The most famous Post Impressionist paintings pushed past what Impressionism could do with a quick brushstroke: Van Gogh built color into a private code, Cézanne rebuilt objects out of geometry, Seurat painted in dots, and Gauguin chased symbols on canvas.
Impressionism was still catching light as it fell. Post Impressionism runs roughly from 1884 to 1906, when Van Gogh, Cézanne, Seurat, Gauguin and Toulouse Lautrec decided a picture could carry more than an instant.
The name is younger than the paintings. The British critic Roger Fry invented Post Impressionism in 1910, for a London show called Manet and the Post Impressionists, twenty six years after Seurat started the first painting on this list.
I picked twelve that show the range: dots, tilted tables, a Tahitian testament, a bedroom painted three times. Dates and museums are below each one.
1. Georges Seurat, Bathers at Asnières (1884)
Seurat was twenty four when he finished this canvas of workers cooling off on the Seine at Asnières, a factory suburb across the river from the fashionable Grande Jatte. He submitted it to the official Salon of 1884.
The jury rejected it. Seurat helped found the Salon des Indépendants that same year, a show with no jury and no prizes, and Bathers at Asnières found its way instead to the National Gallery in London.
2. Georges Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884 to 1886)
Seurat spent two years on this second, larger canvas, moving from the working class riverbank of the painting before it to the fashionable crowd on the island across the water. He built the whole surface from small dots of pure color, a method he called chromoluminarism.
Critics shortened that to pointillism. Up close the canvas is a field of dots. From across the room it resolves into a woman with a monkey on a leash, a soldier, a girl in white.
3. Paul Gauguin, Vision After the Sermon (1888)
Gauguin painted this in Pont Aven, Brittany, while exchanging letters with Van Gogh in Arles. Breton women in white bonnets watch Jacob wrestle an angel, a scene from the sermon they have just heard, set on a flat field of pure red.
The red ground has no light source and no horizon, an idea borrowed from Japanese prints. Gauguin offered the painting to the local church, and the priest turned it down. It is now in the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh.
4. Vincent van Gogh, Sunflowers (1888)
Van Gogh painted four sunflower canvases in August 1888 to decorate the room he had prepared for Gauguin in Arles, then made three more copies the following January. Seven in total.
One of the seven, bought by a Japanese collector in 1921, burned in an air raid on Ashiya in August 1945. This version, now in London's National Gallery, is one where Van Gogh signed his name on the vase itself, in blue, a mark of pride he did not always allow himself.
5. Vincent van Gogh, The Bedroom (1888)
Van Gogh painted his room in the Yellow House three times in less than a year. The first, from October 1888, is the one that survived intact and now hangs in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
He repainted it in September 1889 after water damage threatened the original, a version now at the Art Institute of Chicago, then made a smaller third copy weeks later as a gift for his mother and sister, now at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.
6. Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night (1889)
Van Gogh painted this from the asylum at Saint Rémy, rebuilding the view from memory once he was back in his room. It has hung at the Museum of Modern Art in New York since 1941.
I have gone through the rest of that story, including the church spire that matches nothing in the village below, in the full story behind The Starry Night.
7. Vincent van Gogh, Wheatfield with Crows (1890)
This is often called Van Gogh's last painting, tied to his suicide two and a half weeks later. His own letters date it to around 10 July 1890.
The picture he painted on the day he shot himself was a different one, Tree Roots. The last painting myth comes from a 1934 novel and the 1956 film made from it, not from Van Gogh himself.
8. Paul Cézanne, The Card Players (about 1890 to 1895)
Cézanne painted five versions of this scene, using farmhands from around his family's estate near Aix en Provence as models. The versions range from a crowded table down to a stripped down pair facing off in silence.
One of the five, bought privately in 2011 by the royal family of Qatar for around 250 million dollars, was at the time the highest price ever paid for a painting. The other four are now in the Musée d'Orsay, the Metropolitan Museum, the Courtauld Gallery and the Barnes Foundation.
9. Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, At the Moulin Rouge (1892 to 1895)
Toulouse Lautrec painted the regulars of the cabaret he drank and worked in most nights: the dancer Jane Avril at the table, her red hair unmistakable, the writer Édouard Dujardin beside her, and Toulouse Lautrec himself in the background next to his cousin, Doctor Tapié de Céleyran.
The painting has hung at the Art Institute of Chicago since 1930, part of the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection, the same Chicago gift that also brought in Seurat's La Grande Jatte and Cézanne's Basket of Apples, both earlier on this list.
10. Paul Cézanne, The Basket of Apples (about 1893)
Look at the table. The left edge and the right edge do not line up, the bottle leans one way, the plate of biscuits leans another, and none of it reads as broken until you measure it.
Cézanne built the picture from several viewpoints at once instead of one fixed eye, an idea Picasso and Braque picked up about fifteen years later for cubism. It entered the Art Institute of Chicago in 1926, in the same Bartlett gift that brought in La Grande Jatte.
11. Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897 to 1898)
Gauguin called this his testament, the largest canvas he ever painted, made in Tahiti during the worst year of his life, sick and broke, not long after he learned by letter that his daughter Aline had died in France.
After finishing it in the winter of 1897 he walked into the hills above his house and swallowed a large dose of arsenic. He survived, woke up sick, and kept painting for six more years. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston bought the painting in 1936.
12. Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte Victoire (1902 to 1906)
Cézanne painted this mountain near his home outside Aix en Provence around eighty times over more than two decades, in oil and in watercolor, from the same hillsides as the light changed.
This version, from his final years working the motif, is now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
What readers usually ask about Post Impressionism
What is Post Impressionism? A movement of painters, mainly Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat and Toulouse Lautrec, who kept Impressionism's color but stopped painting only what the eye caught in an instant, roughly from 1884 to Cézanne's death in 1906.
Who invented the name Post Impressionism? The British critic Roger Fry, for his 1910 London exhibition Manet and the Post Impressionists. None of the painters on this list ever used the term themselves.
Is Van Gogh a Post Impressionist or an Impressionist? Post Impressionist. He arrived in Paris in 1886, after the Impressionist group shows had already ended, and never exhibited alongside Monet or Renoir.
What is the most famous Post Impressionist painting? The Starry Night, by visitor numbers and reproductions. Cézanne's Card Players holds the record for price, sold privately for around 250 million dollars in 2011.
Where can I see the most Post Impressionist paintings? The Art Institute of Chicago holds an unusually large group, thanks to a single family's gifts in the 1920s and 1930s. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Musée d'Orsay in Paris hold most of the rest.
The storm that ended the series
Cézanne spent his last two decades circling the same mountain outside Aix en Provence, close to eighty paintings and watercolors of it in total.
On 15 October 1906 he was working outdoors when a storm broke. He kept painting, then collapsed walking home and was carried back by a passing laundry cart. He died of pneumonia a week later, on 22 October 1906, at 67, without seeing the large retrospective of his work that opened in Paris the following autumn and set Picasso and Braque on the road to cubism.
Post Impressionism is the twelfth of twenty stops in Art Movements in Painting.