The arts in nineteenth-century Europe and America are characterized by a parade of styles that reflect the context of their time. Paris, still the center of the Western art world, was the origin of the major nineteenth-century styles. Neoclassicism, because of its associations to the Greek and Roman republics, had been a style of revolution in the late eighteenth century. But under Napoleon, who crowned himself emperor of France in 1804, it became an imperial style. In the United States, Neoclassicism was called the Federal style, notably in the architecture of Thomas Jefferson.
The Romantics fought tyranny and colonialism, longed for past and exotic locales, and were fired by poetic imagination—all of which is expressed in their art. Realists strove to represent everyday life and to depict the broad panorama of society. Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, on the other hand, focused on the material of art, using prominent brushstrokes to convey the way we actually see—which they called "optical realism." They shared with the artists of Japanese woodblock prints of the Edo period a taste for scenes of entertainment and leisure, and a formal interest in patterns, silhouettes, and cropped viewpoints. Exhibitions of non-Western art in Europe inspired artists to study works from the Far East and Oceania. At the end of the century, the Symbolist movement in art, music, and theater reflected the late nineteenth-century interest in psychology, dreams, and the unconscious mind.