decorative painter of the French court in the middle of the eighteenth century. His pictures are the visual definition of Rococo at its most ornate — pink-cheeked goddesses, voluminous silks, garlanded shepherdesses, cherubs at every spare corner of the canvas. The portrait of Madame de Pompadour in a green silk dress, painted in 1756 for the marquise's apartments at Versailles, is the picture in which Boucher's decorative method reaches its highest pitch.

François Boucher, Madame de Pompadour (1756). Oil on canvas, 201 × 157 cm. A Munich collection. Boucher's court Rococo at its most refined — the marquise seated in green silk against a backdrop of books, papers, and engraved prints, the picture deliberately staging her as patron of letters as well as of the arts.

The picture was also an act of public-relations strategy. Madame de Pompadour was widely criticised in pamphlet literature for her influence over the king, and the Boucher portrait responds to the criticism by surrounding her with books, papers, music scores, and the engraved prints she patronised — the picture is an argument that the marquise belongs to the world of letters and the arts, not just the world of court intrigue. Boucher made several versions of the portrait over the next several years, all with similar argumentative purpose.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard, 1732-1806 — the Rococo's last great picture

Jean-Honoré Fragonard's The Swing, painted around 1767, is the picture in which French Rococo painting arrives at its endpoint. Commissioned anonymously by the Baron de Saint-Julien — the bishop's nephew who in this picture appears as the young man hiding in the bushes — the painting shows a young woman on a swing in a garden, her pink dress billowing, her slipper flying off her foot toward a small statue of a putto in the background. Behind her, a second man pushes the swing without seeing the young lover hiding in the foreground. The picture is a closed three-figure erotic anecdote organised as a single diagonal sweep of pink silk through a green garden.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Swing (c. 1767-68). Oil on canvas, 81 × 64 cm. A London collection. The closing statement of the French Rococo — a private erotic anecdote organised around a single sweep of pink silk diagonally through a deep-green garden, with the small statue of Cupid in the upper left silently witnessing.

Fragonard painted the picture in his early thirties. Within twenty years the French Revolution would arrive and the entire culture that had supported pictures like this — the aristocratic patron paying for private erotic anecdotes — would be physically dismantled. Fragonard lived to see the Terror, lost his patrons, and died in obscurity in 1806. The Swing is one of the most fully achieved pictures in the language of the French Rococo, and it is also one of the last.

Jacques-Louis David, 1748-1825 — the neoclassical alternative

Jacques-Louis David's Death of Marat, painted in 1793, is the picture that announces neoclassicism as a public political language. Jean-Paul Marat, a radical journalist and member of the National Convention during the Revolution, was murdered in his bath on the 13th of July 1793 by Charlotte Corday, a moderate Girondin sympathiser who gained access to him by pretending to bring news of counter-revolutionaries. David, who was both a member of the Convention and Marat's friend, painted the picture in the weeks after the assassination. He showed the corpse exactly as the Convention's officials had described it: the body slumped in the medicinal bath Marat needed for a chronic skin condition, the wound in the chest still open, the murder weapon on the floor, the quill pen still in his hand.

Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Marat (1793). Oil on canvas, 165 × 128 cm. A Brussels collection. The founding image of modern political martyrdom — Marat at the moment of death, the murder weapon on the floor, the quill pen still in his hand, the deposition on the wooden block in the foreground naming the picture as a public document.

Everything in the picture is austere. The background is a near-uniform dark olive-green. The composition is built on horizontals — the bath, the wooden writing-block, the rim of the tub. The light hits Marat's hand, face, and the white drapery in his bath like a Caravaggio Christ. The deposition on the wooden block in the foreground — "À MARAT, DAVID, from David to Marat — names the picture as a public document. David has taken the iconographic apparatus of religious martyrdom — the entombment, the lamentation, the deposition — and applied it to a political journalist murdered in his bath. The picture invents modern political martyrdom as a visual category. It is the founding image of the neoclassical revolutionary public style.

Eugène Delacroix, 1798-1863 — Romanticism's emblem

Eugène Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, painted in 1830 in response to the July Revolution that drove Charles X from the throne and installed the constitutional monarchy of Louis-Philippe, is the picture that became the visual emblem of French Romanticism. A bare-breasted female figure — Liberty as classical allegory, but rendered with the unidealised physicality of an actual nineteenth-century woman — strides forward over a barricade of dead bodies, holding the tricolour in her right hand and a musket with bayonet in her left. Around her surge a cross-section of Paris: a top-hatted bourgeois with a hunting rifle, a child holding two pistols, a worker in a sash, a fallen soldier. Behind her the towers of Notre-Dame rise through gun-smoke.

