Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that can help answer the question.
Query: What genre of art did Van Gogh practice?
In 1886, Van Gogh left the Netherlands never to return. He moved to Paris to live with his brother Theo, a Parisian art dealer. Van Gogh entered Paris as a shy, somber man. While his personality would never change, he emerged artistically into what one critic described as a "singing bird". Although Van Gogh had been influenced by his cousin Anton Mauve and the Hague School, as well as the great Dutch masters, coming to Paris meant that he was exposed to Impressionism, Symbolists, Pointillists, and Japanese art ("see Japonism"). His circle of friends included Camille Pissarro, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, Émile Bernard, Paul Signac, and others. The works of the Japanese printmakers Hiroshige and Hokusai greatly influenced Van Gogh, both for the subject matter and the style of flat patterns of colors without shadow. In the two years from 1886 through 1888 he spent working in Paris, Van Gogh explored the various genres, creating his own unique style.
While there Monet completed a series of artwork on the Canale Grande painting the same motif at different times of the day. Monet had the habit of studying the same subject in a varying light, at different times of the day, which resulted during his active career in many distinct Monet series, like for example the "Water Lilies" series, "Poplar" series, "Rouen Cathedral" series, "Haystacks" series and "Charing Cross Bridge" series. Monet painted 37 works of Venice during his three-month stay in Italy, from October to December, including this painting and five more depicting the same theme, Canale Grande. One is hosted at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
As an adult, Caravaggio still lives under the roof and paints with the funding of Del Monte. Caravaggio is shown employing street people, drunks and prostitutes as models for his intense, usually religious paintings (see the article on the painter for examples). He is depicted as frequently brawling, gambling, getting drunk and is implied to sleep with both male and female models. In the art world, Caravaggio is regarded as vulgar and entitled due to his Vatican connections.
While the academic painters dominated the Salon, new artists and new movements rose to prominent prominence under Napoleon III. 
Gustave Courbet (1819–1872) was the leader of the school of realist painters during the Second Empire who depicted the lives of ordinary people and rural life, as well as landscapes. He delighted in scandal and condemned the art establishment, the Academy of Fine Arts, and Napoleon III. In 1855, when his submissions to the Salon were rejected, he put on his own exhibit of forty of his paintings in a nearby building. In 1870, Napoleon III proposed giving the Legion of Honour to Courbet, but Courbet disdainfully rejected the offer.
In 1877 a series of paintings at St-Lazare Station had Monet looking at smoke and steam and the way that they affected colour and visibility, being sometimes opaque and sometimes translucent. He was to further use this study in the painting of the effects of mist and rain on the landscape. The study of the effects of atmosphere was to evolve into a number of series of paintings in which Monet repeatedly painted the same subject (such as his water lilies series) in different lights, at different hours of the day, and through the changes of weather and season. This process began in the 1880s and continued until the end of his life in 1926.
Pablo Picasso was perhaps the most famous artist in Paris, but he shared the spotlight with a remarkable group of others, including the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși, the Belgian René Magritte, the Italian Amedeo Modigliani, the Russian émigré Marc Chagall, the Catalan and Spanish artists Salvador Dali, Joan Miró, Juan Gris, and the German surrealist and Dadaist Max Ernst. Several major artistic movements flourished in Paris at this time, including Cubism, Surrealism, and Art Deco. The American art patron Gertrude Stein, resident in Paris, played an important role in encouraging and buying works of Picasso and other artists of the period.
After serving with the Royal Observer Corps during World War II, his graphic design work was largely replaced by commissioned oil paintings of new vessels. These were often produced from plans so that a painting could be completed before the vessel was launched.
