Symbolism - the history of the art movement, artists, and the dreamlike world of imagery
Symbolism was the art movement that, around the turn of the 20th century, turned its back on visible reality and instead sought to depict dreams, myths, and the inner life of the soul. For those who love art imbued with mystery and ambiguity, Symbolism offers some of art history’s most enigmatic motifs – sphinxes, sleeping women, isles of the dead, and flowers that seem to breathe. The movement emerged in France during the 1880s as a reaction to both Impressionism’s superficial studies of light and Naturalism’s sober depictions of everyday life, and quickly spread throughout Europe to Belgium, Germany, Austria, and the Nordic countries.
Unlike a style characterized by a unified formal language, Symbolism was above all an attitude, an idea about what art should do: suggest rather than describe, evoke a mood rather than reproduce facts. A painting was meant to function like a dream or a poem, with every object carrying a hidden meaning. This guide explores the history and origins of Symbolism, its leading artists and key works, its distinctive visual language, its strong Nordic legacy, and how you can let the atmospheric motifs of dream art live on your own walls.
Contents
↓ What is Symbolism?
↓ The history and origins of Symbolism
↓ Symbolism’s most important works
↓ Technique, style, and visual language
↓ Symbolism in the Nordic countries and Sweden
↓ Symbolism’s legacy and influence
↓ Symbolism in your home
↓ Timeline
↓ Related movements and artists
↓ Common questions about Symbolism
What is Symbolism?
Symbolism is an artistic and literary movement that flourished from the mid-1880s until around 1910. At the heart of the movement was the conviction that art’s task was not to depict the external world, but to express ideas, emotions, and spiritual states through symbols, metaphors, and allegories. Color, form, and subject matter were imbued with a meaning that extended beyond what was depicted. A woman could represent death, a flower could represent desire, and a landscape could represent the state of the soul. The Symbolists sought to revive the mystical, the irrational, and the subconscious in human experience.
The term was first coined in literature. The Greek-born poet Jean Moréas published the Symbolist Manifesto in the French newspaper Le Figaro on September 18, 1886, asserting that art should prioritize suggestion and nuance over direct description. The idea quickly spread to the visual arts, where painters such as Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon were already working in the same spirit. Symbolism thus became a bridge between the Romanticism of the 19th century and the Modernism of the 20th century, and its interest in dreams and the subconscious pointed directly toward Surrealism.
It is worth distinguishing Symbolism from a purely stylistic movement. While, for example, Cubism or Impressionism can be recognized by a distinct visual language, Symbolism brought together artists using widely different techniques under a shared idea of art's purpose. A Symbolist painting may be meticulously detailed or hazily dreamlike, dark and nocturnal or glowing with gold – what matters is that the motif carries a meaning beyond what is depicted. This very openness enabled the movement to take root in so many countries and live on in so many later forms of expression, from the decorative splendor of the Vienna Secession to the dream logic of Surrealism.
Quick facts: Active period approximately 1886–1910. Literary origins in France. The manifesto was written by Jean Moréas and published in Le Figaro on September 18, 1886. Key figures in painting: Gustave Moreau (1826–1898), Odilon Redon (1840–1916), Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901), and Fernand Khnopff (1858–1921). Iconic work: Arnold Böcklin's Isle of the Dead, the first version of which was painted in 1880 and is now at the Kunstmuseum Basel. Dedicated museum: Musée national Gustave Moreau in Paris's ninth arrondissement. Swedish representatives: Edvard Munch and Eugène Jansson (1862–1915), represented in the collections of the Nationalmuseum and Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde in Stockholm.
The history and emergence of Symbolism
Symbolism was born out of dissatisfaction. During the 1880s, Impressionism had conquered the French art scene with its light-filled snapshots of modern urban life and landscapes, while Naturalism in literature had taken sober depictions of reality to their extreme. A new generation of artists and writers found this spiritually impoverished. They missed the depth, mystery, and inner experience that they believed art should convey. The reaction first emerged in poetry, among poets such as Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Stéphane Mallarmé, whose condensed and evocative language became a model for an entire movement.