The picture is also a deliberate stylistic argument. Delacroix is painting in opposition to the Davidian neoclassical line — his brushwork is loose, his colour saturated, his composition organised around diagonals rather than horizontals, his figures rendered with anatomical realism rather than classical idealisation. The French art establishment of the 1830s read the picture as an attack on the academic tradition. The argument Delacroix's painting started — between line and colour, between draughtsmanship and brushwork — would dominate French painting for the next forty years and feed directly into Impressionism in the 1860s.

Gustave Courbet, 1819-1877 — the Realist's stone-breakers

Gustave Courbet's The Stone Breakers, painted in 1849 and exhibited at the 1850 Salon, was the picture that announced Realism as a public movement. Two figures are shown breaking stones beside a country road. A young man on the left, perhaps fifteen years old, struggles to lift a basket of broken rock. An older man on the right, perhaps seventy, kneels with a hammer over a larger stone. Both faces are turned away from the viewer. The clothes are torn. The light is the dull mid-afternoon light of a working day. The background is a wall of dark rock.

Gustave Courbet, The Stone Breakers (1849, destroyed 1945). The picture that announced Realism as a public movement — two figures, one too young and one too old to do the work, breaking stones beside a country road, painted at the scale of an academic history painting.

The scandal of the picture, when it was exhibited at the 1850 Salon, was the scale: Courbet had painted what was effectively a genre scene of rural labour at the dimensions of an academic history painting — one hundred and sixty centimetres by two hundred and sixty. The painting argued, through its sheer size, that two anonymous stone-breakers were as worthy of monumental treatment as the saints, gods, and military heroes the Academy had spent two centuries celebrating. The picture was lost in the fire-bombing of Dresden in 1945; only photographs and reproductions survive. Its argument has outlived the canvas.

Édouard Manet, 1832-1883 — the picture that broke polite painting

Édouard Manet's Olympia, painted in 1863 and exhibited at the 1865 Paris Salon, is the painting that broke nineteenth-century French academic painting in public view. A naked young woman lies on a white bed, her face turned outward to the viewer, her right hand placed firmly over her sex, a black ribbon at her neck, an orchid in her hair, a small slipper on one foot. To the right a Black maid offers her a bouquet of flowers. The composition is a direct, almost shot-for-shot reframing of Titian's Venus of Urbino of 1538 — same pose, same bed, same servant in the background, same dog (replaced here by a black cat). The reference would have been transparent to any educated Salon visitor in 1865.

Édouard Manet, Olympia (1863). Oil on canvas, 130 × 190 cm. A Paris collection. The painting that broke polite Salon nudity — Titian's Venus of Urbino rebuilt as a contemporary Paris demi-mondaine, the gaze direct, the right hand placed in pointed refusal rather than modest concealment.

What scandalised the 1865 Salon was not the nudity itself — academic painting was full of nudes — but the way Manet had stripped the mythological frame from the genre and rebuilt the picture as a contemporary Paris demi-mondaine looking directly at the viewer. Olympia is not Venus. She is a working-class woman who has agreed to be looked at for money. Her right hand is not a modest concealment; it is a refusal, a hand placed on the body in the pose of a refusal of looking. The black ribbon, the orchid, the slipper, the cat, the maid with the bouquet — every detail names the picture as a transaction. The Salon visitors of 1865 understood the argument and recoiled from it. Manet had taken the most-revered subject in the academic tradition and shown what it looked like in 1863 without the Renaissance costume.

Claude Monet, 1840-1926 — the late water lilies

Claude Monet's late Water Lilies, painted in the last twenty years of his life in the lily pond he had built at his garden in Giverny, are the pictures in which French painting arrives at the threshold of abstraction. Monet painted around two hundred and fifty canvases of the lily pond between roughly 1899 and his death in 1926, ranging in size from small intimate studies to the enormous twelve-and-fourteen-metre panels he donated to the French state in 1922. The pictures do not show landscapes in any conventional sense. They show a surface — the still water — that reflects clouds, sky, willow branches, and the pads and flowers of the lilies themselves.

Claude Monet, Water Lilies (one of approximately 250 canvases of the lily pond at Giverny, painted between 1899 and Monet's death in 1926). The pictures in which French Impressionism arrives at the threshold of pure surface — water that reflects sky, willow, and lily-pad as a single optical field.

The pictures dissolve the conventional landscape distinction between foreground and background. Sky is below the eye. Trees are below the eye. The lilies float on a surface that is also the surface of the canvas, so that what one is looking at in a late Monet is not a view of a pond but an experience of vision itself. The American Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s — Rothko, Pollock, Joan Mitchell — explicitly looked back to the late Monets as the picture that had already, in 1920, done what they were trying to do in 1950: render an optical field rather than a depicted object.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1841-1919 — the Impressionist as portraitist

Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Two Sisters (On the Terrace), painted in 1881 at the restaurant Maison Fournaise in Chatou on the Seine, is the picture in which Impressionism is at its most domestically appealing. A young woman in dark blue sits at the foreground of a terrace overlooking the river, a basket of brightly coloured wool on the table beside her. A small child in a white dress with a flowered hat — almost certainly not her sister, despite the title — sits behind her. Both faces are rendered with the soft pink-cheeked rendering that became Renoir's signature in the 1880s.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Two Sisters (On the Terrace) (1881). Oil on canvas, 100 × 81 cm. A Chicago collection. Renoir's domestic Impressionism at its most appealing — the woman in dark blue, the child in white, the basket of brightly coloured wool, all painted at the Maison Fournaise terrace on the Seine.

