Symbolist painting was one of the main artistic manifestations of symbolism, a cultural movement that emerged at the end of the 19th century in France and developed in several European countries. The beginning of this current was in poetry, especially thanks to the impact of The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire (1868), which powerfully influenced a generation of young poets including Paul Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé and Arthur Rimbaud. The term "symbolism" was coined by Jean Moréas in a literary manifesto published in Le Figaro in 1886. The aesthetic premises of Symbolism moved from poetry to other arts, especially painting, sculpture, music and theater. The chronology of this style is difficult to establish: the peak is between 1885 and 1905, but already in the 1860s there were works pointing to symbolism, while its culmination can be established at the beginning of the First World War.

In painting, symbolism was a fantastic and dreamlike style that emerged as a reaction to the naturalism of the realist painting and Impressionist trends, whose objectivity and detailed description of reality were opposed by subjectivity and the depiction of the occult and the irrational, as opposed to representation, evocation, or suggestion. Just as in poetry the rhythm of words served to express a transcendent meaning, in painting they sought ways for color and line to express ideas. In this movement, all the arts were related and thus the painting of Redon was often compared to the poetry of Baudelaire or the music of Debussy.

This style placed a special emphasis on the world of dreams and mysticism, as well as on various aspects of counterculture and marginality, such as esotericism, Satanism, terror, death, sin, sex and perversion—symptomatic in this sense is the fascination of these artists with the figure of the femme fatale. All this was manifested in line with decadentism, a fin-de-siecle cultural current that stressed the most existential aspects of life and pessimism as a vital attitude, as well as the evasion and exaltation of the unconscious. Another current linked to symbolism was aestheticism, a reaction to the prevailing utilitarianism of the time and to the ugliness and materialism of the industrial era. Against this, art and beauty were granted their own autonomy, synthesized in Théophile Gautier's formula "art for art's sake" (L'art pour l'art). Some Symbolist artists were also linked to theosophy and esoteric organizations such as the Rosicrucians. Stylistically there was great diversity within Symbolist painting, as is denoted by comparing the sumptuous exoticism of Gustave Moreau with the melancholic serenity of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.

Pictorial symbolism was related to other earlier and later movements: Pre-Raphaelitism is usually considered an antecedent of this movement, while at the beginning of the 20th century it was linked to Expressionism, especially thanks to figures such as Edvard Munch and James Ensor. On the other hand, some schools or artistic associations such as the Pont-Aven School or the group of the Nabis are considered symbolist or directly related to symbolism. They were also heirs to some extent of Neo-Impressionism, whose puntillist technique was the first to break with Impressionist naturalism. On the other hand, Post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin exerted a powerful influence on the beginnings of Symbolism, thanks to his links with the Pont-Aven School and Cloisonnism. This current was also linked to modernism, known as Art Nouveau in France, Modern Style in United Kingdom, Jugendstil in Germany, Sezession in Austria or Liberty in Italy.

Symbolism emerged as a reaction to the multiple tendencies linked to realism in the field of culture throughout the 19th century. Factors such as the progress of science since the Renaissance—which in this century led to scientific positivism, the development of industry and commerce that originated with capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, the preference of the bourgeoisie for cultural naturalism, and the emergence of socialism with its tendency toward philosophical materialism, led to a clear preference for artistic realism throughout the century, which was evident in movements such as realist painting and impressionism. In contrast to this, first poets and then artists expressed a new way of understanding life, more subjective and spiritual, a reflection of their existential anguish in a time of loss of both moral and religious values, which is why they entered into the search for a new language and a new category of values that manifest their inner world, their beliefs, their emotions, their fears, their longings. According to Johannes Dobai, "Symbolist art tends to generalize, through images, an individual, or rather unconscious, experience of the world."

Symbolism was an eclectic movement, which brought together a number of artists with common concerns and sensibilities. More than a homogeneous style, it was an amalgam of styles grouped by a series of common factors, such as themes, ways of understanding life and art, literary and musical influences, and an opposition to realism and scientific positivism. It was a sometimes contradictory movement, which mixed the desire for modernity and a break with tradition with nostalgia for the past, the ugliness of decadentism with the beauty of aestheticism, serenity with exaltation, reason with madness. There is also an overlap between different styles that coexist simultaneously: Neo-Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, modernism, symbolism, synthetism, ingenuism; as well as between the plastic arts: painting, sculpture, illustration, decorative arts, and between these and poetry, theater, and music.

Art historiography has found it difficult to establish stylistic parameters common to symbolism. For a time, any work of art from the second half of the 19th century with a dreamlike or psychological content was considered symbolist. Finally it was considered to be a broad cultural current covering a timeline between the late 19th and early 20th centuries developed throughout Europe—including Russia—and with some reminiscences in the United States, a current that agglutinated totally or partially diverse autonomous styles, such as the English Pre-Raphaelitism, the French Nabis, the modernism present for example in Gustav Klimt or even an incipient Expressionism perceptible in the work of Edvard Munch. According to Philippe Jullian, "there has never been a symbolist school of painting, but rather a symbolist taste."

Symbolism exalts subjectivity, the inner experience. According to Amy Dempsey, "the Symbolists were the first artists to declare that the true aim of art was the inner world of mood and emotion, rather than the objective world of outward appearances". To this end, they used the symbol as a vehicle for the expression of their emotions, which took the form of images of strong subjective and irrational content, in which dreams, visions, fantastic worlds recreated by the artist predominate, with a certain tendency towards the morbid and perverse, tormented eroticism, loneliness and existential anguish.