Charles Baudelaire's poetry collection Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), published in 1857, is often regarded as the spiritual prelude to Symbolism, with its idea that the visible world was a forest of symbols pointing toward a hidden, spiritual reality. When Jean Moréas formalized the movement in his manifesto in 1886, painting had already begun moving in the same direction. Gustave Moreau, a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, nurtured a generation of young painters in an art built on myth and fantasy, while Odilon Redon created his dark, dreamlike charcoal drawings, which he called noirs.
Poetry as a model
Symbolism is unusual among art movements in that it was born from poetry rather than painting. As early as the 1850s, Charles Baudelaire had described how scents, colors, and tones correspond to one another and point toward a hidden spiritual order, an idea that became fundamental to the entire movement. Stéphane Mallarmé gathered young writers and artists in his famous Tuesday salons in Paris, and his demand that poetry should “paint not the thing itself but the effect it produces” became almost a manifesto for the painters as well. When Jean Moréas finally put the movement into words in 1886, he did so partly to protect the new generation from the press’s accusations of decadence. The manifesto’s impact was enormous and laid the foundation for several of the avant-garde movements of the 20th century.
From France across Europe
From its French center, Symbolism spread with great force. In Belgium, Fernand Khnopff and Jean Delville became leading figures; in Switzerland and Germany, Arnold Böcklin and Max Klinger painted their mythologically charged scenes; and in Austria, Gustav Klimt and the Vienna Secession would carry Symbolism’s dream of the spiritual onward toward a golden, decorative climax. The movement was never an organized school with a common program, but rather a shared sensibility that took different forms in each country. What united the artists was their rejection of superficial representation and their longing for an art that spoke to the soul.
Symbolism’s most important works
Symbolism’s masterpieces share an enigmatic, dreamlike quality, but range from mythological grand paintings to intimate charcoal drawings. What they have in common is that they are never content merely to show a scene – they suggest a story, a mood, or a spiritual truth for the viewer to interpret. Here are three of the movement’s most significant works and why they became icons.
Arnold Böcklin – Isle of the Dead (1880)
Few paintings capture the mood of Symbolism as completely as Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead. The scene shows a small rocky island dominated by dark cypress trees, surrounded by a still, pitch-black sea, toward which a rowboat carries a white-clad figure and a coffin. Böcklin painted five different versions between 1880 and 1886, and they are now spread across museums in Basel, New York, Berlin, and Leipzig. The very first version, from May 1880, hangs at the Kunstmuseum Basel, while the second version belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The painting became one of the most reproduced works of the turn of the century and inspired everything from music to film.
Gustave Moreau – The Apparition (1876)
Gustave Moreau is regarded as Symbolism's most influential painter and, at the height of the movement in the 1890s, was one of France's most important artists. His watercolor The Apparition depicts Salome encountering the floating, severed head of John the Baptist in an opulent, mystical architecture bathed in jewels and light. The work encapsulates Moreau's ability to combine biblical and mythological themes with extravagant, dreamlike splendor. Most of his oeuvre is preserved at the Musée national Gustave Moreau, the house in Paris that the artist transformed into a studio and museum for his own works in 1895.
Odilon Redon – The Cyclops (circa 1914)
During his first few decades, Odilon Redon worked almost exclusively in black and white, using charcoal and lithography, and created a world of floating eyes, spiders with human faces, and other dreamlike creatures. Toward the end of his life, color burst into full bloom in his work, and in The Cyclops, Polyphemus, the terrifying giant from Greek mythology, becomes a tender and melancholy figure gazing down at the sleeping nymph Galatea. The work shows how Symbolism could transform even the monstrous into poetry and longing.
"My drawings inspire and cannot be defined. Like music, they transport us into the ambiguous world of the indeterminate." – Odilon Redon
Technique, Style, and Visual Language
Because Symbolism was an idea rather than a technique, there is no single brushwork that unites the movement's artists. Böcklin's dense oil painting, Redon's sooty charcoal drawings, and Khnopff's cool, glass-like surfaces differ markedly. But in their visual language and choice of motifs, there are clear common features that make a Symbolist image recognizable. The artists sought atmosphere before sharpness, suggestion before clarity, and charged their motifs with dual meanings.
Recurring Motifs and Themes
Symbolism's visual world revolves around several recurring themes: death and transience, dreams and sleep, love and desire, and the sacred and mythological. Women often appear in a dual light - either as innocent and spiritual figures or as dangerous femmes fatales in the form of sphinxes, sirens, and Salome figures. Nature is rarely a neutral backdrop but rather a landscape of the soul: cypresses, still waters, moonlight, and enclosed gardens all carry inner meanings. The logic of dreams allows motifs to float freely between the real and the unreal.
