Post-Impressionism for beginners

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

In 1910 the English critic Roger Fry hung an exhibition in London called Manet and the Post-Impressionists and gave a name to a group of painters who had little in common except a starting point. They had all learned from Impressionism and then gone their own way: toward science, structure, emotion or myth. Between them, they opened almost every door that modern art would walk through.

Three layers

Historical What the works and letters show. Later tradition The legends. Modern How we use the images today.

Seurat’s dots

Georges Seurat, Study for “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte”, 1884. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (51.112.6). Image: Open Access, public domain (CC0).

Historical Georges Seurat (1859 to 1891) wanted to make Impressionism scientific. Drawing on the color theories of Michel-Eugène Chevreul and Ogden Rood, he set small dots of pure color side by side to mix in the viewer’s eye: pointillism. This small study of 1884 prepares his huge A Sunday on La Grande Jatte in Chicago, where Parisians relax on an island in the Seine, frozen in stiff, solemn poses.

Cézanne’s solid world

Historical Paul Cézanne (1839 to 1906), in Provence, wanted to give Impressionism the solidity of museum art. He built forms from patches of color and let tabletops tip, seeing objects from several angles at once. In a 1904 letter to Émile Bernard he advised treating nature by the cylinder, the sphere and the cone. In The Card Players, 1890 to 1892, peasants sit as still and solid as buildings. The Cubists would take his lesson literally.

Van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh, Olive Trees, 1889. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1998.325.1). Image: Open Access, public domain (CC0).

Historical Vincent van Gogh (1853 to 1890) painted for only about ten years. In the south of France he developed thick, rhythmic strokes and intense color. He painted olive groves near the asylum at Saint-Rémy in 1889. His letters, mostly to his brother Theo, are published in full by the Van Gogh Museum, and I quote him only from that edition, because many lines attributed to him online are not in his letters. He suffered severe crises. In December 1888 in Arles he cut off his ear; Bernadette Murphy’s research (2016) argues that he removed the whole ear. He died of a gunshot wound in 1890.

Later tradition The mad genius story overshadows his careful, thoughtful practice.

Gauguin and the Nabis

Historical Paul Gauguin (1848 to 1903) left his work as a stockbroker and his family to paint, first in Brittany and then in Tahiti from 1891. He used flat areas of strong, unnatural color. His life in Polynesia included sexual relationships with girls as young as thirteen, whom he also painted, and his “primitive paradise” ignored the colonial reality around him. Recent exhibitions address both directly.

The esoteric angle

Historical In 1888 Paul Sérusier painted a small landscape under Gauguin’s direction in Brittany, in pure flat color. Back in Paris, he and his friends, including Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, formed a group called the Nabis, from the Hebrew word for prophets. Some of them, Sérusier above all, were drawn to Theosophy and mystical theories of number and color.

Later tradition Van Gogh’s starry skies are often read as mystical. He did write about religion and the stars, but how far to read his paintings as visions is debated.

Modern The Nabis’ idea that color itself carries spirit leads straight to Kandinsky. See Early abstraction.

Try it yourself

Find a high-resolution image of Seurat’s La Grande Jatte (Art Institute of Chicago 1926.224). Zoom into one shadow on the grass and list every color you see. Then zoom out until it looks like one color. Name it.

Before and after

Before this: Impressionism.

After this: Symbolism.

See every movement in order on the art movements timeline, or learn to look step by step in the free Art History for Beginners course.