Table of Contents

I. Realism

- Gustave Courbet
- Edouard Manet

II. Impressionism

- Pierre-Aguste Renoir
- Edgar Degas

III. Post Impressionism

- Paul Cezanne
- Vincent Van Gogh
- Paul Gauguin

IV. Bibliography
 Realism
The Realist movement in French art flourished from about 1840 until the late nineteenth century,
and sought to convey a truthful and objective vision of contemporary life. Realism emerged in
the aftermath of the Revolution of 1848 that overturned the monarchy of Louis-Philippe and
developed during the period of the Second Empire under Napoleon III. As French society fought
for democratic reform, the Realists democratized art by depicting modern subjects drawn from
the everyday lives of the working class. Rejecting the idealized classicism of academic art and
the exotic themes and the exaggerated emotionalism and drama of Romanticism, Realism was
based on direct observation of the modern world. 

It sought to portray real and typical contemporary people and situations with truth and accuracy,
and not avoiding unpleasant or sordid aspects of life. The movement aimed to focus on
unidealized subjects and events that were previously rejected in art work. Realist works depicted
people of all classes in situations that arise in ordinary life, and often reflected the changes
brought by the Industrial and Commercial Revolutions. Realism was primarily concerned with
how things appeared to the eye, rather than containing ideal representations of the world.

Realism rejected traditional forms of art, literature, and social organization as outmoded in the
wake of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Beginning in France in the 1840s,
Realism revolutionized painting, expanding conceptions of what constituted art. Working in a
chaotic era marked by revolution and widespread social change, Realist painters replaced the
idealistic images and literary conceits of traditional art with real-life events, giving the margins
of society similar weight to grand history paintings and allegories. Their choice to bring
everyday life into their canvases was an early manifestation of the avant-garde desire to merge
art and life, and their rejection of pictorial techniques, like perspective, prefigured the many 20 th
century definitions and redefinitions of modernism.

 In keeping with Gustave Courbet’s statement in 1861 that “painting is an

essentially concrete  art and can only consist in the representation of real and existing things,”
Realists recorded in often gritty detail the present-day existence of humble people, paralleling
related trends in the naturalist literature of Émile Zola, Honoré de Balzac, and Gustave Flaubert.

Following the explosion of newspaper printing and mass media in the wake of the Industrial
Revolution, Realism brought in a new conception of the artist as self-publicist. Gustave
Courbet, Édouard Manet, and others purposefully courted controversy and used the media to
enhance their celebrity in a manner that continues among artists to this day.
 Gustave Courbet
"[They] call me ‘the socialist painter.' I accept that title with pleasure. I am not only a socialist
but a democrat and a Republican as well--in a word, a partisan of all the revolution and above
all a Realist ... for ‘Realist' means a sincere lover of the honest truth."

Gustave Courbet, born as Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet, was a renowned French artist during the
19th century Realist movement. He was controversial not only because he addressed social
issues with his work, such as peasants and the working condition of the poor, and the rural
bourgeoisie, but also because of the unsentimental way in which he portrayed them. Unlike the
Romantic school of painters, Courbet did not use smooth lines and soft forms. Instead, he
employed spontaneous brush strokes and a roughness of paint texture, which indicated that he
was observing his subject directly from life, and thus challenging the academic ideas of the way
art should be painted. Because of his development of a realistic form of painting, Courbet was a
celebrity, and considered a genius, socialist, and savage. He also encouraged the perception of
himself as an unschooled peasant.

Gustave Courbet was born in 1819 to Régis

and Sylvie Oudot Courbet in Ornans. Being a
prosperous farming family, anti-monarchical
feelings prevailed in the household. Courbet's
sisters, Zoé, Zélie and Juliette, were his first
models for drawing and painting. After
moving to Paris he often returned home to
Ornans to hunt, fish and find inspiration. He
was dedicated to presenting his independent
style in art as he steered clear of the traditional
art techniques during his time. In fact, his
unique styles became a source of inspiration
among the cubists and impressionists. The Desperate Man (Self-Portrait), 1843-1845

Courbet occupies an important place in 19th-century French painting as an innovator and as an

artist willing to make bold social statements through his work. It was his paintings during the
1840s that made him quite popular. His masterpieces attempted to challenge the conventions
during that time. Most of his paintings also featured less political subjects such as nudes, still
lifes, hunting scenes and landscapes.