Degas's work was controversial, but was generally admired for its draftsmanship. His "La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans", or "Little Dancer of Fourteen Years", which he displayed at the sixth Impressionist exhibition in 1881, was probably his most controversial piece; some critics decried what they thought its "appalling ugliness" while others saw in it a "blossoming". In part Degas' originality consisted in disregarding the smooth, full surfaces and contours of classical sculpture ... [and] in garnishing his little statue with real hair and clothing made to scale like the accoutrements for a doll. These relatively "real" additions heightened the illusion, but they also posed searching questions, such as what can be referred to as "real" when art is concerned. The suite of pastels depicting nudes that Degas exhibited in the eighth Impressionist Exhibition in 1886 produced "the most concentrated body of critical writing on the artist during his lifetime ... The overall reaction was positive and laudatory".
This set the tone for a glittering series of important exhibitions, such as the "Première Exposition d’Art Nègre et d’Art Océanien", organized by Paul Guillaume, 13–19 May 1919, with a catalogue by Henri Clouzot and additional text by Guillaume Apollinaire. Apollinaire, who died the previous year, had collaborated with Paul Guillaume on the pioneering study "Sculptures Nègres" in 1917. This exhibition – drawn from Guillaume's private collection - placed African art at the heart of Modernism.
Artists exhibiting at Galerie Devambez included Mary Cassatt, Armand Guillaumin, Claude-Oscar Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Auguste Marquet, Paul Signac, Raoul Dufy, Maurice de Vlaminck, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Tsuguharu Foujita, and Giorgio de Chirico.
The Caravaggisti (or the "Caravagesques") were stylistic followers of the 16th-century Italian Baroque painter Caravaggio. His influence on the new Baroque style that eventually emerged from Mannerism was profound. Caravaggio never established a workshop as most other painters did, and thus had no school to spread his techniques. Nor did he ever set out his underlying philosophical approach to art, the psychological realism which can only be deduced from his surviving work. But it can be seen directly or indirectly in the work of Rubens, Jusepe de Ribera, Bernini, and Rembrandt. Famous while he lived, Caravaggio himself was forgotten almost immediately after his death. Many of his paintings were reascribed to his followers, such as "The Taking of Christ", which was attributed to the Dutch painter Gerrit van Honthorst until 1990. It was only in the 20th century that his importance to the development of Western art was rediscovered. In the 1920s Roberto Longhi once more placed him in the European tradition: "Ribera, Vermeer, La Tour and Rembrandt could never have existed without him. And the art of Delacroix, Courbet and Manet would have been utterly different". The influential Bernard Berenson stated: "With the exception of Michelangelo, no other Italian painter exercised so great an influence."
One of Monet's larger paintings, it shows the beauty of the sunset reflecting off the water. In 1919, Claude Monet was an elderly man who had already had been painting for almost 70 years, and his "Water Lilies" series came during a time when he was mainly painting water lilies in his pond, the pond's bridge, and his garden.
With the development of the daguerreotype in the 1840s, the role of the portrait painter declined in general, because it was now much easier and much cheaper to have one's likeness presented in a visual format. While many portrait painters lost business in competition with the daguerreotype, Billings instead began to produce daguerreotype prints himself. It is not known exactly which prints were made by Moses Billings, as daguerreotypes were usually signed, when signed at all, along the side of the plate. Due to the traditional storing methods of daguerreotype plates, even this signature usually quickly became illegible. However, it has been generally noted, or at least hypothesized, that his daguerreotype prints showed a level of talent and artistry above that of amateur daguerreotypists. Though it is not known exactly which prints were his, it is known that he had largely abandoned the process by the 1850s. Even after he stopped making daguerreotypes, he did continue to paint people's portraits on canvas.
Degas's only showing of sculpture during his life took place in 1881 when he exhibited "The Little Dancer of Fourteen Years". A nearly life-size wax figure with real hair and dressed in a cloth tutu, it provoked a strong reaction from critics, most of whom found its realism extraordinary but denounced the dancer as ugly. In a review, J.-K. Huysmans wrote: "The terrible reality of this statuette evidently produces uneasiness in the spectators; all their notions about sculpture, about those cold inanimate whitenesses ... are here overturned. The fact is that with his first attempt Monsieur Degas has revolutionized the traditions of sculpture as he has long since shaken the conventions of painting."
