Post Impressionism is the name given to French painting after Impressionism, roughly between 1886 and 1905. It covers above all four painters: Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin.
All four started from Impressionism, and each left it in a different direction. The name says when they worked, the way "the 1890s" would, not how they painted.
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Impressionism was the movement of the French painter Claude Monet and his friends in Paris. They worked outdoors and fast, laying small dabs of light color side by side. Up close a canvas looked rough, but from a few steps back it became a river or a field in the light of one moment of the day.
The four who came after kept that bright palette, but each felt something was missing. Cézanne wanted pictures as solid as a building, and Seurat wanted a precise rule for applying color. Van Gogh wanted color to carry his feelings, while Gauguin wanted to paint what he imagined rather than what he saw.
Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, above, shows Parisians on a Sunday afternoon on an island in the Seine, the river that crosses Paris. Up close the canvas is nothing but tiny dots of pure color. Seurat never blended them on his palette, the board where painters mix paint, and from a distance they merge into grass, water and parasols.
The Impressionists organized their own exhibitions in Paris, outside the official ones, and in 1886 Seurat showed the Grande Jatte at the eighth Impressionist exhibition, the last the group held together. The break with Impressionism began inside the Impressionists' own show.
None of the four lived to hear the name. Van Gogh died in 1890, Seurat in 1891, Gauguin in 1903 and Cézanne in 1906.
The word was coined only in 1910, in London, by the English painter and critic Roger Fry, for an exhibition called Manet and the Post Impressionists. Fry later admitted that the word said almost nothing about how these artists worked.
The title put an older French painter, Édouard Manet, ahead of the four, and London did not take it calmly.
A name invented in London
Fry had gone to Paris with another critic, Desmond MacCarthy, to choose the pictures…
What You'll Discover
Why London critics compared the show to an asylum.
Seurat's dots and Gauguin's red field.
Van Gogh's letter on choosing his colors.
Cézanne's cylinders, spheres and cones.
The sentence Virginia Woolf wrote about December 1910.