1830s
Showing 172 works across all media from the 1830s
Liberty Leading the People
Liberty carries the tricolor over the barricade with a boy waving pistols beside her, painted within months of the revolution it shows.
The Great Wave off Kanagawa
Hokusai was in his seventies when he made this, using a Prussian blue newly imported from Europe, with Fuji small and calm in the trough.
The Fighting Temeraire
A steam tug hauls a Trafalgar warship off to be broken up. Turner refused to sell the picture and left it to the nation.
Eugene Onegin
Onegin coolly refuses a country girl's love letter, then kills a friend in a pointless duel. Pushkin wrote it in verse so quick and alive that Russians still know stanzas by heart.
The Red and the Black
Julien Sorel, a carpenter's son with a memorized Bible and enormous nerve, climbs out of provincial France into Paris society by way of two women. Stendhal reports each calculation without excusing him.
Symphonie fantastique
Berlioz wrote it while obsessed with an Irish actress he had never met. Four timpanists play at once to make the thunder in the third movement.
Portrait of Louis Francois Bertin
The newspaper magnate leans forward gripping both knees, and the picture became the face of the commercial class that ran nineteenth-century France.
The Women of Algiers
Delacroix saw a room like this once, on a trip to North Africa, and painted it from memory. Picasso later made fifteen variations on it.
The Oxbow
Wilderness under storm on the left, farmland in sunshine on the right, and Cole himself down in the middle, tiny, looking up from his easel.
Old Man Goriot
In a shabby Paris boarding house, an old man sells off everything for two daughters ashamed to be seen with him. Balzac counts every franc and shows what money does to love.
Oliver Twist
Born in a workhouse, Oliver asks for more, is sold off, and runs to London, where Fagin's gang of child pickpockets takes him in. Dickens made child poverty impossible to ignore.
The Charterhouse of Parma
Seventeen years old, Fabrice del Dongo wanders onto the field at Waterloo and cannot tell whether he fought there. What follows is court intrigue, a prison tower, and love signaled through a window.