From 1846 To 1863

The 19th century was a time of great change in the world of art. With the Industrial Revolution came new technologies and new ways of seeing the world. Artists began to experiment with new styles and new subjects, and the art of the 19th century reflects the tumultuous changes of the time.

Whalers

    Turner was seventy years old when Whalers debuted to mixed reviews at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1845.
    The painting's subject proved elusive, as the English novelist William Thackeray observed:"That is not a smear of purple you see yonder, but a beautiful whale, whose tail has just slapped a half-dozen whale-boats into perdition; and as for what you fancied to be a few zig-zag lines spattered on the canvas at hap-hazard, look! they turn out to be a ship with all her sails."
    Apparently Turner undertook the painting - which was returned to him - for the collector Elhanan Bicknell, who had made his fortune in the whale-oil business.

A Village Street: Dardagny

    Corot was a tireless traveler, and the extension of the network of French railroads in the 1850s widened the range of his summer journeys.
    In 1852, 1857, and 1863, he visited Dardagny, a small village near Geneva.
    This view, essentially unchanged today, was probably painted on Corot's first visit.
   It is an excellent example of his remarkable ability to derive a poetic scene from a prosaic site

The New Bonnet

    This work, the last the artist exhibited at the National Academy of Design, exemplifies his gently moralizing approach to genre painting.
    In a setting influenced by the established formulas of seventeenth-century Dutch masters, Edmonds contrasts the daughter's extravagant purchase with the faults of her disapproving parents.

In the Woods

    The painting departs from the pastoral treatment of Durand's earlier works to celebrate the shadowy solitude of the deep woods.
    Living and dead trees rise from the fertile decay of the forest floor.

Madame Frederic Breyer (Fanny Hélène Van Bruyssel, 1830–1894)

    This painting was made by Courbet during an 1858 trip to Brussels.
    It was commissioned as a betrothal portrait by the sitter's fiancé, a doctor originally from Germany who belonged to progressive political circles, like Courbet himself.

The North Cape by Moonlight

    Balke visited the North Cape only once, in 1832, but the experience became a touchstone of his imagination for the rest of his life.
    The tenebrous palette and expressive brushwork seen in this moonlit view are characteristic of Balke's mature style, which stands in contrast to the more restrained naturalism of his mentor Johan Christian Dahl.
    When this painting (or another version) was exhibited in Oslo in the fall of 1848, a critic wrote that it "claims our interest, both for the nature of the subject itself and the singularity of the perception of the chosen moment."

Delaware Water Gap

    From 1857 to 1891, Inness painted a number of views of the Delaware Water Gap, located on the border of Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
    This early version, which reflects some of the tenets of the Hudson River School, juxtaposes a moving steam engine at the left and heavily laden barges on the river, with the pastoral element of grazing cows in the foreground.
    The panoramic view of the countryside is enhanced by dramatic climatic effects:a passing storm and a rainbow.

Edge of a Wood