Post-Impressionism

Post-Impressionism is an art movement of the 1886–1905 period. The gallery holds 5,702 works in this movement, including works by Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley. Browse Post-Impressionism paintings, portraits, pictures and artworks from the world's public-domain museum collections.

Post-Impressionism is a predominantly French movement in painting that flourished roughly between 1886 and 1905, emerging directly from Impressionism even as it pushed against that style's limits. Its conventional starting point is the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in Paris in May 1886, where Georges Seurat unveiled *A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte* and a younger generation made plain that recording fleeting effects of light no longer satisfied them. The label itself came later and from abroad: the English critic Roger Fry coined "Post-Impressionism" for his 1910 London exhibition *Manet and the Post-Impressionists* at the Grafton Galleries. It was never a unified school with a manifesto but a retrospective grouping of strongly individual artists who shared a point of departure.

What binds them is a turn from the eye to the idea. Building on Impressionism's pure, brilliant colour and broken brushwork, the Post-Impressionists subordinated naturalistic observation to structure, symbol, and feeling. Their methods diverged sharply: Seurat and Paul Signac pursued the systematic optical mixture of Pointillism (Neo-Impressionism); Paul Cézanne reduced nature to underlying geometry and shifting planes; Vincent van Gogh charged thick, agitated strokes with emotion; and Paul Gauguin flattened form into bold, contour-bound colour drawn from medieval, folk, and non-Western art.

The principal figures—Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, and Seurat, alongside Signac, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and the Symbolist Odilon Redon—produced many of the period's defining canvases, among them van Gogh's *The Starry Night* (1889) and Gauguin's Tahitian works. This collection holds telling examples: Cézanne's *Harlequin*, with its sculptural figure and tilting space; Gauguin's *Ia Orana Maria* (1891), a Polynesian recasting of a Christian Annunciation; and van Gogh's *L'Arlésienne*, a portrait built from flat planes of saturated colour.

The movement's legacy is foundational to modern art. Cézanne's faceting fed directly into Cubism, while van Gogh's and Gauguin's expressive colour propelled Fauvism and German Expressionism. Bridging nineteenth-century Impressionism and the twentieth-century avant-garde—and intertwined with currents such as Japonisme and Symbolism—Post-Impressionism redefined the picture surface as an autonomous arena of form and emotion rather than a window onto nature.