The short answer to Impressionism vs Post-Impressionism: the Impressionists tried to paint what light looked like at a particular moment, and the Post-Impressionists kept the bright colour but used it for something else, structure for Cézanne, science for Seurat, feeling for Van Gogh, imagination for Gauguin. The brushwork tells you which is which faster than any date. Here is how to tell them apart, with paintings you can check against the museums’ own descriptions.
Two labels, invented at different times
“Impressionism” began as an insult. The group’s first exhibition was held in Paris in 1874, with work by Monet, Renoir, Degas and Cézanne, and critics singled out Monet’s Impression, Sunrise for ridicule, giving the movement its name. Seven more group shows followed, the last in 1886 (Tate).
“Post-Impressionism” is a later, British coinage. The critic and painter Roger Fry first used it in 1910, when he organised the London exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists. Tate’s definition is useful because it is narrow: the term describes the changes to Impressionism from about 1886, and is usually confined to four painters who pushed it in very different directions, Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat and Van Gogh (Tate).
So Post-Impressionism was never a movement with a manifesto. It is a name given after the fact to four people who had each, separately, decided that catching the light was not enough.
What Impressionism was after
Tate sums up the method: paint out of doors, on the spot and quickly, to catch the momentary effects of sunlight, which led to a new awareness of light and colour and to brushwork broken into separate dabs. The subject matters less than the conditions.
Monet’s Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer) (1890–91) at the Art Institute of Chicago is the clearest case. The museum explains that he worked on the series both in the field, painting at several easels at once, and in the studio, refining the colour harmonies. In May 1891 he hung fifteen of them side by side at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris. The motif stays the same from canvas to canvas; the season, the weather and the light change. That is the point.
Renoir’s Two Sisters (On the Terrace) (1881), shown at the Impressionist exhibition of 1882, adds a useful complication. The Art Institute notes that the faces are painted with controlled, precise strokes that give them a porcelain finish, set against a loose, impressionist backdrop of river, boats and blossoming trees. Even inside the movement, painters kept detail for the parts they cared about most.
Not every Impressionist even used the broken brushwork. Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877) shares the Impressionist subject, modern urban life, but the museum calls his technique more Realist. He shows the rain not with brushed raindrops but with umbrellas and reflections on the wet cobblestones.
What Post-Impressionism did instead
Seurat: light, made systematic
Tate says Seurat put the Impressionist painting of light and colour on a scientific basis. In A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884 (1884–86) at the Art Institute, nearly ten feet wide, the figures dissolve at close range into dots and dashes of complementary colours laid side by side. The museum adds that Seurat wanted a painting of modern life equivalent to a classical Greek frieze. Impressionism caught a moment; Seurat wanted to make it permanent and still.
Cézanne: light, made solid
Cézanne kept painting from nature, Tate says, but with added rigour. The Art Institute calls him the odd man out among the artists branded Impressionists. Look at The Basket of Apples (c. 1893): the tabletop does not line up from one side of the cloth to the other, the bottle tilts, and the stacked biscuits stop just short of falling out of the picture. Thick strokes model the fruit while the edges are sketched. He is not recording what he saw in one glance. He is building the table from several.
Van Gogh: light, made emotional
Van Gogh, in Tate’s phrase, developed a highly personal use of colour and brushwork that expressed his emotional response. The Art Institute’s Self-Portrait of 1887, painted in Paris, shows the moment it happened: the densely dabbed brushwork answers Seurat’s dots, but what was cool method for Seurat becomes, in the museum’s words, an intense emotional language.
His own letters say it more plainly. In Anthony Ludovici’s translation, he describes his technique in a letter:
In painting I observe no system; I lash the canvas with irregular strokes and let them stand. Impasto—bare patches here and there—some places left quite unfinished—others overpainted—brutal touches
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Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of a Post-Impressionist, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici
And here he is on the painting now known as The Bedroom, of which the Art Institute owns the second of three versions, painted in September 1889:
I will simply paint my bedroom. This time the colour shall do everything. By means of its simplicity it shall lend things a grand style, and shall suggest absolute peace and slumber to the spectator.
Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of a Post-Impressionist, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici
That sentence is the whole difference in miniature. An Impressionist would let the light in the room decide the colours. Van Gogh decides them himself, for the mood he wants, and expects the colour to do the work.
Gauguin: light, made up
Gauguin, Tate says, kept intense light and colour but rejected painting from nature and brought back imaginative subjects. The Art Institute’s Mahana no atua (Day of the God) (1894) was painted in Paris, not Tahiti, from fantasy and memory. The museum describes pools of water in interlocking zones of acidic colour, and figures that read as symbolic forms, not portraits. Nothing here was observed on the spot.
The quick test
| Look at | Impressionism | Post-Impressionism |
|---|---|---|
| Brushwork | Quick broken dabs that blur up close and merge at a distance | Systematic dots (Seurat), constructive patches (Cézanne), thick directional strokes (Van Gogh), flat areas (Gauguin) |
| Colour | Taken from the light at that moment | Chosen for structure, theory or feeling |
| Outline | Soft, often dissolved | Often firm, sometimes dark |
| Where it was painted | Mostly outdoors, on the spot | Studio, memory, or nature reworked |
| Time | A moment | Something meant to last |
| Example at the Art Institute | Monet, Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer) | Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884 |
The Japanese connection
One influence runs through both groups and explains a lot of Post-Impressionist flatness: Japanese woodblock prints. Van Gogh’s letters return to them again and again, and he says outright what he took:
For the Japanese pays no heed to the play of light, and paints flat tones one beside the other—characteristic lines, which seize the movement or the form in a simple manner.
Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of a Post-Impressionist, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici
Paying no heed to the play of light is the opposite of the Impressionist programme, and he names it as the thing to learn. Monet borrowed from Japan too; the Art Institute notes the Japanese-style wooden bridge he built over his lily pond at Giverny, which appears in Water Lily Pond (1900). But Monet made eighteen similar versions of that view in 1899–1900, all about reflections on the water, and Van Gogh painted his bedroom in flat colour. Same source, different lessons. The print most people know is Hokusai’s, discussed in what the Great Wave is really showing.
Where to go next
The quickest way to train your eye is to stand at two distances in front of each painting, as described in how to look at a painting: close enough to see the strokes, then far enough for them to merge. With Monet the merge is the point; with Van Gogh the strokes never quite stop being strokes. For fiction about painters of exactly this generation, start with Zola, in novels about painters and paintings.
One last fact worth keeping: when Monet hung those fifteen Stacks of Wheat together in 1891, the Art Institute says, the show was a critical and financial success. The painters who came after him were reacting against a winner, not a failure.
Sources
- Tate, “Impressionism” (art term): tate.org.uk
- Tate, “Post-impressionism” (art term): tate.org.uk
- Art Institute of Chicago: Monet, Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer), 1985.1103: artic.edu
- Art Institute of Chicago: Renoir, Two Sisters (On the Terrace), 1933.455: artic.edu
- Art Institute of Chicago: Caillebotte, Paris Street; Rainy Day, 1964.336: artic.edu
- Art Institute of Chicago: Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884, 1926.224: artic.edu
- Art Institute of Chicago: Cézanne, The Basket of Apples, 1926.252: artic.edu
- Art Institute of Chicago: Van Gogh, Self-Portrait, 1954.326: artic.edu
- Art Institute of Chicago: Van Gogh, The Bedroom, 1926.417: artic.edu
- Art Institute of Chicago: Gauguin, Mahana no atua (Day of the God), 1926.198: artic.edu
- Art Institute of Chicago: Monet, Water Lily Pond, 1933.441: artic.edu
- Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of a Post-Impressionist, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici, Project Gutenberg #40393: gutenberg.org/ebooks/40393