From Baroque to Romanticism (1600s to 1800s)

Baroque art is full of drama, movement and strong contrasts of light and dark.
The Italian painter Caravaggio (1571 to 1610) used tenebrism: figures lit by a strong, sharp light against very dark backgrounds, like actors under a spotlight.
Artemisia Gentileschi (Italian, 1593 to about 1656) was one of the most successful women painters of the 1600s and the first woman to join Florence's Academy of the Arts of Drawing, in 1616.
The Spanish court painter Diego Velázquez (1599 to 1660) painted Las Meninas (1656), showing the young princess Margarita with her maids of honour, and Velázquez himself standing at a large canvas. It is in the Prado, Madrid.

In the 1600s the Dutch Republic was rich from trade. Merchants and middle-class families bought paintings for their homes, so artists painted portraits, landscapes, still lifes and genre paintings (scenes of everyday life).
Rembrandt (1606 to 1669) painted The Night Watch (1642), a huge group portrait of a city militia company, now in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
Johannes Vermeer (1632 to 1675) painted quiet indoor scenes lit by soft light from a window, and Girl with a Pearl Earring (about 1665).

Romantic artists valued emotion, imagination and the power of nature over calm, rational order.
They were drawn to the sublime: nature so vast or violent, such as storms, mountains and the sea, that it fills us with awe and even fear.
J. M. W. Turner (English, 1775 to 1851) painted swirling light, storms and seas, as in The Fighting Temeraire (1839).
John Constable (English, 1776 to 1837) painted the Suffolk countryside from close observation, as in The Hay Wain (1821). Both are in the National Gallery, London.
Caspar David Friedrich (German, 1774 to 1840) painted Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (about 1818), a figure seen from behind on a rocky peak.
Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746 to 1828) painted The Third of May 1808 (1814), showing French soldiers shooting Spanish civilians, a powerful image of the horror of war.