Courbet established himself as the leading proponent of Realism by challenging the primacy of
history painting, long favored at the official Salons and the École des Beaux-Arts, the state-
sponsored art academy. The self-proclaimed “proudest and most arrogant man in France,”
Gustave Courbet created a sensation at the Paris Salon of 1850–51 when he exhibited a group of
paintings set in his native Ornans, a village in the Franche-Comté in eastern France. These
works, including The Stonebreakers (1849–50; now lost) and A Burial at Ornans (1849–50;
Musèe d’Orsay, Paris) challenged convention by rendering scenes from daily life on the large
scale previously reserved for history painting and in an emphatically realistic style. Confronted
with the unvarnished realism of Courbet’s imagery, critics derided the ugliness of his figures and
dismissed them as “peasants in their Sunday best.”

Courbet’s career was punctuated by scandal,

often deliberately courted by the artist
himself. Young Women from the Village (Les
Demoiselles de village) set in the outskirts of
Ornans, generated further controversy at
the Salon of 1852. Critics were nearly
unanimous in reproaching Courbet for the
“ugliness” of the three young women, for
whom the artist’s sisters modeled, and for the
disproportionately small scale of the cattle.
Moreover, Courbet’s suggestive use of the
Young Women from the Village, 1851-1852 term demoiselles (young ladies) to denote this
trio of young village women further provoked his critics, who took issue with the blurring of
class boundaries that the term implied. 

In 1855, Courbet’s monumental canvas, The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing

Up Seven Years  of My Artistic Life, was rejected by the jury of the Exposition Universelle.
Courbet retaliated by mounting his own exhibition in his Pavilion of Realism, built within sight
of the official venue, where he displayed, among more than forty other works, The Painter’s
Studio.

The meaning of Courbet’s unfinished

painting remains enigmatic: the figures
on the left suggest the various social
types that appear in his canvases, while
on the right he portrays his friends and
supporters. The artist painted himself at
the center of this universe, paradoxically
painting a landscape within the confines
of his studio. The accompanying
exhibition catalogue included Courbet’s
seminal “Realist Manifesto,” in which
he proclaimed his fidelity to subjects
drawn from modern life. The Painter’s Studio, 1855

On 31 December 1877, a day before the first installment was due, Courbet died, aged 58, in La
Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland, of a liver disease aggravated by heavy drinking.
 Edouard Manet
"I paint what I see and not what others like to see.”

Édouard Manet was a French painter who broke new ground by defying traditional techniques of
representation and by choosing subjects from the events and circumstances of his own time.
Édouard was the son of Auguste Manet, the chief of personnel at the Ministry of Justice, and
Eugénie-Désirée Fournier. From 1839 he was a day pupil at Canon Poiloup’s school in
Vaugirard, where he studied French and the classics. From 1844 to 1848 he was a boarder at the
Collège Rollin, then located near the Panthéon. A poor student, he was interested only in the
special drawing course offered by the school.

Early in his life, Manet knew that his ultimate desire

was to become an artist, and he found support from
his uncle to pursue this field. Along with his uncle,
the two visited the Louvre where he found greater
inspiration to improve on his artistic skills. In 1845,
he decided to sign up for a drawing course, as he was
encouraged by his uncle. It was during that time when
he met a fellow art enthusiast, Antonin Proust, who
soon became one of his dearest friends. Although
Manet developed a passion for the arts, his father had
other plans for his future. His father wanted him to
enroll in law school, Édouard could not be persuaded
to do so. When his father refused to allow him to
become a painter, he applied for the naval college but
failed the entrance examination. He therefore
embarked in December 1848 as an apprentice pilot on
a transport vessel. Upon his return to  France  in June
1849, he failed the naval examination a second time, and his parents finally yielded to their son’s
stubborn determination to become a painter.

With ample experience and confidence in himself, Manet decided to open his very first art
studio. His early works were inspired by Gustave Courbet, who was a realist artist. Most of
Manet's artworks during the mid-1850s depicted contemporary themes and everyday life
situations including bullfights, people in pavement cafes, singers, and Gypsies. His brush strokes
were also rather loose, and the details were quite simplified and lacked much transitional tones.

