A personal guide to Post-Impressionist paintings through five curated artworks – from the emotional intensity of Van Gogh to the scientific spectacle of Seurat.
Post-Impressionist Paintings: A Curated Introduction to the Movement
In the years following the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in 1886, four artists emerged to take their place. They expanded on Impressionist principles and artistic styles, redirecting the Parisian and wider art worlds. They were Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin and Georges Seurat.
Roger Fry, an English art critic, was the first to group these artists together in 1910 for an exhibition he was organising at the Grafton Gallery in London, about two decades after they were most active. A departure from the realistic depictions of life under Impressionism, these four artists focused on emotional expression through vivid, lively colours, brushwork and techniques, and symbolic imagery and subject matter.
Defined by its pursuit of applying scientific concepts to art, Neo-Impressionism was a subset led by Georges Seurat that involved applying concepts on colour theory and human perception to their paintings through the use of techniques like divisionism and pointillism. Each of the following works was chosen as a personal guide to these qualities.
1. Church at Auvers, Vincent Van Gogh (1890) — Post-Impressionist Paintings in Motion
At first glance, the rich colours make this painting stand out, but upon a second, as with many of Van Gogh’s paintings, it appears to move, stirring in the breeze of the Auvers summer day. This effect is created through lines that bend and curve and colour that emits light, depicting the church and its surrounding landscape as fluid rather than rigid and static. It was painted in the final month of his life. In a letter to his sister, Van Gogh himself described how “the building appears purplish against a sky of a deep and simple blue of pure cobalt, the stained-glass windows look like ultramarine blue patches, the roof is violet and in part orange.”
Van Gogh’s ability to create movement in his work has been studied, sometimes, to the confusion and awe of many, even yielding mathematical and scientific results. His depiction of light through luminance, the intensity of light in the colours on the canvas, can be seen in this painting. His placement of contrasting colours side by side on the canvas results in a visual effect that makes the painting seem to move and pulse across the canvas. Beyond shadows and colour, this painting, whether from the ecclesiastic subject matter, the artistic techniques or the knowledge of his imminent suicide, is imbued with an emotional intensity, one characteristic of Post-Impressionism era.
2. Mont Sainte-Victoire with Large Pine, Paul Cézanne (1887) — The Landscape That Defined a Career
This is a Cezanne landscape at its most quintessential. His choice of France’s southern landscapes as his subject, alongside his light brushwork and natural, earthy tones combine to create a timeless composition, its only hint of modernity being the thread of railway through the far right of the canvas. With the Montagne Sainte-Victoire as its focal point, the colour contrast from light to darker as the eye travels from the centre outward across the canvas creates depth and breadth. This mountain reappeared several times throughout Cezanne’s body of work , having been said to embody the French Provincial landscape and its people. Similarly, the tree in its foreground framing the piece gives perspective and a comforting shade from the vastness of the landscape.
3. The Circus, Georges Seurat (1891) — Post-Impressionist Paintings Meet Science
The scale of this painting places the viewer inside the spectacle of lively performers, dazzling costumes and the sparkling white horse. The characters are brought to life through Seurat’s use of ‘pointillism’, swirling lines, animated figures, and distinct colour palette of burnt orange, marigold yellow and shadows of sky blue. The frame itself is painted in deeper blue dots, creating overall cohesion, blurring the boundary between the painting and the viewer’s reality.
This painting is an embodiment of the scientific principles Seurat and his contemporaries aspired to in their artwork. It is a skilled representation of the theories of fluid line and colour and how they interact with each other to create a kind of optical illusion in the viewer’s perception. Dots of pure, solid colours placed strategically alongside each other, in theory, allows for the viewer’s mind to mix the colours. This also creates brighter overall compositions, allowing Neo-Impressionists to expand on and develop the Impressionists’ original aim of capturing light in their compositions.
4. By The Mediterranean, Henri-Edmund Cross (1895) — Neo-Impressionism’s Second Act
With a hint of fauvism in its purple and pink shading, this intimate scene by the Mediterranean Sea secludes its figures as they fish, lounge and picnic in the underbelly of its towering trees. Here we can see Cross’s elaboration on the style begun by Seurat as he moves the Neo-Impressionist movement into its second phase. Cross, a self-professed anarchist, was drawn to the movement, not just for its artistic style, but also for their shared political ideologies and beliefs in a utopian bliss. Therefore, beyond his depiction of an idyllic community, this scene represents Cross’s belief in humans to co-exist in harmony with nature. In this Mediterranean utopia, his artistic style that pushed the boundaries of the movement and was indicative of future years of European art.
5. Matamoe, Paul Gauguin (1892) — Post-Impressionist Paintings and the Problem of Gauguin
There is a collage-like quality to this painting, its patchwork of colours and textures representing the blooming biodiversity of the Tahitian landscape. Painted using bright, almost non-naturalistic colours, it is a busy landscape – a peacock and its central figure to the front, a geyser, arching palm tree and waterfall in the background. And yet, despite this, it possesses a tranquility, representative of Gauguin’s ambitions to escape the confines of European civilisation.
There is a sad irony to all Gauguin’s Tahitian paintings, one that contrasts the idyllic, ‘primitive’ lifestyle and culture he sought to immerse himself in and capture in his art. The island had already been colonised by the French for around 50 years at the time of the artist’s arrival, by which time French customs and culture had been imposed upon Tahiti. His professed ambitions for a harmonious life on the island were undermined by his mistreatment of many Tahitian women. With this context underpinning his paintings, Gauguin becomes a controversial figure within the movement.
A Curated Selection: Why These Five Post-Impressionist Paintings?
These five works were chosen not as a definitive canon, but as a personal guide, each one exemplifying a distinct strand of Post-Impressionist painting. Together they span emotional intensity, scientific experimentation, political idealism and cultural controversy, offering a complete picture of a movement that was anything but uniform. Their influence stretched far into the 20th century, across the Nabis, Fauvism and German Expressionism. And these five are as good a place as any to begin exploring it.