Color, Light, and Atmosphere
The color palette of the Symbolists is often muted and atmospheric, built on deep blue and green tones, golden glimmers, and nocturnal darkness. Light is used dramatically to create mystery rather than to describe a place. Many Symbolists allowed contours to dissolve into haze and shadow, so that the motifs seem to emerge from the half-light. In Eugène Jansson's work, the blue tone became so pervasive that he earned the nickname "the blue painter." This emphasis on atmosphere over sharp detail is one of the surest characteristics of a Symbolist image.
Symbolism in the Nordic countries and Sweden
During the 1890s, several Nordic artists were captivated by the ideas of Symbolism. They continued to depict the world around them, but no longer with the sharp, clear-as-daylight gaze that had characterized the plein-air painting of the 1880s. Instead, they drew on the inner life of human beings and sought to capture moods and sensory impressions that affected viewers on an emotional rather than an intellectual level. This Nordic decade of the 1890s is often called the decade of mood painting, and it combined the French Symbolist yearning for dreams with a deeply rooted sensitivity to the light and seasons of the Nordic landscape. The cool, clear Nordic light and the long twilights suited the movement’s atmospheric expression exceptionally well, and several artists of the period moved freely between the art world of Paris and studios in their homelands. In this way, Nordic Symbolism became both part of the European movement and something entirely its own, shaped by the nature and mentality of northern Europe.
The best-known Nordic Symbolist is the Norwegian Edvard Munch, whose The Scream from 1893 is one of the most iconic expressions of existential angst in the history of art. Munch’s imagery surrounding life, death, love, and jealousy is imbued with Symbolism’s desire to depict the states of the soul rather than external reality. Parts of his oeuvre can be seen in the permanent collection at Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde in Stockholm, alongside Nordic masters such as Carl Larsson and Anders Zorn. One of the earliest Swedish Symbolists was also Ernst Josephson, whose water-sprite motifs already anticipated the movement’s dreamlike and mood-laden visual language in the 1880s.
Eugène Jansson and Swedish mood painting
In Sweden, Eugène Jansson (1862–1915) became one of the most important Symbolist artists. During the 1890s, he developed a highly distinctive style, characterized by an often bluish palette and expressive brushwork in swirling lines. His atmospheric cityscapes of Stockholm’s southern heights at dusk, along with his later depictions of nude athletes, have given him a unique place in Swedish art history. Works such as Motif from Timmermansgatan and the later A May Demonstration are part of the Nationalmuseum collection in Stockholm and provide excellent examples of how Symbolism’s mood painting took shape in Sweden.
Symbolism’s legacy and influence
Symbolism left a deeper mark on 20th-century art than its relatively brief heyday might suggest. Through its interest in dreams, the unconscious, and the irrational, the movement prepared the ground for Surrealism, which in the 1920s would make the dream the very foundation of its art. Salvador Dalí and his contemporaries built on Symbolism’s idea of the image as a gateway to the inner self. At the same time, the Symbolists’ liberation of color and form from the demands of representation pointed toward abstract art - Wassily Kandinsky’s ideas about the spiritual effect of color have clear roots in the Symbolist climate of the turn of the century.
The Austrian Vienna Secession, led by Gustav Klimt, can also be seen as a decorative continuation of Symbolism, where gold, ornament, and allegory merged into a new monumentality. The market still bears witness to the appeal of turn-of-the-century art: Klimt’s Lady with a Fan sold for more than 108 million dollars in London in June 2023, the highest price ever paid for a Klimt painting at auction. Symbolism’s dream of an art beyond the visible lives on every time an artwork chooses atmosphere and mystery over straightforward representation.
Its influence can also be seen in broader cultural contexts. Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead became one of the most widely circulated images around the turn of the century and inspired composers, writers, and later filmmakers well into the 20th century. Symbolism’s fascination with the unconscious anticipated the breakthrough of modern psychology, and its way of allowing a single image to contain multiple meanings has become an integral part of how we think about art today. When a contemporary artist imbues an everyday object with hidden meaning, or lets a landscape reflect an inner state, she is working within a tradition that the Symbolists formulated more than a century ago.
