Symbolism[5] emerged in France during the 1880s as a decisive rejection of naturalism, realism, and the positivist faith in observable fact. Where the Impressionists had chased light across haystacks, the Symbolists turned inward, pursuing the invisible architecture of dreams, myths, and spiritual states. The movement drew its earliest energy from poetry. Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, and Paul Verlaine had already argued that language should evoke rather than describe, and painters soon adopted the same principle: suggestion over statement, mood over documentation. Jean Moreas formalised these ideas in his 1886 Symbolist Manifesto, published in Le Figaro. From Paris the impulse spread to Brussels, Vienna, Oslo, and Munich. Artists as different as Gustave Moreau[11], Odilon Redon[16], Edvard Munch[14], and Gustav Klimt[15] shared the conviction that art should make the unseen felt. Their subjects (femmes fatales, biblical visions, psychological anguish, erotic mysticism) look wildly varied on the surface, yet each channels the same ambition: to bypass the eye and reach the mind. By the time the movement waned around 1910, it had laid the philosophical groundwork for Expressionism, Surrealism, and abstraction.
The Symbolists believed that art should never state its meaning directly. A painting or poem should function like music: producing feeling through rhythm, colour, and association rather than literal depiction. Mallarme captured this in his directive to paint the effect a thing produces rather than the thing itself.
Naturalism had made the external world the proper territory of art. Symbolism reversed that hierarchy. Dreams, hallucinations, spiritual longings, and erotic obsessions became legitimate subjects. Odilon Redon's floating eyeballs, Munch's screaming figures, and Moreau's jewel-encrusted tableaux all insist that the truest reality is interior.
Symbolist painters returned to mythology, religion, and literature. Salome, Orpheus, Ophelia, and the Sphinx recur because these figures carry centuries of accumulated meaning. They function as shorthand for universal experiences that resist straightforward depiction. This reliance on pre-existing narrative distinguished Symbolism from the avant-garde movements that followed.
Symbolists aspired to dissolve boundaries between painting, poetry, music, and theatre. Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk was a touchstone. Painters titled works after poems. The Nabis designed theatre sets, book illustrations, and stained glass alongside easel paintings. A single image might reference a Baudelaire sonnet, a Wagnerian leitmotif, and a medieval altarpiece.
Many Symbolists embraced flat, decorative patterning as an alternative to Renaissance illusionism. Klimt's gold-leaf surfaces, Maurice Denis's arabesques, and Puvis de Chavannes's mural-like canvases all sacrifice depth for surface intensity. The Symbolists argued that a painting's material presence could communicate spiritual content more directly than any illusion of three-dimensional space.
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Landmark works that shaped the movement.
Moreau's watercolour of Salome confronting the severed head of John the Baptist caused a sensation at the 1876 Paris Salon. Against a palatial interior, Salome stands rigid while the floating head glows in a halo of light. Every surface is loaded with ornamental detail yet the composition's centre is the empty space between Salome's pointing finger and the disembodied head. Huysmans devoted several pages of A Rebours to this work, making it the poster image of Decadence.
Bocklin painted five versions between 1880 and 1886. A rowing boat carries a white-draped figure and coffin across dark water toward a rocky islet ringed by cypresses. Bocklin told his patron only that she should lose herself in the painting's dream. That deliberate ambiguity became a model for Symbolist practice. Rachmaninoff composed a symphonic poem after it; Freud kept a print in his consulting room.
Critics attacked its flat modelling and compressed space. A lone fisherman stands in a boat on a glassy sea. The composition reads like a frieze: figures arranged parallel to the picture plane, gestures stilled. Gauguin, Seurat, and the Nabis admired it precisely for its refusal of academic illusionism. Its flat colour fields pointed toward painting that could carry emotional weight without narrative fuss.
A single enormous eye, trailing nerve-like filaments, floats upward like a hot-air balloon above a flat horizon. A severed head rests on a dish below. Redon later wrote that his originality consisted in making improbable beings live according to the laws of probability. This print staked out territory that neither Moreau's pageants nor Bocklin's moody landscapes had claimed: the purely psychological image, born from dream logic.
