Symbolism & Art Nouveau

Symbolism, from the 1880s, turned away from the visible world towards dreams, myths, moods and the inner life, using images to suggest ideas rather than describe them. Arnold Böcklin’s mysterious landscapes, Ferdinand Hodler’s rhythmic figures and Edvard Munch’s paintings of love, anxiety and death are among its landmarks.

In Britain, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, founded in 1848 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, had earlier rejected academic convention for bright colour, detail and literary subjects, a path John William Waterhouse continued. Around 1900, Art Nouveau and the Vienna Secession of Gustav Klimt brought flowing lines and gold ornament into painting, while James McNeill Whistler treated pictures as harmonies of colour.