Manet's modernity lies above all in his eagerness to update older genres of painting by injecting
new content or by altering the conventional elements. He did so with an acute sensitivity to
historical tradition and contemporary reality. This was also undoubtedly the root cause of many
of the scandals he provoked.
The Paris Salons were considered the most expedient way for an artist to make himself known to
the public, and Manet submitted paintings to Salon juries throughout his career. In 1861, at the
age of twenty-nine, he was awarded the Salon’s honorable mention for The Spanish Singer. His
hopes for continued early success were dashed at the subsequent Salon of 1863. That year, more
than half of the submissions to the official Salon were rejected, including Manet’s own. To
staunch public outcry, Napoleon III ordered the formation of a Salon des Refusés. Manet
exhibited three paintings, including the scandalous Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe  (Musée d’Orsay,
Paris).
The public professed to be shocked by the
subject of a nude woman blithely enjoying a
picnic in the company of two fully clothed
men, while a second, scantily clad woman
bathes in a stream. While critics recognized
that this scene of modern-day debauchery was,
to a certain degree, an updated version of
Titian’s Concert champêtre (a work then
thought to be by Giorgione; Musée du Louvre,
Paris), they ruthlessly attacked Manet’s
Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1862 - 1863 painting style.

Manet’s submissions to the Salon of 1864 were again

condemned by critics, who found errors of perspective
in his Incident at a Bullfight (fragments of which are
now at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.,
and the Frick Collection, New York) and a lack of
decorum in The Dead Christ with Angels. The latter
picture, in particular, was denounced for its realistic
touches, such as the cadaverous body of Christ and the
seemingly human angels. It was argued that the painting
lacked any sense of spirituality; the figure of the battered
Christ was said to more closely resemble the body of a
dead coal miner than the son of God. Despite his efforts,
Manet’s modern scenes remained a target of criticism
throughout the decade. Olympia was considered the
most shocking work in the 1865 Salon. Its debt
to Titan’s Venus of Urbino only accentuated the wide
gulf of public opinion vis-à-vis a reclining nude woman
as subject matter: a goddess was perfectly acceptable,
but a contemporary prostitute was not. The Dead Christ with Angels, 1864

When Manet’s health began to deteriorate toward the end of the decade, he was advised to take a
cure at Bellevue. In the summer of 1880, he rented a villa in that Parisian suburb, and he painted
his last portrait of his wife, the Dutch-born pianist Suzanne Leenhoff, in the villa’s garden. He
continued to work until his death in April 30, 1883 at the age of 51.
 Impressionism
Impressionism is a 19th-century art movement characterized by relatively small, thin, yet visible
brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities
(often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, inclusion
of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual
angles. Impressionism originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent
exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s.

The Impressionists faced harsh opposition

from the conventional art community
in France. The name of the style derives from
the title of a Claude Monet work, Impression,
soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise), which
provoked the critic Louis Leroy to coin the
term in a satirical review published in the
Parisian newspaper Le Charivari.
Impression, Sunrise depicts the port of Le
Havre at sunrise, Monet's hometown - the two
small rowboats in the foreground and the red
Sun being the focal elements. It is now
displayed at the Musée Marmottan Monet in
Paris.

Radicals in their time, early Impressionists violated the rules of academic painting. They
constructed their pictures from freely brushed colours that took precedence over lines and
contours, following the example of painters such as Eugène Delacroix and J. M. W. Turner. They
also painted realistic scenes of modern life, and often painted outdoors. Previously, still
lifes and portraits as well as landscapes were usually painted in a studio. The Impressionists
found that they could capture the momentary and transient effects of sunlight by painting
outdoors or en plein air. They portrayed overall visual effects instead of details, and used short
"broken" brush strokes of mixed and pure unmixed colour—not blended smoothly or shaded, as
was customary—to achieve an effect of intense colour vibration.

The first group exhibition was in Paris in 1874 and included work by Monet, Auguste
Renoir, Edgar Degas and Paul Cezanne. The work shown was greeted with derision with
Monet’s Impression, Sunrise  particularly singled out for ridicule and giving its name (used by
critics as an insult) to the movement. Seven further exhibitions were then held at intervals until
1886.

Its many facets and varied participants make the Impressionist movement difficult to define.
Indeed, its life seems as fleeting as the light effects it sought to capture. Even so, Impressionism
was a movement of enduring consequence, as its embrace of modernity made it the springboard
for later avant-garde art in Europe.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir
“Work lovingly done is the secret of all order and happiness”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, or more commonly known as Auguste Renoir, was painter originally
associated with the Impressionist movement. Famed for his sensual nudes and charming scenes
of pretty women, Renoir was a far more complex and thoughtful painter than generally assumed.
He was a founding member of the Impressionist movement, nevertheless he ceased to exhibit
with the group after 1877. From the 1880s until well into the twentieth century, he developed a
monumental, classically inspired style that influenced such avant-garde giants as Pablo Picasso.