One of his most important papal commissions was the Raphael Cartoons (now in the Victoria and Albert Museum), a series of 10 cartoons, of which seven survive, for tapestries with scenes of the lives of Saint Paul and Saint Peter, for the Sistine Chapel. The cartoons were sent to Brussels to be woven in the workshop of Pier van Aelst. It is possible that Raphael saw the finished series before his death—they were probably completed in 1520. He also designed and painted the "Loggie" at the Vatican, a long thin gallery then open to a courtyard on one side, decorated with Roman-style grottesche. He produced a number of significant altarpieces, including "The Ecstasy of St. Cecilia" and the "Sistine Madonna". His last work, on which he was working up to his death, was a large "Transfiguration", which together with "Il Spasimo" shows the direction his art was taking in his final years—more proto-Baroque than Mannerist.
Between 1878 and 1881, Degas drew, painted and sculpted Marie in artworks including "Dancer with Fan", "Dancing Lesson", "Dancer Resting", numerous preparatory sketches, and most famously in "Little Dancer of Fourteen Years". He frequently attended ballet performances at the Paris Opera and often observed classes at the dance school. By posing for Degas, Marie likely earned five to six francs per four-hour sitting.
Water Lilies (or Nymphéas, ) is a series of approximately 250 oil paintings by French Impressionist Claude Monet (1840–1926). The paintings depict his flower garden at his home in Giverny, and were the main focus of his artistic production during the last thirty years of his life. Many of the works were painted while Monet suffered from cataracts.
The earliest sale on the list below ("Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers" by Vincent van Gogh) is from March 1987; with a price of £24.75 million (£ million in dollars). This sale tripled the previous record, and introduced a new era in top art sales. Before this, the highest absolute price paid for a painting was £8.1 million (£ million in dollars) paid by the J. Paul Getty Museum for Andrea Mantegna's "Adoration of the Magi" at Christie's in London on April 18, 1985. In constant dollars, the highest price paid before 1987 was by the National Gallery of Art when in February 1967 they acquired Leonardo da Vinci's "Ginevra de' Benci" for around $5 million ($ million in dollars) from the Princely Family of Liechtenstein. The sale of Van Gogh's "Sunflowers" was the first time a "modern" (in this case 1888) painting became the record holder, as opposed to the old master paintings which previously had dominated the market. In contrast, there are currently only nine pre-1875 paintings among the listed top 89, and none created between 1635 and 1874.
This is the earliest known work by Caravaggio, painted soon after his arrival in Rome from his native Milan in mid 1592. His movements in this period are not certain. According to his contemporary Giulio Mancini he stayed for a short time with Monsignor Pandulfo Pucci in the Palazzo Colonna, but disliked the way Pucci treated him and left after a few months. (Pucci fed his boarders exclusively on greens, and Caravaggio referred to him later as 'Monsignor Salad'). He copied religious pictures for Pucci, (none survive), and apparently did a few pieces of his own for personal sale, of which "Boy Peeling a Fruit" would be the only known example. The piece may also date from slightly later, when he was working for Giuseppe Cesari, the "cavaliere d'Arpino". As Caravaggio is said to have been painting only "flowers and fruit" for d'Arpino, this would again be a personal piece done for sale outside the workshop, but it was among the works seized from d'Alpino by Cardinal Scipione Borghese in 1607, together with two other early Caravaggios, the "Young Sick Bacchus" and the "Boy with a Basket of Fruit". It is not known how these works came to be in Cesari's collection at the time.
