Napoleon III style
The Napoleon III style was a highly eclectic style of architecture and decorative arts, which used elements of many different historical styles,and also made innovative use of modern materials, such as iron frameworks and glass skylights. It flourished during the reign of Emperor Napoleon III in France (1852–1871) and had an important influence on architecture and decoration in the rest of Europe and the United States. Major examples of the style include the Opéra Garnier in Paris by Charles Garnier (1862–71), the Bibliothèque nationale de France. and the Church of Saint Augustine (1860–1871). The architectural style was closely connected with Haussmann's renovation of Paris carried out during the Second Empire; the new buildings, such as the opera, were intended as the focal points of the new boulevards.
History painting
History painting was the dominant form of academic painting in the various national academies in the 18th century, and for most of the 19th, and increasingly historical subjects dominated. During the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods the heroic treatment of contemporary history in a frankly propagandistic fashion by Antoine-Jean, Baron Gros, Jacques-Louis David, Carle Vernet and others was supported by the French state, but after the fall of Napoleon in 1815 the French governments were not regarded as suitable for heroic treatment and many artists retreated further into the past to find subjects, though in Britain depicting the victories of the Napoleonic Wars mostly occurred after they were over. Another path was to choose contemporary subjects that were oppositional to government either at home and abroad, and many of what were arguably the last great generation of history paintings were protests at contemporary episodes of repression or outrages at home or abroad: Goya's "The Third of May 1808" (1814), Théodore Géricault's "The Raft of the Medusa" (1818–19), Eugène Delacroix's "The Massacre at Chios" (1824) and "Liberty Leading the People" (1830). These were heroic, but showed heroic suffering by ordinary civilians.
Romantic artists such as Géricault and Delacroix, and those from other movements such as the English Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood continued to regard history painting as the ideal for their most ambitious works. Others such as Jan Matejko in Poland, Vasily Surikov in Russia, José Moreno Carbonero in Spain and Paul Delaroche in France became specialized painters of large historical subjects. The "style troubadour" ("troubadour style") was a somewhat derisive French term for earlier paintings of medieval and Renaissance scenes, which were often small and depicting moments of anecdote rather than drama; Ingres, Richard Parkes Bonington and Henri Fradelle painted such works. Sir Roy Strong calls this type of work the "Intimate Romantic", and in French it was known as the "peinture de genre historique" or "peinture anecdotique" ("historical genre painting" or "anecdotal painting").