Renoir was born in Limoges, Haute-Vienne, France, in

1841. His father, Léonard Renoir, was a tailor of
modest means, so in 1844, Renoir's family moved to
Paris in search of more favorable prospects. He began
his artistic career as a porcelain painter and had a
steady hand and a talent for decorative effect, which
earned him praise from his employers and brought him
to the attention of a growing customer base, including a
number of wealthy patrons for whom he painted picture
hangings and decorations for fans and other luxury
objects. These early successes fed his desire to leave
the factory and pursue fine arts painting. To
compensate for the limited training he was receiving in
Limoges, in 1860 Renoir began making frequent trips
to visit the Louvre in Paris to study the work of the
French Rococo masters Jean-Antoine Watteau, Jean-
Honore Fragonard, and François Boucher, and
the Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix.

His ambitions to become a professional artist prompted him to seek other instruction. He began
copying paintings at the Louvre and eventually entered the studio of the academic artist Charles
Gleyre, where he met Claude Monet, Frédéric Bazille, and Alfred Sisley. The four friends soon
began painting in the forest of Fontainebleau, although Renoir always remained dedicated to
figure painting and portraits. His early female nudes were heavily influenced by the earthy
palette and buxom figure types of Realist painter Gustave Courbet.

In the summer of 1869, Renoir painted for two months alongside Monet at La Grenouillère, a
boating and bathing establishment outside Paris. Their sketchlike technique of broad, loose
brushstrokes and their brightened palette attempted to capture the effects of the sun streaming
through the trees on the rippling water. This painting campaign catalyzed the development of the
Impressionist aesthetic.

After several of his paintings were rejected by

the Salon in the early 1870s, Renoir decided to
join Monet in establishing an independent artist’s
society. The Impressionists, as they were called,
sought to capture modern life, and Renoir’s works
from this period focused on everyday people,
streets, and surroundings. His most iconic
painting from this period, Dance at the Moulin de
la Galette explores dappled light as it flutters over
young Montmartre revelers flirting, drinking,
and dancing. The painting depicts a typical
Sunday afternoon at the original Moulin de la
Galette in the district of Montmartre in Paris. Dance at the Moulin de la Galette, 1876

Renoir’s penchant for portraiture attracted the

attention of a range of patrons with avant-
garde sensibilities. From the politically radical
pastry cook Eugène Murer to the wealthy
society lady Madame Georges Charpentier,
Renoir painted all of his patrons with
affectionate charm. One of his most splendid
and ambitious portraits, the painting of
Marguerite Charpentier with her children
blends a modern informality and intimacy
with the compositional rigor of an old master
portrait. Portraiture sustained Renoir
financially, especially after the Charpentier
Madame Georges Charpentier and her Children, 1878 painting was exhibited at the 1879 Salon.
With his newfound financial freedom, Renoir began to explore other artistic directions. Skeptical
of the Impressionist aesthetic’s durability, he refused to participate in their exhibition in 1878.
He turned instead to the old masters for an art of structure, craft, and permanence. His first
painting in this vein, Luncheon of the Boating Party, exhibits a new solidity and clarity in the
depiction of the figures and their placement within space, especially when compared to Moulin
de la Galette. Renoir was famous for many pieces, which include The Theater Box (1874), The
Swing (1876), Two Sisters (1881), The Little Girl (1880), Girls at the Piano (1892) and many
more.

In the early twentieth century, despite old age and declining health, Renoir persisted in artistic
experimentation. He took up sculpture, hiring a young assistant and collaborator, Richard Guino,
to create models after his designs. He continued to paint portraits, and Tilla Durieux is arguably
the finest of his late period. He died on December 3, 1919 at the age of 78. Renoir was celebrated
in the early twentieth century as one of the greatest modern French painters, not only for his
work as an Impressionist but also for the uncompromising aesthetic of his late works.
 Edgar Degas
“A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, some fantasy. When you always make
your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people.”

Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas seems never to have reconciled himself to the label of

“Impressionist,” preferring to call himself a “Realist” or “Independent.” Nevertheless, he was
one of the group’s founders, an organizer of its exhibitions, and one of its most important core
members. Like the Impressionists, he sought to capture fleeting moments in the flow of modern
life, yet he showed little interest in painting plein-air landscapes, favoring scenes in theaters and
cafés illuminated by artificial light, which he used to clarify the contours of his figures, adhering
to his academic training.

