PAINTING: A CONCISE OVERVIEW OF 40,000+ YEARS OF MARK-MAKING

The history of painting reaches back in time to artifacts from pre-historic humans, and spans all cultures. It represents a continuous, though periodically disrupted, tradition from Antiquity. Across cultures, and spanning continents and millennia, the history of painting is an ongoing river of creativity, that continues into the 21st century. Until the early 20th century it relied primarily on representational, religious and classical motifs, after which time more purely abstract and conceptual approaches gained favor.

Initially serving utilitarian purpose, followed by imperial, private, civic, and religious patronage, Eastern and Western painting later found audiences in the aristocracy and the middle class. From the Modern era, the Middle Ages through the Renaissance painters worked for the church and a wealthy aristocracy. Beginning with the Baroque era artists received private commissions from a more educated and prosperous middle class. Finally in the West the idea of "art for art's sake" began to find expression in the work of the Romantic painters like Francisco de Goya, John Constable, and J. M. W. Turner. The 19th century saw the rise of the commercial art gallery, which provided patronage in the 20th century.

The oldest known paintings are approximately 40,000 years old. Some experts believe the earliest paintings are more likely to have been painted by Neanderthals than early modern humans. There are examples of cave paintings all over the world—in France, India, Spain, Portugal, China, Australia etc.

Various conjectures have been made as to the meaning these paintings had to the people that made them. They may be the result of a basic need of expression that is innate to human beings, or they could have been for the transmission of practical information.