# Who is the most influential artist 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.

*By YPB Team · Published September 17, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/who-is-the-most-influential-artist-of-the-19th-century*

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## Current results (1 vote)

1. **Claude Monet** — score 1000/1000
   Gave Impressionism its name and painted the same subject until light itself was the subject.
2. **Auguste Rodin** — score 999/1000
   Dragged sculpture out of the academy with The Thinker and The Kiss.
3. **Edouard Manet** — score 881/1000
   The painter whose scandals moved art from the studio to modern life.
4. **Gustave Courbet** — score 809/1000
   Realist who declared he could not paint an angel because he had never seen one.
5. **J.M.W. Turner** — score 787/1000
   Dissolved British landscape into light decades before the Impressionists.
6. **Edgar Degas** — score 787/1000
   Reinvented composition using photography and Japanese prints.
7. **Francisco Goya** — score 629/1000
   Court painter turned chronicler of war, ending in the Black Paintings.
8. **Eugene Delacroix** — score 532/1000
   Romantic colourist the Impressionists studied closely.
9. **Paul Gauguin** — score 420/1000
   Left Paris for Tahiti and made flat colour a language.
10. **Paul Cezanne** — score 420/1000
   Called the father of modern art by both Picasso and Matisse.
11. **Katsushika Hokusai** — score 420/1000
   His prints reached Paris in the 1860s and changed European composition.
12. **Georges Seurat** — score 420/1000
   Turned optical science into pointillism before dying at 31.
13. **Vincent van Gogh** — score 286/1000
   Sold almost nothing alive, then reset what colour and brushwork could do.
14. **Caspar David Friedrich** — score 286/1000
   German Romantic whose lone figures defined the sublime landscape.
15. **William Morris** — score 0/1000
   Made design a moral argument and founded the Arts and Crafts movement.

Tags: artists, art, painters, 19th century