Degas was born on July 19, 1834, the scion of a wealthy

Degas au porte-fusain (self-portrait), 1855
banking family, and was educated in the classics,
including Latin, Greek, and ancient history, at the Lycée
Louis-le-Grand in Paris. His father recognized his son’s
artistic gifts early and encouraged his efforts at drawing
by taking him frequently to Paris museums. Degas
began by copying Italian Renaissance paintings at the
Louvre and trained in the studio of Louis Lamothe, who
taught in the traditional academic style, with its
emphasis on line and its insistence on the crucial
importance of draftsmanship. Degas was also strongly
influenced by the paintings and frescoes he saw during
several long trips to Italy in the late 1850s; he made
many sketches and drawings of them in his notebooks.

Evidence of Degas’ classical education can be

seen in his relatively static, friezelike early
painting, Young Spartans Exercising. It was
done while he was still in his twenties. Yet
despite the title, and the suggestion of
classical drapery on some of the figures in the
background, there is little that places the
subject of this painting in ancient Greece.
Indeed, it has been noted that the young girls
have the snub noses and immature bodies of
“Montmartre types,” the forerunners of the
dancers Degas painted so often throughout his
career. Young Spartans Exercising, 1860-1862
After 1865, when the Salon accepted his history painting The Misfortunes of the City of Orléans,
Degas did not paint academic subjects again, focusing his attention on scenes of modern life. He
began to paint scenes of such urban leisure activities as horse racing and, after about 1870, of
café-concert singers and ballet dancers.
Degas’s choice of subject matter reflects his
modern approach. He favored scenes of ballet
dancers, laundresses, milliners, and denizens of
Parisian low life. His interest in ballet dancers
intensified in the 1870s, and eventually he
produced approximately 1,500 works on the
subject. These are not traditional portraits, but
studies that address the movement of the
human body, exploring the physicality and
discipline of the dancers through the use of
contorted postures and unexpected vantage
At the Milliner, 1882 points.

Degas experimented with an array of

techniques, breaking up surface textures with
hatching, contrasting dry pastel with wet, and
using gouache and watercolors to soften the
contours of his figures. In Race Horses, which
depicts another of Degas’ favorite themes, the
use of hatching gives a sense of swaying grass.
The immediacy of the moment is captured in
the raised leg of the horse in the foreground
and the foreshortened, angled approach of the
vigorous horse in the background. Race Horses, 1855

In later life, Degas became reclusive, morose, and given to

bouts of depression, probably as a consequence of his
increasing blindness. His monotype Landscape, an unusual
work from this period, is an unexpected instance of Degas
presenting an outdoor scene with no figures, which shows
an imaginative and expressive use of color and freedom of
line that may have arisen, at least in part, as a result of his
struggle to adapt to his deteriorating vision.

Degas continued working as late as 1912, when he was forced to leave the studio in Montmartre
in which he had labored for more than twenty years. He died five years later in 1917, at the age
of eighty-three.
 Post-Impressionism
Post-Impressionism is a predominantly French art movement that developed roughly between
1886 and 1905, from the last Impressionist exhibition to the birth of Fauvism. Post-
Impressionism emerged as a reaction against Impressionists' concern for the naturalistic
depiction of light and colour.

Breaking free of the naturalism of Impressionism in the late 1880s, a group of young painters
sought independent artistic styles for expressing emotions rather than simply optical impressions,
concentrating on themes of deeper symbolism. Through the use of simplified colors and
definitive forms, their art was characterized by a renewed aesthetic sense as well as abstract
tendencies. Among the nascent generation of artists responding to Impressionism include Paul
Gauguin (1848–1903), Georges Seurat (1859–1891), Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), and the
eldest of the group, Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), and followed diverse stylistic paths in search of
authentic intellectual and artistic achievements. These artists, often working independently, are
today called Post-Impressionists. Although they did not view themselves as part of a collective
movement at the time, Roger Fry (1866–1934), critic and artist, broadly categorized them as
“Post-Impressionists,” a term that he coined in his seminal exhibition Manet and the Post-
Impressionists installed at the Grafton Galleries in London in 1910.

