Post-Impressionism

By 1880 several of the most gifted painters in France had absorbed Impressionism and found it insufficient for what they wanted to do. Post-Impressionism is not a single movement but a constellation of individual solutions: Cézanne's determination to "treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone" and achieve something "solid and durable like the art of the museums"; van Gogh's charged, swirling brushwork that turned landscape and portraiture into vehicles for psychological intensity; Gauguin's flight to Brittany and then Tahiti to find an alternative to European modernity; Seurat's systematic pointillist dots. What united them was the shared premise that pure visual sensation — the Impressionist legacy — needed to be pushed further, toward structure, expression or symbolism. Their collective solutions directly seeded the twentieth century's revolutions: Cézanne fed Cubism, van Gogh fed Expressionism, Gauguin fed Symbolism and beyond.

How to recognise it

Post-Impressionism is a family of styles rather than a single look, but certain patterns recur. Cézanne's work shows geometric simplification of form — landscapes and still-lifes broken into interlocking planes, multiple viewpoints subtly combined — with a greenish-grey cool palette. Van Gogh announces himself through urgent, directional brushstrokes that seem to vibrate with emotional energy, and a palette of charged yellows, blues and oranges. Gauguin's Breton and Tahitian work uses flat planes of unmodulated colour with strong dark contours, like stained glass. Across all these approaches, form is more resolved than in Impressionism, composition more deliberate, emotional or structural intent more explicit.