Post-Impressionism
Description
Post-Impressionism (also spelled Postimpressionism) was a predominantly French art movement which developed roughly between 1886 and 1905, from the last Impressionist exhibition to the birth of Fauvism. Post-Impressionism emerged as a reaction against Impressionists' concern for the naturalistic depiction of light and colour. Its broad emphasis on abstract qualities or symbolic content means Post-Impressionism encompasses Les Nabis, Neo-Impressionism, Symbolism, Cloisonnism, the Pont-Aven School, and Synthetism, along with some later Impressionists' work. The movement's principal artists were Paul Cézanne (known as the father of Post-Impressionism), Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh and Georges Seurat. Read more ↗
Key Artists
Paul Cézanne
Known as the 'Father of Post-Impressionism' who sought to make Impressionism something solid and durable like museum art, analyzing natural forms through geometric planes of modulated color.
Vincent van Gogh
Dutch master whose emotionally turbulent, expressive impasto brushwork, vibrating color contrasts, and spiritual intensity transformed landscape and portraiture into psychological autobiographies.
Paul Gauguin
Bold innovator who abandoned European naturalism for Synthetism and Symbolist Primitivism, seeking spiritual authenticity and decorative purity in Brittany and Tahiti.
Georges Seurat
Pioneer of Neo-Impressionist Pointillism who countered Impressionist spontaneity with rigorous scientific structure, optical color mixing, and monumental architectural permanence.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Master draftsman and printmaker who captured the decadent, electrified nightlife of Montmartre cabarets and brothels with radical cropped angles, sinuous contours, and flat Japanese color.
Henri Rousseau
Self-taught 'Naïve' genius and toll collector admired by Post-Impressionists for his imaginative, dreamlike jungle compositions painted with absolute formal clarity and uninhibited sincerity.
Famous Artworks
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Fun Facts
The term 'Post-Impressionism' was invented in 1910 by English art critic Roger Fry when organizing the groundbreaking London exhibition 'Manet and the Post-Impressionists'; Fry needed a convenient catch-all name to describe the diverse French masters (Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Seurat) who had pushed beyond Impressionism.
↗ Source: britannica.com
During their stormy nine-week cohabitation at the Yellow House in Arles in late 1888, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin painted the exact same subjects side-by-side - including Madame Ginoux and the Alyscamps ancient necropolis - before intense artistic and personal disputes ended with Van Gogh severing part of his own left ear.
↗ Source: britannica.com