Due to its broad emphasis on abstract qualities or symbolic content, Post-Impressionism

encompasses Les Nabis Neo-Impressionism, Symbolism, Cloisonnism, Pont-Aven School,
and Synthetism, along with some later Impressionists' work. The movement was led by Paul
Cézanne (known as father of Post-impressionism), Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh,
and Georges Seurat. Post-Impressionists extended Impressionism while rejecting its limitations:
they continued using vivid colours, often thick application of paint, and real-life subject matter,
but were more inclined to emphasize geometric forms, distort form for expressive effect, and use
unnatural or arbitrary colour.

The Post-Impressionists rejected Impressionism’s concern with the spontaneous and naturalistic
rendering of light and color. Instead they favored an emphasis on more symbolic content, formal
order and structure. Similar to the Impressionists, however, they stressed the artificiality of the
picture. The Post-Impressionists also believed that color could be independent from form and
composition as an emotional and aesthetic bearer of meaning.
 Paul Cezanne
“Art is a harmony parallel with nature.”

One of the most influential artists in the history of modern painting, Paul Cézanne (1839–1906)
has inspired generations of artists. Generally categorized as a Post-Impressionist, his unique
method of building form with color and his analytical approach to nature influenced the art
of Cubists, Fauves, and successive generations of avant-garde artists. 

Paul Cézanne was born in 1839 in the town of Aix-en-

Provence in the South of France. His father was a wealthy
lawyer and banker who strongly encouraged Paul to follow
in his footsteps. Cézanne's eventual rejection of his
authoritative father's aspirations led to a long, problematic
relationship between the two, although, notably, the artist
remained financially dependent on his family until his
father's death in 1886.

Cézanne was largely a self-taught artist. In 1859, he

attended evening drawing classes in his native town
of Aix. After moving to Paris, Cézanne twice
attempted to enter the École des Beaux-Arts, but was
turned down by the jury. Instead of acquiring
professional training, Cézanne made frequent visits to
the Musée de Louvre, where he copied works
by Titian, Rubens, and Michelangelo.
He also regularly visited the Académie Suisse, a studio where young art students could
draw from the live model for a very modest monthly membership fee. While at the
Académie, Cézanne met fellow painters Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, and Auguste
Renoir, who were at that time also struggling artists, but who would soon comprise the
founding members of the nascent Impressionist movement.

Cézanne's experience with painting from nature and rigourous experimentation led him
to develop his own approaches to art. He strove to depart from the portrayal of the
transient moment, long favored by the Impressionists; instead, Cézanne sought true and
permanent pictorial qualities of objects around him. According to Cézanne, the subject
of the painting was first to be "read" by the artist through the understanding of its
essence. Then, in the second stage, this essence must be "realized" on a canvas
through forms, colors, and their spatial relations. The colors and forms thus became the
dominant elements of his compositions, completely freed from the rigid rules of
perspective and paint application as promoted by the Academy.

In his still-life paintings from the mid-1870s,

Cézanne abandoned his thickly encrusted surfaces
and began to address technical problems of form
and color by experimenting with subtly gradated
tonal variations, or “constructive brushstrokes,” to
create dimension in his objects. Still Life with Jar,
Cup, and Apples of about 1877 shows Cézanne’s
rejection of the intense contrasts of light and
shadow of his earlier years in exchange for a
refined system of color scales placed next to one
another. The light of Impressionism resonates in
this work, but signs of a revised palette are
especially apparent in his muted tones. 

Still Life with Apples and a Pot of Primroses, a mature work from about 1890, reveals Cézanne’s
artistic evolution and mastery of this style of building forms completely from color and creating
scenes with distorted perspectival space. The objects in this painting, such as the fruit and
tablecloth, are rendered without use of light or shadow, but through extremely subtle gradations
of color. In such still lifes as Dish of Apples of about 1876–77, as in his landscapes, Cézanne
ignores the laws of classical perspective, allowing each object to be independent within the space
of a picture while the relationship of one object to another takes precedence over traditional
single-point perspective.

In 1890, Cézanne began a series of five

pictures of Provençal peasants playing cards.
Widely celebrated as among the finest figure
compositions completed by the artist, The Card
Players demonstrates his system of color
gradations to build form and create a three-
dimensional quality in the figures. Continuing
on this theme of the rural laborer, Seated
Peasant celebrates the dignity of working-class
citizens of Third Republic France (1870–
1940).

