Post-Impressionism
The generation that came after Impressionism and decided that light was not enough. They wanted emotion, structure, color, and meaning.
Post-Impressionism: After the Light
The Impressionists solved one problem and created another. They proved that painting could capture the fleeting effects of light on a pond, a field, or a Parisian street. But a generation of younger painters looked at Impressionist work and asked: is that all? Is light enough? Where is the emotion? Where is the structure? Where is the meaning? The term "Post-Impressionism" was coined by the British art critic Roger Fry in 1910, when he organized an exhibition at the Grafton Galleries in London called "Manet and the Post-Impressionists." The label is awkward. It describes not a single movement but a group of painters who all started as Impressionists and then went in radically different directions. What united them was dissatisfaction with Impressionism's emphasis on optical sensation. They wanted painting to do more than record what the eye sees.
Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)
Van Gogh painted for exactly ten years. He started in 1880 at the age of twenty-seven, working in the Borinage mining region of Belgium, and he shot himself in a wheat field in Auvers-sur-Oise in July 1890. In those ten years he produced about 860 paintings and 1,300 works on paper. Most of the paintings we know were made in the last two and a half years of his life. His "Bedroom in Arles" from 1888, available as a print in our store, shows his bedroom at the Yellow House in Arles where he lived for fourteen months. The walls are blue, the bed is yellow, the chairs are red. The perspective is off. The floor seems to tilt. Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo that the painting should "express absolute repose," and it does, but it also expresses something else: the mind of a person who sees color as emotion, not as description. His late paintings from Saint-Remy, including the wheat field and cypress series, are painted with a physical intensity that no one had attempted before. The paint is thick. The brushstrokes are visible. The sky moves. The cypress trees twist upward like dark flames. Van Gogh was not painting what he saw. He was painting what he felt about what he saw, and that distinction is the core of Post-Impressionism.
Paul Cezanne (1839-1906)
Cezanne was the quiet revolutionary of Post-Impressionism. He was a friend of Emile Zola from childhood, grew up in Aix-en-Provence, and spent most of his career painting the same subjects: Mont Sainte-Victoire, still lifes with apples, and card players in Provence. He was not interested in fame. He was not interested in Paris. He wanted to solve a specific problem: how to paint form and color simultaneously, without one sacrificing to the other. His still lifes of apples, including the painting available in our store, show his approach. The apples are not round in the traditional sense. They are built up from patches of color, each patch describing a different plane of the fruit's surface. The table is not flat. It tilts upward. The perspective is deliberately inconsistent, because Cezanne was not trying to create the illusion of depth. He was trying to show the structure of objects as a composition of colored forms. Cezanne's work directly led to Cubism. Picasso said, "Cezanne was my one and only master." When you look at a Cezanne still life, you are looking at the painting that taught Picasso and Braque how to break objects into facets and reassemble them on canvas.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901)
Toulouse-Lautrec was an aristocrat who became a chronicler of Parisian nightlife. He was born in Albi in southern France, the son of a count. He broke both legs in adolescence, and they stopped growing. He reached four feet eleven inches as an adult. He moved to Paris, lived in Montmartre, and spent his nights in cabarets, dance halls, and brothels. His paintings and posters of the Moulin Rouge, the Moulin de la Galette, and the cafes of Montmartre are not voyeuristic. They are sympathetic. He knew the dancers, the singers, and the prostitutes personally. He painted them at work, at rest, and in private moments. His style combined the loose brushwork of Impressionism with the bold outlines of Japanese woodblock prints, creating a look that became the visual language of Parisian nightlife in the 1890s.
Henri Rousseau (1844-1910)
Rousseau was a customs officer who painted on weekends. He had no formal training. He never left France. His jungle paintings, including the works available in our store, were based on illustrations in books and the botanical garden in Paris, not on actual travel. He painted lions, snakes, and tropical foliage with a literalness that made Picasso and the avant-garde love him. Rousseau's work is sometimes called "naive" or "primitive," and he is grouped with Post-Impressionism because he was working at the same time and exhibiting in the same independent salons. But his work does not fit any category. He painted what he imagined, with a precision and sincerity that trained painters could not replicate. His jungle scenes are dreamlike, not because they are surreal, but because they are so carefully painted from such limited information.
Why Post-Impressionism Matters
Post-Impressionism is the bridge between Impressionism and modern art. It is the moment when painters decided that painting should not just record what the eye sees. Painting should express emotion (Van Gogh), explore structure (Cezanne), document modern life (Toulouse-Lautrec), or create worlds from imagination (Rousseau). Every art movement of the twentieth century starts here.
Where to See Post-Impressionist Paintings
The Musee d'Orsay in Paris has the largest collection, including Van Gogh's self-portraits, Cezanne's card players, and Rousseau's jungle scenes. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a strong Post-Impressionist collection, including Cezanne's "The Card Players" and several Van Gogh paintings. The Courtauld Gallery in London has Cezanne's "Mont Sainte-Victoire" and Van Gogh's "Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear." The Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands has the second-largest Van Gogh collection in the world, housed in a national park.
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