Collection: Post-Impressionism

Post-Impressionism is less a single movement than a generation. The painters covered by the term, working between roughly 1885 and 1905, all began from the optical lessons of Impressionism but pressed past them toward structure, symbol, and expressive colour. The British critic Roger Fry popularised the label with his 1910 exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists at the Grafton Galleries in London, and it has held since because it names accurately what unites otherwise very different bodies of work.

Four figures define the period. Paul Cézanne rebuilt landscape and still life as architectures of geometric facets, laying the groundwork that Cubism would extend a generation later. Vincent van Gogh pushed colour and impasto toward direct emotional address, fusing Provençal landscape with personal urgency in a body of work made almost entirely in his last five years. Paul Gauguin took the same conviction in colour and outline to Brittany and then to Polynesia, shaping a Synthetist style that flattened space and treated the painted surface as a self contained sign system. Georges Seurat turned in the opposite direction, codifying optical theory into the Pointillist or Neo Impressionist method, where small dots of pure colour were laid in adjacent fields for the eye to combine.

Around these four sit the Pont Aven school, the Nabis, and the printmakers who turned the colour woodcut and the lithograph into expressive languages of their own. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec belongs to the period as well, his lithographic posters fixing the visual style of fin de siècle Parisian nightlife.

The prints gathered here move across these strands. The collection sits between the gallery's Impressionism holdings, from which the period departed, and the Expressionism & Fauvism selection, where the next generation extended Post-Impressionist colour into more violent registers.