In the last decade of his life, Cézanne limited his artistic pursuits almost exclusively to two
pictorial motifs. One was the depiction of the Mont Sainte-Victoire, a dramatic mountain that
dominated the parched and stony landscape at Aix. The other was the final synthesis of nature
and the human body in a series of so-called Bathers (nudes depicted frolicking in a landscape).
The later versions of the Bathers were becoming increasingly abstract in regard to how form and
color seemed to fuse together on the canvas.
After contracting pneumonia, Paul Cézanne died in his familial house in Aix on October 22,
1906. The last decade of his life had been marred by the development of diabetes and severe
depression, which contributed toward alienating the artist from most of his friends and family.
Vincent van Gogh
“What am I in the eyes of most people — a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person —
somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low.
All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my
work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less
on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on
passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and
music inside me.”

There’s a longstanding link between mental illness and creative genius; and there is probably no
better-known epitome of a mad artist than Vincent Willem van Gogh, who hacked off his ear
with a razor 130 years ago today while staying in a self-described “Yellow House” in Arles,
France.

Van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853, into a Dutch

Reformed family in Groot-Zundert, Netherlands. He
was the oldest surviving child of Theodorus van
Gogh, an austere country minister, and his mother,
Anna Cornelia Carbentus, a moody artist whose love
of nature, drawing and watercolors was transferred to
her son. Van Gogh was born exactly one year after
his parents' first son, also named Vincent, was
stillborn. At a young age — with his name and
birthdate already etched on his dead brother's
headstone — van Gogh was melancholy. Born into
the upper-middle-class family, Van Gogh drew as a
child and was serious, quiet and thoughtful. As a
young man he worked as an art dealer but became
depressed after he was transferred to London. He
turned to religion and spent time as a Protestant
missionary in southern Belgium.

In 1886, he moved to Paris, where he met members of the avant-garde, who were reacting
against the Impressionist sensibility. As his work developed he created a new approach; his
paintings grew brighter in color as he developed a style that became fully realized during his stay
in Arles in the south of France in 1888.
While staying at that house in the south of France, Van Gogh became agitated on the eve of
Christmas Eve and did himself harm. Using the razor, Van Gogh removed his entire left ear – not
just the lobe. He spent time in psychiatric hospitals, including a period at Saint-Rémy. His
depression continued and on 27 July 1890, Van Gogh shot himself in the chest with a revolver.

When Van Gogh entered the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum on 8 May 1889, accompanied by his

caregiver, Frédéric Salles, a Protestant clergyman, he slept in two cells with barred windows, one
of which he used as a studio.The clinic and its garden became the main subjects of his paintings.
He made several studies of the hospital's interiors, such as Vestibule of the Asylum and Saint-
Rémy (September 1889). Some of his works from this time are characterised by swirls, such
as The Starry Night. He was allowed short supervised walks, during which time he
painted cypresses and olive trees, including Olive Trees with the Alpilles in the Background
188, Cypresses 1889, Cornfield with Cypresses (1889), Country road in Provence by
Night (1890). In September 1889 he produced two further versions of Bedroom in Arles.

The artist is particulary famous for the

Starry Night. It was painted in June 1889,
and it describes the view from the east-
facing window of his asylum room at Saint-
Rémy-de-Provence, just before sunrise,
with the addition of an ideal village. The
Starry Night is the only nocturne in the
series of views from his bedroom window.
In early June, Vincent wrote to Theo, "This
morning I saw the countryside from my
window a long time before sunrise with
nothing but the morning star, which looked
very big". Researchers have determined that
Venus was indeed visible at dawn in Provence in the spring of 1889, and was at that time nearly
as bright as possible. So the brightest "star" in the painting, just to the viewer's right of the
cypress tree, is actually Venus.

Van Gogh painted several landscapes with flowers, including

roses, lilacs, irises, and sunflowers. In these series, Van Gogh
was not preoccupied by his usual interest in filling his
paintings with subjectivity and emotion; rather, the two series
are intended to display his technical skill and working
methods. The 1888 paintings were created during a rare period
of optimism for the artist. The sunflowers were painted to
decorate the walls in anticipation of Gauguin's visit, and Van
Gogh placed individual works around the Yellow House's
guest room in Arles.
Van Gogh was unsuccessful during his lifetime, and was considered a madman and a failure. His
work was only recognized long after he died, and exists in the public imagination as the
quintessential misunderstood genius, the artist who discourses on madness and creativity
converge. Beneath the canvas of his art, Van Gogh impulses a sense of purpose, a sense of
figuring out what was important to him and how to develop his craft towards his ideals.
 Paul Gauguin
“Art is either plagiarism or revolution.”

Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin styled himself and his art as “savage.” Although he began his artistic
career with the Impressionists in Paris, during the late 1880s he fled farther and farther from
urban civilization in search of an edenic paradise where he could create pure, “primitive” art. Yet
his self-imposed exile to the South Seas was not so much an escape from Paris as a bid to
become the new leader of the Parisian avant-garde. Gauguin cultivated and inhabited a dual
image of himself as, on the one hand, a wolfish wild man and on the other, a sensitive martyr for
art. His notoriety helped to promote his astonishing work, which freed color from mimetic
representation and distorted form for expressive purposes. Gauguin pioneered the Symbolist art
movement in France and set the stage for Fauvism and Expressionism.

Gauguin came late to art. There is little in his early life to

presage his phenomenal artistic career; however, his
peripatetic upbringing established his restless need for
voyage to exotic destinations. Descended on his mother’s
side from Peruvian nobility, he spent his early childhood
in Lima. He would later misrepresent his ancestry to
portray himself as an Incan savage. Gauguin’s nomadic
life continued when he joined the merchant marines and
visited ports as far flung as India and the Black Sea. By
1873, he was married and settled in Paris as a
stockbroker, thanks to his guardian Gustave Arosa, a
wealthy Spanish financier in Paris with a formidable
collection of modern French painting. Through Arosa,
Gauguin developed an amateur interest in art. He met
Camille Pissarro at Arosa’s home and by 1879 became
an unofficial pupil as well as patron of the artist. Pissarro
soon invited the ambitious Gauguin to exhibit with the
Impressionists.

After the stock market crashed in 1882, Gauguin decided to become a full-time artist. He painted
Impressionist landscapes, still lifes, and interiors heavily influenced not only by Pissarro but also
by Paul Cézanne, whom he had met through Pissarro. Gauguin adopted and adapted Cézanne’s
parallel, constructive brushstrokes; he in fact bought several paintings by Cézanne in order to
study the brushwork more carefully. Nevertheless, Gauguin’s pictures showed a preoccupation
with dreams, mystery, and evocative symbols that revealed his own artistic inclinations. He also
sculpted, carved wood reliefs and objects, and made ceramics, signaling an interest in three-
dimensional decorative objects from the beginning of his career.
During his second visit to Pont-Aven, Brittany in
1888, his encounter with the artist Émile Bernard
resulted in the groundbreaking painting Vision of
the Sermon. This work became the clarion call for
Symbolist art. Dropping the Cézannist brushstroke,
Gauguin used broad, matte fields of stridently non-
naturalistic color to express the transcendent visions
of Breton peasant women. The painting depicts a
scene from the Bible in which Jacob wrestles an
angel.

His first major Tahitian canvas, Ia Orana Maria (Hail

Mary), dresses a Christian theme in Polynesian guise. A
Tahitian Virgin Mary is worshipped by two other Tahitian
women dressed in colorful pareus in a lush, tropical
landscape. The composition is based on a photograph that
Gauguin had brought with him of a bas-relief in the
Javanese temple of Borobudur. Another photograph that
Gauguin packed, of Manet‘s Olympia, inspired the
masterwork from his first Tahitian trip, Manao Tupapau
(Spirit of the Dead Watching) (Albright-Knox Art Gallery,
Buffalo). Gauguin’s Tahitian pictures are thus a hybrid of
various Western and Eastern sources, creating a new
synthetic style that combined decorative abstract patterning
with figuration.

With financial success continuing to elude him in France, Gauguin decided to return to Tahiti
permanently in 1895. He was suffering from syphilis by this time, yet between hospitalizations,
he was able to paint his masterpiece, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We
Going? This monumental allegorical painting served as a synthesis or culmination of his art.
Afterwards, his Tahitian work became increasingly self-referential; he drew and painted the
same figures over and over again, cutting and pasting them in different configurations and
settings
Despite the arcadian content of his
pictures, Gauguin became disillusioned
with the Westernization and colonial
corruption of Tahiti. He left in 1901 for
the Marquesan island of Hiva Oa,
perpetually searching for a lost
paradise. He died there in 1903, having
become a legend for a new generation
of artists halfway across the world in
Paris.
 Bibliography

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Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “Gustave Courbet (1819–1877).” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History.
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Edouard Manet:
Rabinow, Rebecca. “Édouard Manet (1832–1883).” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History.
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Edgar Degas:
Schenkel, Ruth. “Edgar Degas : Painting and Drawing.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History.
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