For me Symbolism is one of the more troublesome art styles, as artists whose work get put into this category had such varied approaches. It's also easy to think it means "symbol" and get distracted looking for hidden signs/symbols in a composition. While Symbolism is about a painted landscape having more in it than there mere representation of what you might see, that there is some extra meaning and/or manipulation by the artist of reality to convey some sort of message, quite what this additional meaning and underlying narrative (story) might be isn't necessarily overt.
