Post-Impressionism

Post-Impressionism describes artists working in the 1880s and 1890s who built on Impressionism but went in new directions.
They did not work as one group. The name was invented later by the English critic Roger Fry, for an exhibition in London in 1910.
They kept bright colour and real-life subjects, but added stronger emotion, bolder shapes or more structure.

Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853 to 1890): expressive colour and thick, swirling brushstrokes (impasto), as in The Starry Night (1889) and his paintings of sunflowers.
Paul Cézanne (French, 1839 to 1906): simplified nature into geometric forms such as cylinders, spheres and cones, and painted Mont Sainte-Victoire many times. He greatly influenced Cubism.
Georges Seurat (French, 1859 to 1891): developed pointillism, painting with small dots of pure colour that mix in the viewer's eye, as in A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884 to 1886).
Paul Gauguin (French, 1848 to 1903): flat areas of bold, non-natural colour; he later worked in Tahiti.

In pointillism, dots of blue and yellow placed close together can look green from a distance. This is called optical mixing.
Many artists of this time, including Van Gogh, admired and collected Japanese woodblock prints, with their flat colour, strong outlines and bold compositions.
Post-Impressionism opened the way to 20th-century movements such as Cubism and Expressionism.