1804-12 ­ In Rome, Canova carves the portrait of Pauline Bonaparte Borghese as Venus and "The Italic Venus," masterpieces of neoclassical sculpture.
Ingres inaugurates his purist style of painting with "The Bather from Behind."

1805 ­ Napoleon is anointed emperor. David celebrates the event in a large painting.

1818 ­ Géricault paints The Raft of the Medusa in Paris, taking his inspiration from the story of a shipwreck.

1825 ­ Corot’s first stay in Italy, where he paints a series of views that constitute the first examples of painting "en plein air".

1848 ­ A number of British artists (W. Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriele Rossetti, John Everett Millais) found the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to oppose Victorian conventionality, calling for a return to nature inspired by Renaissance painting.

1860 ca. ­ The "Macchiaioli" school is founded in Florence.
1863 ­ Manet outrages public opinion by painting Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), and two years later his "Olympia" causes a scandal at the Salon.

1874 ­ First exhibition of the Impressionists; the name is derived from a painting by Monet, "Impression, soleil levant" (Impression: Sunrise).

1886 ­ Last joint exhibition by the Impressionists.
Gustave Moreau publishes the “Symbolist Manifesto” in "Le Figaro". This sophisticated and eclectic "fin de siècle" culture was represented in literature by Huysmans’ "A Rebours" (Against Nature) and found its greatest exponents in painting in G. Moreau and O. Redon

1886-90 ­ Van Gogh paints some of his greatest masterpieces.
In Brittany, the Pont-Aven school grows up around Gauguin: influenced by medieval art, Japanese painting, and primitivism, it developed a synthetic simplification of form.

1889 ­ The Eiffel Tower is built for the World's Fair in Paris.