Renoir is the Impressionist who most consistently aimed at general public popularity, and the picture's continuous reputation since 1881 is the reward. The composition is built on a triangle — the woman's head at the apex, the basket and the child's hat at the base. The background — the river, the willow, the distant boats — is rendered with the loose brushwork of conventional Impressionism, but the figures themselves are tightened up, almost academic in their finish. Renoir had spent the late 1870s in Italy studying Raphael, and the trip pushed his painting toward a softer, more finished portrait style that would dominate his work for the rest of his life.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1864-1901 — Montmartre as subject

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, born to a noble family in Albi in southern France, broke both legs in his teens in two separate accidents and was left permanently disabled, with adult arms and a child's legs. He moved to Paris in his late teens, trained at the studio of Léon Bonnat, and from the late 1880s onward spent most of his nights in the cabarets and brothels of Montmartre — the Moulin Rouge above all, but also the Chat Noir, the Mirliton, the Folies-Bergère. His paintings, drawings, and lithographs of the cabaret world were one of the most important graphic projects of the 1890s.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Moulin Rouge (1892-95). Oil on canvas, 123 × 141 cm. A Chicago collection. Montmartre as documentary subject — a group of cabaret regulars at a table, the dancer La Goulue arranging her hair in the background, the green-lit face of Jane Avril at the right cropped against the picture's edge.

The At the Moulin Rouge of 1892-95 is the picture in which Toulouse-Lautrec's cabaret project arrives at its most ambitious form. A group of cabaret regulars sits at a table in the picture's middle distance. In the background, the dancer La Goulue arranges her hair in front of a mirror. At the right edge, the face of the dancer Jane Avril is lit in a sickly artificial green and cropped — Toulouse-Lautrec is using the off-centre composition and harsh artificial colour of contemporary Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints (which had been arriving in Paris since the 1860s) and applying their visual language to modern Paris nightlife. Toulouse-Lautrec died at thirty-six. His work consolidates everything French painting had learned in the previous two centuries — composition from Watteau, colour from Delacroix, candid contemporary subject matter from Manet, the optical compression of Japanese prints — and points the way forward to the early modernism of the 1900s.

Key takeaways

• Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) invented the fête galante — the pastoral leave-taking scene — and established the small-scale, soft-coloured, melancholy register that would dominate French painting through the eighteenth century.

• François Boucher (1703-1770) was Madame de Pompadour's official painter and the dominant figure of French court Rococo at its most decorative; his 1756 portrait of the marquise is the picture in which the style reaches its highest pitch.

• Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806) painted The Swing around 1767 — the closing statement of the French Rococo, a private erotic anecdote organised around one diagonal sweep of pink silk through a green garden.

• Jacques-Louis David's Death of Marat (1793) is the founding image of modern political martyrdom — David took the iconographic apparatus of religious entombment and applied it to a journalist murdered in his bath, inventing neoclassicism as a public political language.

• Eugène Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People (1830) is the visual emblem of French Romanticism and of post-Revolutionary France itself — a bare-breasted Liberty striding over a barricade of the dead with the tricolour and a bayonet.

• Gustave Courbet's The Stone Breakers (1849, destroyed 1945) announced Realism by painting a rural genre scene at the dimensions of an academic history painting — the argument that anonymous rural labourers were as worthy of monumental treatment as saints and gods.

• Édouard Manet's Olympia (1863) reframed Titian's Venus of Urbino as a contemporary Paris demi-mondaine, replacing mythological allegory with direct contemporary transaction; the 1865 Salon recoiled from it and modern painting started.

• Claude Monet's late Water Lilies (1899-1926) dissolved the foreground-background landscape distinction and rendered an optical field rather than a depicted object, anticipating the American Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s by thirty years.

• Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Two Sisters (On the Terrace) (1881) is Impressionism at its most domestically appealing — a soft-edged terrace scene at the Maison Fournaise on the Seine, with the figures tightened up almost to an academic finish after Renoir's Italian Raphael studies.

• Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's At the Moulin Rouge (1892-95) consolidated two centuries of French painting and applied them to modern Paris nightlife — composition from Watteau, colour from Delacroix, candid subject matter from Manet, optical compression from Japanese ukiyo-e.

Browse French painting prints in the archive at zocineartdesign.etsy.com.