What is Post-Impressionism? Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin and Seurat

Post-Impressionism is an umbrella term for painters at the end of the 19th century who started from the bright colours of Impressionism but wanted more: solid form, symbolism or strong emotion. The most important are Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, active roughly 1886–1905.

Facts

A name given afterwards

None of the painters called themselves Post-Impressionists. The English critic Roger Fry needed a name when in 1910 he organised the exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists in London, and the word simply means “after Impressionism”. It gathers artists who had passed through Impressionism but felt that it only captured the surface.

That is why Post-Impressionism is not a unified style. It includes Cézanne's geometry, Seurat's scientific dots, van Gogh's swirling brushstrokes and Gauguin's flat areas of colour. What they share is the wish to give painting something more than a fleeting impression.

Cézanne: the form beneath the surface

Paul Cézanne wanted to make “something solid and durable of Impressionism, like the art of the museums”. He built up landscapes, still lifes and figures with small, ordered brushstrokes and let several viewpoints meet in the same picture. In the series The Card Players from the 1890s the peasants sit as motionless as mountains.

Cézanne worked largely in obscurity in Provence, but after his death in 1906 a large memorial exhibition was shown in Paris the following year. It was decisive for Picasso and Braque, and he is often called the father of modern painting. Read more in the guide to Cubism.

Seurat: dots and science

Georges Seurat drew on the colour theory of his day and placed small dots of pure colour side by side so that they mix in the viewer's eye. The technique is called pointillism or divisionism. A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, on which he worked for two years, was shown at the Impressionists' last exhibition in 1886.

The picture is almost the exact opposite of Impressionism's quick sketches: the figures stand stiffly as in a frieze, and every part is carefully calculated. Seurat died in 1891, only 31 years old, but his method was taken up by Paul Signac among others.

Van Gogh and Gauguin: colour as feeling

Vincent van Gogh painted most of his famous works in the last years of his life, in Arles and Saint-Rémy in the south of France. Sunflowers of 1888 and The Starry Night of 1889 are painted with thick paint and powerful, rhythmic strokes. Colour describes not only how things look but how they feel.

Paul Gauguin sought to escape the city, first to Brittany and in 1891 to Tahiti. He painted with large, flat areas of colour and dark outlines and wanted to create pictures with symbolic and spiritual meaning. Both van Gogh and Gauguin became important models for the Expressionists and the Fauves.

Post-Impressionism in the Nordic countries

In the Nordic countries the period coincided with a breakthrough for a more personal and atmospheric painting. Edvard Munch painted The Scream in 1893, a picture in which the landscape itself seems to scream. In Sweden the artists around the Opponents of 1885 attacked the Academy, and in the 1890s Richard Bergh, Prince Eugen and Carl Larsson painted Swedish landscapes and homes in a new, national spirit.

Swedish painting around 1900 has its own period in the app: The Opponents and National Romanticism. There you can see how the French ideas mixed with the light and moods of the Nordic summer nights.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Who coined the word Post-Impressionism?