Symbolism in your home
Symbolist motifs bring something to an interior that few other art movements can: a sense of depth, mystery, and narrative. A poster featuring a dreamlike landscape or an enigmatic figure becomes a conversation piece on the wall, a motif that reveals new meanings the longer you look at it. Because Symbolism’s palette often rests on muted blues, greens, and golden tones, its motifs naturally complement a calm and atmospheric room. They work particularly well in the bedroom, reading nook, or hallway, where their contemplative character has room to unfold.
If you want to work with the expression of Symbolism, look for motifs that contain a story or an atmosphere rather than a clear scene. Dreamlike landscapes, floral motifs with a double meaning and nocturnal, blue-toned views are all close to the movement's core. In our collection of black-and-white posters, you will find the graphic side of dream art, while abstract posters and blue posters capture Symbolism's atmospheric colour palette. Among artworks by famous artists, there are classic motifs from the turn of the century to build on.
Tip: Let a Symbolist motif stand alone and dominate a calm wall instead of crowding it into a dense grouping. The atmosphere of dream art needs space around it to have an effect. A simple, dark wooden frame reinforces the motif's seriousness and depth, and placing the picture in a reading corner or beside the bed gives the contemplative motif time to work in peace and quiet. Read our guide to framing art to find the right framing for atmospheric motifs.
Timeline of Symbolism
Symbolism took shape over several decades, from its literary precursors to its absorption into the new movements of the 20th century. Here are the most important milestones in the movement's history.
1857 – Charles Baudelaire publishes the poetry collection Les Fleurs du mal, which, with its idea of the world as a forest of symbols, becomes the spiritual prelude to Symbolism.
1876 – Gustave Moreau exhibits the watercolour The Apparition and cements his position as a master of dream art.
1880 – Arnold Böcklin paints the first version of The Isle of the Dead, which becomes one of the most reproduced images at the turn of the century.
1886 – Jean Moréas publishes the Symbolist manifesto in Le Figaro on 18 September, giving the movement its name.
1893 – Edvard Munch paints The Scream, one of the most iconic images of existential anguish in world art.
1895 – Gustave Moreau begins transforming his house in Paris into a museum for his own work.
1897 – Gustav Klimt and the Vienna Secession are formed, carrying the spirituality of Symbolism forward in a decorative direction.
1898 – Gustave Moreau dies, and his Paris home later opens as the Musée national Gustave Moreau.
1901 – Arnold Böcklin dies after completing the last of his five versions of Isle of the Dead.
Around 1910 – Symbolism as the dominant movement wanes and merges into abstraction, Expressionism, and later Surrealism.
Related movements and artists
Symbolism stands in close dialogue with several other movements and artists around the turn of the century. The best-known voice of Nordic Symbolism was Edvard Munch, whose emotionally charged art also became a bridge to Expressionism. Among the Swedish representatives, Ernst Josephson, the man behind The Water Sprite, was one of the earliest. In Vienna, Gustav Klimt and the Vienna Secession brought the movement to its golden peak, while the decorative Art Nouveau (Jugendstil) shared Symbolism's longing for spirituality and ornament. The Symbolists' liberation of form and color pointed toward Abstract Art, and Swedish mood painting is closely connected with the broader Nordic art tradition. An early British relative of Symbolism's dream world was the Pre-Raphaelites, whose second generation around Burne-Jones cultivated the same myth- and dream-laden visual language. Read also about National Romanticism – the Swedish and Nordic movement around the turn of the twentieth century. If you want to explore further, you will find all our guides to artists and movements collected in the Knowledge Base. The Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele carried the Vienna Secession's symbol-laden legacy forward into Viennese Modernism.
Also read our in-depth article on Romanticism - the art movement that placed emotion and nature at the center from around 1770 to 1850.
For those who want to read more in external sources, the Swedish Wikipedia article on Symbolism provides a good overview, while Musée national Gustave Moreau and Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde let you explore the movement's works up close.
Frequently asked questions about Symbolism
Would you like to give your walls some of symbolism's dreamlike depth? Explore our collection of Swedish artworks and let yourself be inspired by the atmospheric painting of the turn of the century, or read more about how to create a gallery wall and decorate with posters that tell a story.