Paul Cézanne is considered an artist of the Post-Impressionism era, although he was a contemporary and friend of the Impressionists. Those contemporaries rightfully counted him among the Impressionists – Cézanne had exhibited with the Impressionists at the first 1874 exhibition, consequently, even the critic Leroy branded him, as he did the others, with this label. While working alongside Monet, Renoir and Pissarro, who were his friends all his life, Cézanne appraised their painting critically and followed his own, independent path. The Impressionists’ aspiration to copy nature objectively did not satisfy him. “One must think”, he said, ‘the eye is not enough, thinking is also necessary”. Cézanne’s own system of painting was born in a dispute with Impressionism. Paul Cézanne was…

The end of the nineteenth century also saw the birth of a new science: ethnography. In 1882 the ethnographical museum was opened in Paris and in 1893 an exhibition of Central America took place in Madrid. In 1898 during a punitive expedition to the British African colonies, the English rediscovered Benin and its strange art long after the Portuguese discovery in the fifteenth century. The art works in gold of the indigenous Peruvian and Mexican populations, which had flooded Europe in the sixteenth century after the discovery of America and had scarcely been noticed by the art world; it was nothing more than precious metal to be melted down. The…

The term ‘Post-Impressionism’ has only one meaning: ‘after Impressionism’. Post-Impressionism is not an art movement, nor an art style; it is a brief period at the end of the nineteenth century. Impressionism being a phenomenon unique to French painting, the idea of Post-Impressionism is also closely linked to French art. Generally, the beginning of the Post-Impressionist era dates from 1886, from the moment of the eighth and final joint Impressionist Art exhibition. The era ends after 1900, running only into the first decade of the twentieth century. Although ‘Post-Impressionism’ and its chronological limits are well-defined, it seems that several Post-Impressionist works exist outside this period. Despite this period’s extreme brevity,…

CLAUDE MONET: “Colour is my day-long obsession, joy and torment”

Amongst the women painters in modern history, Berthe Morisot achieved a distinction equalled only by that of Mary Cassatt. Her gifts did not at once receive public recognition, but in recent years they have won more and more appreciation. She was an interesting person. Degas once said of her that she painted pictures as she made bonnets – a suggestion of the femininely instinctive and impulsive action of her talent. One source of her strength, however, was the thoroughness of her training. Her father, an official at Bourges, saw that his daughter’s tastes were genuine, and made it easy for her to develop her faculties. She and her sister Edma…

Camille Pissarro’s life began in an exotic world, on the rocky island of Saint Thomas not far from Puerto Rico. His father owned a hardware store and wished to see his children carry on the business. He sent his son to France to study, where Camille stayed for six years. This is where he began to draw and the principal of the school encouraged his student’s artistic inclinations. At the time landscapes were already the centre of his attention, and he strove to learn how to render spacial depth and lay out the composition of a painting. Pissarro was impassioned, intelligent, and kind, and indeed became a sort of “father”…

Alfred Sisley was born in Paris on 30 October 1839 to English parents. He spent five years in England from 1857 to 1861, and in the country of Shakespeare he felt himself to be English for the first time. He studied English literature, but was even more interested in England’s great master painters. It was most likely in this way – through exposure to the free brushwork of Turner, and Constable’s landscapes, which resembled preparatory studies – that Sisley sensed he had a vocation for the genre. In October 1862 fate brought him to Charles Gleyre’s free studio, where Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, and Frédéric Bazille had come to study.…

Alfred Sisley was born in Paris on 30 October 1839 to English parents. He spent five years in England from 1857 to 1861, and in the country of Shakespeare he felt himself to be English for the first time. He studied English literature, but was even more interested in England’s great master painters. It was most likely in this way – through exposure to the free brushwork of Turner, and Constable’s landscapes, which resembled preparatory studies – that Sisley sensed he had a vocation for the genre. In October 1862 fate brought him to Charles Gleyre’s free studio, where Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, and Frédéric Bazille had come to study.…

Degas was closest to Renoir in the impressionist’s circle, for both favoured the animated Parisian life of their day as a motif in their paintings. Degas did not attend Gleyre’s studio; most likely he first met the future impressionists at the Café Guerbois. Edgar Degas came from a completely different milieu than did Monet, Renoir and Sisley. His grandfather René-Hilaire de Gas, a grain merchant, had been forced to flee from France to Italy in 1793 during the French Revolution. Business prospered for him there. After establishing a bank in Naples, de Gas wed a young girl from a rich Genoan family. Degas preferred to write his name simply as…

The art of Manet was one of the most important aesthetic factors contributing to the emergence of Impressionism. Although he was only twelve years older than Monet, Bazille, Renoir, and Sisely, those painters considered him a master. The originality of Manet’s painting and his independence from academic canons opened new creative horizons for the Impressionists. Manet is one of the most famous artists from the second half of the nineteenth century linked to the impressionists, although he was not really one of them. He had great influence on French painting partly because of the choice he made for his subjects from everyday life, the use of pure colours, and his…