Impressionism and Post-Impressionism were linked movements in French painting (1860s-1905): the first caught passing light in quick strokes of pure color, the second gave that color structure, symbol and feeling. Impressionism flourished in Paris in the 1870s and 1880s, and Post-Impressionism followed from 1886 until Fauvism appeared around 1905. Both broke with the Académie des Beaux-Arts and its annual Salon, which favored history and religious subjects, smooth surfaces that hid the brush and colors dulled by golden varnish. In 1863 the Salon jury rejected Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Musée d’Orsay), with its nude woman picnicking beside two clothed men. Napoleon III then permitted a Salon des Refusés, which drew more visitors than the official Salon, many of whom came to jeer.
The core of the group met in the early 1860s in the studio of Charles Gleyre: Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and Frédéric Bazille. Eugène Boudin had first drawn Monet to open-air painting, and the friends now finished whole pictures outdoors rather than only sketching there. Paint sold in tin tubes made this practical, and new synthetic pigments such as cobalt blue, cadmium yellow and cerulean blue brightened their palettes. At the Café Guerbois in Paris they gathered around Manet, joined by Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne and Armand Guillaumin. They admired Manet as their leader, yet he never exhibited with them and kept using black. Bazille was killed in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870.
In December 1873 Monet, Edgar Degas, Pissarro, Renoir, Berthe Morisot and others founded an Anonymous Society of painters, sculptors and engravers to exhibit outside the Salon. Its first show opened in April 1874 at Nadar’s photography studio on the boulevard des Capucines, with thirty participants. In Le Charivari the humorist Louis Leroy mocked Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1872, Musée Marmottan Monet) as a mere sketch, less finished than raw wallpaper, and from its title dubbed the whole group Impressionists. The painters adopted the name. The group held eight shows by 1886, and only Pissarro took part in all of them. Their dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, carried their work to London and, in 1886, to New York.
An Impressionist canvas is built from short, thick dabs laid next to each other with little mixing, so that neighboring colors heighten one another. Black is avoided, and darks come from mixing complementary colors. Wet paint goes into wet paint, softening edges, while a white or pale ground keeps the surface light and opaque. Shadows take on the sky’s blue, an effect first noticed on snow. The subjects are modern: boulevards, railway stations, cafés, theaters, dance halls and Sunday outings, even factory chimneys in the countryside. Off-center, cropped views learned from photography and Japanese prints make scenes look caught by chance, as in Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877, Art Institute of Chicago).
Monet (1840-1926), Sisley, Morisot and Pissarro held most consistently to sunlight and color. Monet later painted series of a single motif at different hours, such as haystacks and the facade of Rouen Cathedral. From 1883 he painted his garden at Giverny, and his great Water Lilies panels have hung in the Musée de l’Orangerie since 1927. Renoir’s Bal du moulin de la Galette (1876, Musée d’Orsay) scatters sunlight through leaves over a crowd of dancers. Degas put drawing before color, scorned open-air work and painted dancers and café life. Barred as women from café and boulevard subjects, Morisot and the American Mary Cassatt painted domestic life, as in Morisot’s The Cradle (1872, Musée d’Orsay) and Cassatt’s The Child’s Bath (1893, Art Institute of Chicago).
The rupture came with the eighth exhibition in 1886, which split the group over invitations to Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. Seurat showed A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-1886, Art Institute of Chicago), a riverside crowd built from tiny, regular dots of pure color. Critics mocked the method as Pointillism, its makers preferred Divisionism, and the movement became known as Neo-Impressionism. Pissarro himself adopted it from the mid-1880s to the early 1890s before returning to his earlier manner. The younger painters kept Impressionism’s bright color and work from life but found its subjects slight and its structure lost. They stressed geometric form, distorted shapes for expression and used color freely rather than naturally.
Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), often called the father of Post-Impressionism, wanted to make Impressionism as solid and enduring as museum art. He built his pictures from simplified, block-like forms in saturated color, as in The Card Players (1894-1895, Musée d’Orsay) and his many views of Mont Sainte-Victoire. Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) poured his feelings into blazing color and thick, swirling brushwork, as in The Starry Night (1889, Museum of Modern Art, New York). In Pont-Aven in Brittany, Paul Gauguin and Émile Bernard set down color in flat, outlined areas, a manner named Synthetism in 1889; from 1891 Gauguin painted in Tahiti. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec drew the cabarets of Montmartre with a sharp, poster-like line.
The label Post-Impressionism goes back to the critic Roger Fry, who used it in 1906. He made it famous with the exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists at London’s Grafton Galleries in 1910-1911, later explaining that he had chosen the vaguest name available. Much of the press reacted with outrage. By then Impressionism had spread to Childe Hassam and William Merritt Chase in America, Max Liebermann and Lovis Corinth in Germany, Joaquín Sorolla in Spain and the Heidelberg School in Australia. Post-Impressionism led on to Fauvism, Expressionism and Cubism. The largest group of works from both movements hangs in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, with major holdings also in the Art Institute of Chicago and the Courtauld Gallery in London.
