Symbolists

The Symbolist painters sprung from the literary movement that flourished in France, during the 1860s and 1870s. Like the Parisian poets, artists across Europe began to reject realism and use personal metaphors and symbols to express their inner feelings and thoughts. The term was first used by the poet and art critic Jean Moréas in the Symbolisme manifesto, published in le Figaro in 1886. Artists began to explore their inner subjectivity through the themes of death, desire and the occult. Women became a reoccurring subject for these themes to be explored, they were often depicted as biblical and mythological figures or as femme fatales. Although the ideas of the movement were articulated through writing and manifestoes, the diverse artists worked independently of each other and didn't share a uniform style or approach. They were united by a shared dissatisfaction with the materialism and rationalism of the fin-de-siecle' world they inhabited and used art as a means of escapism and expression.