Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746 - 1828)

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, The Colossus, 1810

Erastus Salisbury Field (1805 - 1900)

Erastus Salisbury Field, Historical Monument of the American Republic, 1867

Arnold Böcklin (1827 - 1901)

Arnold Böcklin, The Island of the Dead, (Third version) 1883

Edgar Degas, (1834 - 1917)

Edgar Degas, L'Absinthe, 1876

Anselm Kiefer (1945 - )

Anselm Kiefer, Margarethe, 1981

Luke Fildes (1843 -1927)

Luke Fildes, The Doctor, 1843

Paul Gauguin (1848 - 1903)

Paul Gauguin, The Spirit of the Dead Keep Watch, 1892

Vincent Van Gogh (1853 - 1890)

Vincent Van Gogh, Starry Night, 1889

Vincent Van Gogh (1853 - 1890)

Vincent Van Gogh, The Night Café, 1888

… the picture is one of the ugliest I have done… I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green. The room is blood red and dark yellow with a green billiard table in the middle; there are four lemon-yellow lamps with a glow of orange and green. Everywhere there is a clash and contrast of the most alien reds and greens… in violet and blue. The blood-red and the yellow-green of the billiard table, for instance, contrast with the soft tender Louis XV green of the counter, on which there is a rose nosegay. The white clothes of the landlord, watchful in a corner of that furnace, turn lemon-yellow, or pale luminous green.

Van Gogh, Vincent (1888) [Letter to Theo, Sept. 8 1888] in Roskill, M. ed. (1983) The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, London: Fontana, pp288-9 

Vincent Van Gogh (1853 - 1890)

Vincent Van Gogh, The Potato Eaters, 1885

Georges Seurat (1859 -1891)

Georges Seurat, Bathers at Asnières, 1884

William Holman Hunt (1827 - 1910)

William Holman Hunt,  The Awakening Conscience, 1853

Robert Martineau (1826 - 1869)

Robert Martineau, The Last Day in the Old Home, 1862

Camille Pissarro (1830 -1903)

Camille Pissarro, Gelée blanche (Hoarfrost), 1874

Then, very quietly, with my most naive air, I led him before the Ploughed Field of M. Pissarro. At the sight of this astounding landscape, the good man thought that the lenses of his spectacles were dirty. He wiped them carefully and replaced them on his nose.

"By Michalon!" he cried. "What on earth is that?"

"You see ... a hoarfrost on deeply ploughed furrows."

"Those furrows? That frost? But they are palette-scrapings placed uniformly on a dirty canvas. It has neither head nor tail, top nor bottom, front nor back."

"Perhaps ... but the impression is there."

"Well, it's a funny impression!

Louis Leroy’s review of Exhibition of the Impressionists, published in Le Charivari, 25 April 1874; Leroy's article took the form of a dialogue between two sceptical viewers of the work.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834 - 1903)

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Nocturne: Blue and Silver - Cremorne Lights, 1872

William Powell Frith (1819 - 1909)

William Powell Frith, The Railway Station, 1862

… no one has experienced before it one half-second of aesthetic rapture… "Paddington Station" is not a work of art; it is an interesting and amusing document.

Bell, Clive (1914) ‘The Aesthetic Hypothesis’, in Frascina, F. and Harrison, C. (1982) Modern Art & Modernism: a Critical Anthology, London: Chapman, p71

John Everett Millais (1829 - 1896)

John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1852

Claude Monet (1840 - 1926)

Claude Monet, Le Pont de l’Europe, 1877

Gustave Caillebotte (1848 - 1894)

Gustave Caillebotte, Le Pont de l’Europe, 1876

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841 - 1919)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, La Grenouillère, 1869