Nineteenth-Century Painting (Compass History of Art)
Viking Press | 1965 | ISBN: N/A | English | 250 pages | PDF | 25.8 MB

In the history of painting, the nineteenth century is of capital importance ; such were the developments it brought forth, such was the scale and importance of their repercussions, that it deserves to be called 'unique'. That century saw the end of one age and the opening of another - one whose discoveries, inventions, novel problems and expedients can be compared to mines of unknown ores, to windows opened wide upon a future whose astounding richness we can begin to estimate only today. This was the great century of revolutions. It turned its back upon the past, it sounded the doom of unendurable conventions, and it made an effort greater than any that had gone before to break the tyranny of habit and burst the shackles by which art was bound. The nineteenth century did for art what the French Revolution had done for politics and social life. It brought, beyond all doubt, a transition from one world to another, and it launched an irrevocable process in which one idea after another was overthrown and replaced by concepts that left no single aspect of life the same. The nineteenth century gave birth to modern times