Category · Painting
Painting
Painting is grouped by movement, not by medium — the question "is this oil or acrylic" is less useful than "is this color-field abstraction or quiet American realism". Western, Japanese, and Dutch traditions all sit here when the work is painted. Each entry is anchored to the canonical reference work of its movement — Dutch Golden Age window light, Impressionist broken color, Post-Impressionist impasto swirls. A request for "oil painting" is too broad to be a style; a request for "an ukiyo-e great wave" is exact.
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Styles in this category
12 styles
Abstract Expressionism
Abstract Expressionism was the first internationally dominant American art movement, centered in New York from roughly 1945 to 1960. It s…
Open style
American Realism
American Realism's mid-twentieth-century painters built a vocabulary for painted loneliness. The components are specific: large flat plan…
Open style
Art Nouveau
Art Nouveau was a decorative-arts movement that swept Europe and the United States between roughly 1890 and 1910. Within visual art, eleg…
Open style
Dutch Golden Age
The Dutch Golden Age (roughly 1620–1680) produced an unusually coherent body of small, intimate, light-driven paintings. Within that move…
Open style
Impressionism
Impressionism (1872–1886, peak years) was the first movement to take painting outside the studio and treat the act of seeing — not the ac…
Open style
Plein Air Landscape
Plein air ("in the open air") painting is the practice of painting a landscape in front of the landscape — directly, in one or two sittin…
Open style
Post-Impressionism
Post-Impressionism was the loose collection of painters (1886–1905) who accepted the Impressionists' premise — broken color, painted in t…
Open style
Pre-Raphaelite
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a small group of British painters who founded a secret society in 1848 to oppose the loose, idealized…
Open style
Renaissance Chiaroscuro
Chiaroscuro — literally "light-dark" in Italian — names the late-Renaissance and Baroque practice of modeling figures with strong contras…
Open style
Sumi-e Ink Wash
Sumi-e ("ink picture") is the Japanese name for ink-wash painting introduced from China by Zen Buddhist monks in the 14th century. The pr…
Open style
Classic Surrealism
Classic Surrealism, founded in the 1920s, was a literary and visual movement built on ideas about the unconscious mind — automatism, drea…
Open style
Ukiyo-e Woodblock
Ukiyo-e — "pictures of the floating world" — is the dominant Japanese print tradition from roughly 1660 to 1900. The images were carved i…
Open style