Breton women in white bonnets occupy the foreground. Beyond a diagonal apple tree trunk, Jacob wrestles an angel on a flat field of pure vermilion. The red ground announces we have crossed from observed reality into shared hallucination. Gauguin flattened forms, outlined them in dark contour, and suppressed modelling. He called the approach Synthetism. It was the first major canvas to make Symbolist theory physically visible in paint.
A skull-like figure presses its hands to its face on a bridge while the sky writhes in orange and red bands. The landscape participates in the anguish. Munch worked on cardboard with thin, streaky layers, giving the surface a raw quality that heightens the sense of exposed nerve. The painting sits at the intersection of Symbolism and the Expressionism that would follow: Symbolist vocabulary pushed toward a directness the French Symbolists generally avoided.
A female figure with closed eyes tilts her head back in a pose hovering between religious ecstasy and sexual abandonment. The lithographic border frames her with sperm cells and a skeletal foetus, binding conception, eroticism, and death into a single image. By invoking the Madonna for a figure so clearly defined by physical desire, Munch performed a deliberate blasphemy.
Nearly four metres wide, painted in Tahiti during severe personal crisis. The composition reads right to left: sleeping infant (birth), central figure reaching upward (adult questioning), old woman crouching (death). Gauguin refused to explain the symbolism. The canvas gathers the movement's central preoccupations into a single panoramic field, making it arguably the most ambitious easel painting Symbolism produced.
A couple locked in embrace on a flower-strewn ledge against gold background. Gold leaf draws on Byzantine mosaics Klimt studied in Ravenna. The painting refuses to choose between fine and decorative art. Within Symbolism, it represents the movement's late, sensuous flowering in Vienna, where the Secession fused Symbolist content with Art Nouveau design.
The one-eyed giant peers over a mountain ridge at the sleeping nymph below, his expression closer to longing than menace. The landscape blazes with pinks, blues, and greens in loose, luminous patches. Redon had abandoned his monochrome noirs by the mid-1890s. The painting demonstrates that Symbolism did not simply end; it dissolved into broader currents of early modernism.
Symbolism's roots lie in poetry. Baudelaire's 1857 Les Fleurs du Mal introduced correspondences: hidden connections between scents, sounds, colours, and emotions. Mallarme argued the poet's task was to evoke the effect a thing produces, never the thing itself. Verlaine demanded music above all else from verse. These poets gave Symbolism its core doctrine before any painter adopted the term.
Moreau and Redon were making Symbolist art before the label existed. Moreau's mythological watercolours replaced academic narrative clarity with hallucinatory density. Redon produced his noirs (charcoal drawings and lithographs of floating eyes and biomorphic phantoms) throughout the 1870s and 1880s. By the mid-1880s, these two had established the movement's visual poles: mythological density versus psychological strangeness.
On 18 September 1886, Jean Moreas published his Symbolist Manifesto in Le Figaro. The document gave visual artists a banner to rally around. It defined Symbolist art as hostile to plain description, didactic sentiment, and objective narration. The label provided coherence to scattered tendencies, converting individual experiments into a recognisable programme.
Symbolism spread through personal networks, little magazines, and exhibition societies. In Belgium, Les XX showed Khnopff's sphinx-women alongside French Symbolist painting. In Vienna, Klimt co-founded the Secession in 1897. In Scandinavia, Munch developed his Frieze of Life cycle in Berlin. In Britain, the Pre-Raphaelite legacy ran parallel. By 1900 the movement had touched virtually every European art centre.
“I believe neither in what I touch nor what I see. I only believe in what I do not see, and solely in what I feel.”
“My originality consists in bringing to life, in a human way, improbable beings and making them live according to the laws of probability, by putting the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible.”
“Do not paint too much after nature. Art is an abstraction; derive this abstraction from nature while dreaming before it.”
“Paint not the thing itself but the effect that it produces.”
64 artists.
The book that introduced French Symbolist poetry to the English-speaking world.
Concise survey of Symbolist visual art across Europe, strong on literary-painterly relationships.
The definitive catalogue of Redon's work from the Art Institute of Chicago retrospective.
Covers the full geographic spread with particular strength on Belgian and Scandinavian contributions.
Symbolism editorial draws on the following published scholarship.
Editorial overseen by Solis Prints. Sources verified 2026-05-15. Click a source for details, or hover over [N] in the page above to preview.
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