The 34 Most Influential Artists of the 19th Century

Painters, printmakers and a sculptor who left the next century a different set of rules. Several of them sold almost nothing while alive.

1. 1
   Claude Monet

   Gave Impressionism its name and painted the same subject until light itself was the subject.
   1000pts

   DI
2. 2
   Auguste Rodin

   Dragged sculpture out of the academy with The Thinker and The Kiss.
   999pts
3. 3
   Edouard Manet

   The painter whose scandals moved art from the studio to modern life.
   881pts
4. 4
   Gustave Courbet

   Realist who declared he could not paint an angel because he had never seen one.
   809pts
5. 5
   J.M.W. Turner

   Dissolved British landscape into light decades before the Impressionists.
   787pts
6. 6
   Edgar Degas

   Reinvented composition using photography and Japanese prints.
   787pts
7. 7
   Francisco Goya

   Court painter turned chronicler of war, ending in the Black Paintings.
   629pts
8. 8
   Eugene Delacroix

   Romantic colourist the Impressionists studied closely.
   532pts
9. 9
   Paul Gauguin

   Left Paris for Tahiti and made flat colour a language.
   420pts
10. 10
    Paul Cezanne

    Called the father of modern art by both Picasso and Matisse.
    420pts
11. 11
    Katsushika Hokusai

    His prints reached Paris in the 1860s and changed European composition.
    420pts
12. 12
    Georges Seurat

    Turned optical science into pointillism before dying at 31.
    420pts
13. 13
    Vincent van Gogh

    Sold almost nothing alive, then reset what colour and brushwork could do.
    286pts
14. 14
    Caspar David Friedrich

    German Romantic whose lone figures defined the sublime landscape.
    286pts
15. 15
    William Morris

    Made design a moral argument and founded the Arts and Crafts movement.
    0pts
16. 16
    Pierre-Auguste Renoir

    Impressionist who painted Parisian leisure in Bal du moulin de la Galette and later steered the movement back toward classical form.
17. 17
    Camille Pissarro

    The only painter to show at all eight Impressionist exhibitions, mentor to Cézanne and Gauguin and the movement's patient elder.
18. 18
    Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

    Chronicled Montmartre cabarets and the Moulin Rouge, and his lithograph posters turned the advertising poster into an art form.
19. 19
    Berthe Morisot

    Founding member of the Impressionist group whose quick, light brushwork and domestic scenes made her one of its boldest painters.
20. 20
    Edvard Munch

    Norwegian painter of The Scream whose raw psychological images of anxiety and love laid the ground for Expressionism.
21. 21
    John Constable

    English landscape painter of The Hay Wain whose fresh, direct studies of sky and weather inspired the French Barbizon painters.
22. 22
    Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

    Champion of line and classical draughtsmanship whose odalisques and portraits set the academic standard Delacroix's Romantics rebelled against.
23. 23
    Théodore Géricault

    Romantic painter whose The Raft of the Medusa turned a recent shipwreck scandal into a monumental modern history painting.
24. 24
    Jean-François Millet

    Barbizon painter of The Gleaners and The Angelus who gave peasant labour the dignity once reserved for saints and heroes.
25. 25
    Honoré Daumier

    Caricaturist and painter whose thousands of lithographs mocked kings, judges and the bourgeoisie, founding modern political satire in art.
26. 26
    Camille Corot

    Landscape painter whose outdoor oil sketches and silvery late scenes bridged Neoclassicism and Impressionism and taught a generation.
27. 27
    Dante Gabriel Rossetti

    Poet-painter who co-founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 and shaped the dreamy look of later Aestheticism and Symbolism.
28. 28
    Winslow Homer

    American painter of the sea and of Civil War soldiers whose bold watercolours of Maine and the Caribbean set a national standard.
29. 29
    James McNeill Whistler

    American in London whose tonal Nocturnes and Arrangement in Grey and Black argued that painting should exist for art's sake.
30. 30
    John Singer Sargent

    The leading portrait painter of his age, whose Madame X scandal of 1884 and dazzling brushwork defined Gilded Age society painting.
31. 31
    Mary Cassatt

    American Impressionist who exhibited with Degas in Paris and made mothers and children a serious subject for modern painting.
32. 32
    Ilya Repin

    Russia's foremost realist painter, whose Barge Haulers on the Volga and Ivan the Terrible works defined national history painting.
33. 33
    Utagawa Hiroshige

    Ukiyo-e master of The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō whose landscape prints Van Gogh copied and Monet collected.
34. 34
    Thomas Cole

    Founder of the Hudson River School whose dramatic landscapes and The Course of Empire series gave America its first national art movement.

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