Movements

Proto-Renaissance

1280–1400 · 4 works. Painting turns from flat gold icons toward solid figures in real space. Giotto sets his figures under deep blue skies, as on the star-covered vault of the Scrovegni Chapel.

Italian Renaissance

1400–1550 · 30 works. Egg tempera gives way to oil. Natural ultramarine, ground from Afghan lapis lazuli, is so costly that contracts spell out where it may be used.

Northern Renaissance

1420–1580 · 28 works. Flemish painters build color in thin oil glazes over white grounds, reaching jewel-like reds and greens that tempera can't.

Mannerism

1520–1610 · 13 works. Acid pinks, lemon yellows and shot silks. Color is pushed away from nature toward elegance and strain.

Baroque

1600–1720 · 28 works. Tenebrism: figures carved out of dark grounds by a single raking light. Earth pigments and deep shadow dominate.

Dutch Golden Age

1610–1700 · 30 works. Quiet interiors and grey-green landscapes in earth tones and lead white, with ultramarine and lead-tin yellow saved for the point of focus.

Rococo

1720–1790 · 22 works. Pastel pinks, powder blues and silvery greens. Prussian blue, the first modern synthetic pigment, arrives in the early 1700s and makes blue cheap.

Neoclassicism

1760–1830 · 14 works. Clear drawing, smooth finish and sober color, with reds and whites held in strict balance and little visible brushwork.

Romanticism

1790–1860 · 32 works. Color as emotion and weather: storms, fog, blazing sunsets. Cobalt blue and chrome yellow widen the bright end of the palette.

Realism

1840–1900 · 30 works. Ordinary life in earthy, observed color. Dark grounds persist, but paint in tubes (1841) takes painters outdoors.

Hudson River School

1825–1880 · 13 works. Luminous American landscape: glowing skies over deep green wilderness, painted with a near-theatrical sense of light.

Rinpa

1600–1750 · 4 works. A Japanese decorative school: bold, simplified flowers, waves and birds laid out on grounds of gold leaf, in mineral blues and greens.

Ukiyo-e

1680–1900 · 29 works. Woodblock prints built from flat, layered color. Imported Prussian blue transforms the landscapes of Hokusai and Hiroshige from the 1830s.

Impressionism

1865–1895 · 44 works. Light over line. Shadows turn blue and violet, black nearly disappears, and pure color is laid side by side on pale grounds.

Post-Impressionism

1885–1910 · 38 works. Color as structure and symbol: Seurat's dots, Van Gogh's clashing complementaries, Gauguin's flat, unreal fields.

Symbolism & Aestheticism

1860–1915 · 33 works. Moody harmonies and jewelled surfaces. Whistler titles paintings as 'arrangements' and 'nocturnes'; Klimt adds gold leaf.

Fauvism & Expressionism

1905–1930 · 40 works. Color set free from description: red trees, green faces, cadmiums straight from the tube.

Cubism & Early Abstraction

1908–1935 · 35 works. Color leaves the object behind: first muted to grey and brown in Cubism, then reduced to primaries and pure fields.

Bauhaus

1919–1933 · 14 works. Color taught as a discipline: Itten's color wheel, the color courses of Klee and Kandinsky, and Josef Albers, who took the school's color teaching to America.

1920–1960 · 3 works. Indian painters fuse European modernism with Indian traditions. Amrita Sher-Gil brings her Paris training together with Ajanta frescoes and Mughal miniatures in warm, earthy color.

Surrealism

1924–1960 · 12 works. Dream images, either painted with deadpan clarity or dissolved into free, floating shapes; color serves the strangeness.

American Modernism

1910–1960 · 10 works. American painters distil land and city into simplified forms: O'Keeffe's close-up flowers and desert hills, Hopper's hard sunlight on empty streets.

Abstract Expressionism & Color Field

1943–1970 · 3 works. After the war, New York painting goes big and abstract. Color field painters like Rothko stack soft-edged fields of color meant to be felt as much as seen.