The difference between Impressionism and Post-Impressionism

The difference between Impressionism and Post-Impressionism is that the Impressionists (from 1874) wanted to capture the light and colour of a moment as the eye perceives it, with quick, light brushstrokes, while the Post-Impressionists (from around 1886) kept the bright colours but wanted something more: solid form and order in Cézanne and Seurat, feeling and symbolism in van Gogh and Gauguin. Impressionism was a shared movement; Post-Impressionism was never a group but a collective name for those who moved on.

Facts

Impressionism: painting what the eye sees

The Impressionists exhibited together for the first time in Paris in 1874, and the name came from Monet's Impression, Sunrise: the harbour at Le Havre in morning haze, painted with a few quick strokes. The group wanted to move away from the studio's brown shadows and narrative subjects. They often painted outdoors, en plein air, and tried to capture the light of the moment: sun on water, shadows on snow, smoke over a railway station.

The brushstrokes are short and visible, the colours bright and often impure at the edges, and the shadows are blue or violet rather than black. The subjects are everyday: parks, cafés, rivers, the family. Berthe Morisot's The Cradle and works by Renoir, Pissarro and Degas belong here. Read more in the guide to Impressionism.

Post-Impressionism: something more than the moment

During the 1880s several artists who had learned from Impressionism began to grow dissatisfied with it. The moment was not enough. Pictures dissolved into light and lost their weight, and they said nothing about what the artist felt or thought. The word Post-Impressionism was coined afterwards, by the English critic Roger Fry for an exhibition in London in 1910, and simply means after Impressionism.

That is why Post-Impressionism is not a style with shared rules. It has two main paths. One seeks order and structure: Seurat with his dots and Cézanne with his built-up forms. The other seeks expression and symbol: van Gogh with his swirling strokes and Gauguin with his flat, strong fields of colour. See the guide to Post-Impressionism.

Light versus form: Monet and Cézanne

Cézanne exhibited with the Impressionists in 1874 but wanted, as he is often quoted as saying, to make Impressionism into something solid and lasting, like the art in the museums. Where Monet dissolved a cathedral in light, Cézanne built a mountainside out of patches of colour laid like bricks. In The Card Players the two peasants are simple, solid forms, and the bottle in the middle divides the picture into two mirrored halves. Nothing happens; everything stands still.

Put The Cradle next to The Card Players in Compare. Morisot captures a moment: the veil over the cradle is a few light white strokes, and you feel that the mother has just leaned forward. Cézanne builds a state: the men could have been sitting there for hours. Both are bright and modern, but they want entirely different things.

The dot: Monet and Seurat

The Impressionists often laid pure colours next to each other instead of mixing them on the palette, so that they blended in the eye. But they did it intuitively, quickly and on the spot. Georges Seurat made it a method. He read the colour theories of his day and built A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte from thousands of small dots over almost two years, in the studio. The picture was shown at the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition in 1886, and it marks the boundary between the periods.

Compare it with Impression, Sunrise in Compare. Monet's picture is a moment in haze; Seurat's is a carefully ordered, almost motionless world in which every figure stands in profile or full face. The explanatory diagram below shows the difference between colour mixed on the palette and colour mixed in the eye. Read more in the guide to Pointillism and in Looking at art: colour.

Feeling and symbol: van Gogh and Gauguin

Van Gogh came to Paris in 1886 and took up the Impressionists' bright colours, but he used them to express feeling. In The Starry Night the sky swirls and the cypress flames; the brushstrokes follow the forms and give the picture a movement that does not exist in reality. Gauguin went in another direction: he painted flat fields of colour with dark contours, inspired by medieval stained glass and Japanese woodcuts, and sought a simpler, more spiritual world in Brittany and Tahiti.

In this way Post-Impressionism points forward to the 20th century. Cézanne became a model for the Cubists, Seurat for the abstract colour experiments, and van Gogh and Gauguin for the Fauves and the Expressionists. The guide Impressionism and Expressionism follows that thread further.

In Sweden, and how to tell them apart

Swedish artists in Paris followed the same path. Hanna Pauli's Breakfast Time of 1887 is plein-air painting in the spirit of Impressionism, with dappled sunlight on a white cloth. Barely ten years later Prince Eugen painted The Cloud, in which an enormous cloud over a dark landscape becomes a mood and almost a symbol. Read about the Swedish Opponents.

A simple rule: ask what the painter wanted to capture. If it is the light of the moment, in quick strokes, it is probably Impressionism. If it is form, order, the effect of colour or a feeling not visible in the subject, it is probably Post-Impressionism. If you mix up the names Monet and Manet, also read Monet or Manet? The periods have pages of their own: Impressionism and Post-Impressionism and Symbolism.

How to tell them apart

Exercise

Which painting is usually seen as the boundary between Impressionism and Post-Impressionism?