Word.ws English Dictionary

pictorialism

pictorialism noun: a school of artistic photography that emphasized using photography to mimic certain styles of contemporary painting, that flourished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Noun

pictorialism (countable and uncountable, plural pictorialisms)

  1. A school of artistic photography that emphasized using photography to mimic certain styles of contemporary painting, that flourished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
  2. Any artistic use of photography to imitate painting, especially using pictorial conventions.
    • The black-and-white portraits and landscapes […] fall somewhere between photojournalism and pictorialism.2007 December 21, Karen Rosenberg, “In Bhutan, Sacred Sights Amid the Clouds”, in New York Times
  3. The theory that mental imagery is visual rather than based on language-like description.

Forms of pictorialism

pluralpictorialisms

Origin of pictorialism

From pictorial + -ism.

Questions about pictorialism

What does pictorialism mean?
Pictorialism means a school of artistic photography that emphasized using photography to mimic certain styles of contemporary painting, that flourished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
What part of speech is pictorialism?
Pictorialism is a noun.
What is the plural of pictorialism?
The plural of pictorialism is pictorialisms.

Words near pictorialism in the dictionary

  1. pictorialisation
  2. pictorialise
  3. pictorialised
  4. pictorialises
  5. pictorialising
  6. pictorialism
  7. pictorialisms
  8. pictorialist
  9. pictorialists
  10. pictorialities
  11. pictoriality

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pictorialism (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “pictorialism.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pictorialism. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.