Art by Country: Famous Artists, Movements & Paintings | Alpha

The Italian peninsula was home to many independent courts, republics and city-states. Florence, Rome and Venice became especially influential artistic centres during the Renaissance and later periods.

France, and particularly Paris, became one of the world's most influential centres for nineteenth-century painting. Academies, salons, dealers, collectors and independent exhibitions helped shape major artistic developments.

Seventeenth-century Dutch painting flourished in prosperous urban centres, producing remarkable portraiture, landscapes, still lifes, domestic interiors and scenes of everyday life.

British art encompasses influential traditions in portraiture, landscape, Romanticism and Victorian painting, including the richly detailed world of Pre-Raphaelite and related artists.

Spanish painting includes court portraiture, religious painting, dramatic Baroque art and later artists whose work helped reshape European modernism.

German-speaking artistic traditions range from the Northern Renaissance to Romantic landscape and the radical colour and form of twentieth-century Expressionism.

Vienna became an especially important centre around 1900, when artists and designers challenged academic conventions and developed highly distinctive modern approaches to ornament, portraiture and the human figure.

Nineteenth-century artists associated with the Russian Empire created celebrated landscapes, forests and marine scenes while participating in a complex, culturally diverse artistic world.

Japanese ukiyo-e prints and paintings documented landscapes, actors, beautiful figures, travel, seasons and urban life. Their compositions later became deeply influential in Europe through Japonisme.

American painting developed through many regional and international influences. Landscape, scenes of modern life and internationally connected forms of Impressionism became especially important during the nineteenth century.

Flemish art is particularly important when discussing the historical Southern Netherlands. Modern Belgian nationality should not simply be projected backward onto every earlier artist from the region.

Norwegian art connects to wider Scandinavian and European traditions. Edvard Munch became one of the most influential artists associated with the psychological intensity of modern European painting.