The installation of the St. Matthew paintings in the Contarelli Chapel had an immediate impact among the younger artists in Rome, and Caravaggism became the cutting edge for every ambitious young painter. The first Caravaggisti included Orazio Gentileschi and Giovanni Baglione. Baglione's Caravaggio phase was short-lived; Caravaggio later accused him of plagiarism and the two were involved in a long feud. Baglione went on to write the first biography of Caravaggio. In the next generation of Caravaggisti there were Carlo Saraceni, Bartolomeo Manfredi and Orazio Borgianni. Gentileschi, despite being considerably older, was the only one of these artists to live much beyond 1620, and ended up as court painter to Charles I of England. His daughter Artemisia Gentileschi was also close to Caravaggio, and one of the most gifted of the movement. Yet in Rome and in Italy it was not Caravaggio, but the influence of his rival Annibale Carracci, blending elements from the High Renaissance and Lombard realism, which ultimately triumphed.
The work has a rectangular shape in the lower part, ending with a triangular cusp, and has a golden background above which is St. Francis receiving the stigmata during his prayer on Mount Alverno from a flying Christ who appears him as a seraphim. The latter's wounds emit light rays which strike Francis' body. The scene was innovative as it abandoned the Byzantine tradition of inexpressive, frontal figures; the background is a mix of newer and old elements, the latter including the very generic mountains and the lack of proportions in the landscape elements. The chapels in the mount show the attempt to draw them according to geometrical perspective. Francis' face is characterized by a strong use of chiaroscuro.
Invented by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and introduced worldwide in 1839, daguerreotype was almost completely superseded by 1860 with new, less expensive processes yielding more readily viewable images. In the late 20th century, there was a revival of daguerreotypy by a small number of photographers interested in making artistic use of early photographic processes.
During van Gogh's first twelve months in Paris he absorbed a lot of information about modern art from the best of the avant-garde artists of the time, but in practice his work in 1886 and early 1887 varied little from his paintings in the Netherlands. In the early 1887 he stayed with Émile Bernard and his parents in Asnières and the budding spring seemed to trigger an awakening within van Gogh where he experimented with the genres to develop his personal style. In a country setting, undergoing industrialization, van Gogh was able to depict his reverence for rural life and express concern about encroachment of industrialization. With new techniques, van Gogh produced paintings evoked tenderness of couples taking a walk in the park or social commentary about the ways in which factories affected country life.
The "peasant genre" that greatly influenced Van Gogh began in the 1840s with the works of Jean-François Millet, Jules Breton, and others. In 1885 Van Gogh described the painting of peasants as the most essential contribution to modern art. He described the works of Millet and Breton of religious significance, "something on high." A common denominator in his favored authors and artists was sentimental treatment of the destitute and downtrodden. He held laborers up to a high standard of how dedicatedly he should approach painting, "One must undertake with confidence, with a certain assurance that one is doing a reasonable thing, like the farmer who drives his plow... (one who) drags the harrow behind himself. If one hasn't a horse, one is one's own horse." Referring to painting of peasants Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo: "How shall I ever manage to paint what I love so much?"
In 1880 Van Gogh writes of his desire to be useful as an artist, "To try to understand the real significance of what the great artists, the serious masters, tell us in their masterpieces, that leads to God; one man wrote or told it in a book; another, in a picture." After having moved to Brussels Van Gogh decided to study on his own, rather than at the art academy, often in the company of Dutch artist Anthon van Rappard. It is at this point his brother Theo, working as an art dealer at the Paris Goupil & Cie branch, began sending him money for support, a practice that continued throughout the brother's lives.
Drawn to Biblical parables, Van Gogh found wheat fields metaphors for humanity's cycles of life, as both celebration of growth and realization of the susceptibility of nature's powerful forces.
The "peasant genre" that greatly influenced Van Gogh began in the 1840s with the works of Jean-François Millet, Jules Breton, and others. In 1885 Van Gogh described the painting of peasants as the most essential contribution to modern art. He described the works of Millet and Breton of religious significance, "something on high," and described them as the "voices of the wheat."