Collection: Post-Impressionism

Post-Impressionism was a French art movement that flourished from approximately 1886 to 1905. The term was coined by the British critic Roger Fry, who first used it in 1906 and popularised it through his 1910 exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists at the Grafton Galleries in London. Fry described the label as the vaguest and most non-committal way to identify the artists' chronological position relative to Impressionism.

The movement emerged as a reaction against what its principal figures considered the limitations of Impressionism, particularly its emphasis on optical record over structure and emotional content. Post-Impressionist painters retained the vivid colour and visible brushwork of the previous generation but pushed toward geometric reduction, expressive distortion, and symbolic subject matter. They emphasised harmony and pictorial structure over the naturalistic transcription of light.

Four principal painters defined the movement. Paul Cézanne rebuilt landscape and still life as architectures of geometric facets, laying the groundwork that Cubism would later extend. Vincent van Gogh pushed colour and impasto toward direct emotional address, producing the bulk of his work in his last five years in Arles and Saint-Rémy. Paul Gauguin developed Synthetism in Brittany and later Tahiti, flattening space and treating the painted surface as a self-contained sign system. Georges Seurat codified Pointillism and Divisionism, applying small dots of pure colour in adjacent fields for the eye to combine optically.

The movement included several distinct sub-currents and groups, including Pointillism, Divisionism, Neo-Impressionism around Paul Signac, Synthetism, the Pont-Aven School, and Les Nabis. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec belongs to the wider field through his lithographic posters of fin de siècle Parisian nightlife. The movement bridged Impressionism and the early modernist developments of Fauvism, Expressionism, and Cubism.