Originating in France, Symbolism was a nineteenth-century romantic movement stemming from reactions against the realistic approach to Naturalism, Impressionism, and the realities of the industrial age, choosing, instead, to use symbols for the depiction of ideas, and thereby, creating a visual language of the soul.

More than a movement, Symbolism was a trend influencing artists of every kind, worldwide. Symbolists believed that art should aim to capture more absolute truths that could only be accessed by indirect methods. Thus, they wrote and painted in a highly metaphorical and suggestive manner, endowing particular images or objects with symbolic meanings.

The founding Symbolists tended to look to poetry and art as a contemplative refuge from the world of strife. From this desire, the Symbolists took characteristic themes of mysticism and otherworldliness, a keen sense of mortality, and a sense for the power of sexuality.

In 1886, the Symbolists published a manifesto announcing that Symbolism was hostile to "plain meanings, declamations, false sentimentality and matter-of-fact description," and that its goal was to "clothe the Ideal in a perceptible form". From this, scenes from nature, human activities, and all other real world phenomena were only surfaces created to represent affinities with the primordial Ideals.

Symbolism, in every form, had a significant influence on many later forms of art. Expressionism and Surrealism were two movements that were direct descendents of Symbolism, as well as, Art Nouveau and carried forward to serve as a catalyst toward abstraction.