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Explore Impressionism and Post-Impressionism in a whole new way through this interactive colour analysis experience.

IMPRESSIONISM

POST-IMPRESSIONISM

Description:

This view of Pontoise, just northwest of Paris, helped establish Pissarro’s reputation as an innovative painter of the rural French landscape. The critic Émile Zola praised the picture enthusiastically when it was shown along with another rustic scene at the Salon of 1868, writing, 'This is the modern countryside. One feels that man has passed by, turning and cutting the earth. . . . And this little valley, this hill have a heroic simplicity and forthrightness. Nothing would be more banal were it not so grand. From ordinary reality the painter's temperament has drawn a rare poem of life and strength.'

Jalais Hill, Pontoise

Camille Pissarro, 1867

Description:

Manet summered at Gennevilliers in 1874, often spending time with Monet and Renoir across the Seine at Argenteuil, where Boating was painted. Beyond adopting the lighter touch and palette of his younger Impressionist colleagues, Manet exploits the broad planes of color and strong diagonals of Japanese prints to give inimitable form to this scene of outdoor leisure. Rodolphe Leenhoff, the artist’s brother-in-law, is thought to have posed for the sailor but the identity of the woman is uncertain. Shown in the Salon of 1879, Boating was deemed 'the last word in painting' by Mary Cassatt, who recommended the acquisition to the New York collectors Louisine and H.O. Havemeyer.

Boating

Edouard Manet, 1874

Description:

This work and its variant in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, represent the most ambitious paintings Degas devoted to the theme of the dance. Some twenty-four women, ballerinas and their mothers, wait while a dancer executes an 'attitude' for her examination. Jules Perrot, a famous ballet master, conducts the class. The imaginary scene is set in a rehearsal room in the old Paris Opéra, which had recently burned to the ground. On the wall beside the mirror, a poster for Rossini’s Guillaume Tell pays tribute to the singer Jean-Baptiste Faure, who commissioned the picture and lent it to the 1876 Impressionist exhibition.

The Dance Class

Edgar Degas, 1874

Description:

The theme of potato gathering recurs in Pissarro’s oeuvre in a number of media—pencil, gouache, oil, and prints—over a period of thirty years. The artist is borrowing a subject from the great Barbizon painter Camille Corot, while anticipating the more staccato, broken brushwork of later artists such as Georges Seurat. In the Lehman Collection painting, Pissarro’s treatment of harvesters in Pontoise is carefully structured, while remaining expressive in tone and brushwork.

The Harvest, Pontoise (La Récolte, Pontoise)

Camille Pissarro, 1881

Description:

By virtue of their size, placement, and quiet dignity, these youthful laborers dominate the landscape setting—an open field near Pissarro’s house at Éragny. Sympathetic to anarchist ideals, the artist wanted to preserve the values of agrarian society that were being threatened by the rapid industrialization of France. He began this picture in summer 1891 and completed it in mid-January 1892, a month before the opening of a major exhibition of his work organized by his dealer Joseph Durand-Ruel. Many of the fifty paintings were sold from the show, but Pissarro kept this canvas and gave it to his wife.

Two Young Peasant Women

Camille Pissarro, 1891–92

Description:

Pierre Auguste Renoir painted a great many canvases of single bathers in outdoor settings, timeless studies of fulsome young women. In the Lehman painting, his model averts her glance, seated in shy three-quarter profile. Innocent yet sensual, this charming nude would have pleased Renoir's audience in the later nineteenth century. The picture is thinly painted, its brushwork soft and supple. Renoir probably posed his model in the studio, since the rapidly brushed landscape background is far more imaginary than real. Claude Monet first owned this painting, and remarked to a friend that while the nude was beautiful, the landscape was conventional. Renoir clearly concentrates his brush on the undulating physiognomy of his innocent auburn-haired model.

Young Girl Bathing

Auguste Renoir, 1892

Description:

Made the same year as Pissarro’s bird’s-eye views of the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris, this idyllic scene of a meadow near the artist’s home in rural Éragny is a counterpoint to his paintings of modern urban life. Pissarro depicted the same trio of haystacks, seen from a slightly different vantage point, and under afternoon rather than morning light (private collection), a practice recalling Monet’s Haystacks series of the early 1890s.

Haystacks, Morning, Éragny

Camille Pissarro, 1899

Description:

Renoir likely painted this work in his studio, posing his model in a wicker chair and relying on studies he had made on the Normandy coast to furnish the beach scene behind her. Stylistically, it reflects the impact of Renoir’s trip to Italy in 1881–82, which inspired him to unite the “grandeur and simplicity” he admired in Renaissance art with the luminosity of Impressionism. His new approach, which he called his “dry” manner, is evident in the sitter’s face, with its carefully drawn features and smooth handling of paint. The medley of quick strokes in the background, however, displays the freer technique of Renoir’s earlier years.

By the Seashore

Auguste Renoir, 1883

Description:

This is Seurat’s final study for his monumental painting of Parisians at leisure on an island in the Seine (Art Institute of Chicago). Contrasting pigments are woven together with small, patchy brushstrokes, whereas in the mural-sized park scene—which debuted two years later at the 1886 Impressionist exhibition—Seurat used tighter, dot-like dabs of paint, a technique which came to be known as Pointillism (from the French word point, or dot). He preferred the term Divisionism—the principle of separating color into small touches placed side-by-side and meant to blend in the eye of the viewer.

Study for 'A Sunday on La Grande Jatte'

Georges Seurat, 1884

Description:

In this commissioned portrait, as Marcel Proust observed, Renoir gave expression to 'the poetry of an elegant home and the beautiful dresses of our time.' In the Japanese-style sitting room of her Parisian townhouse—the décor and chic gown testifying to her stylish taste—Marguerite Charpentier sits beside her son, Paul. At age three, his locks are still uncut and, in keeping with current fashion, he is dressed identically to his sister Georgette, perched on the family dog. The well-connected publisher's wife, who hosted elite literary salons attended by such writers as Flaubert, the Goncourts, and Zola, used her influence to ensure that the painting enjoyed a choice spot at the Salon of 1879.

Madame Georges Charpentier and Her Children, Georgette-Berthe and Paul-Émile-Charles

Auguste Renoir, 1878

Description:

The juxtaposition of the prominent bouquet and the off-center figure, gazing distractedly to the right, exemplifies Degas’s aim of capturing individuals in seemingly casual, slice-of-life views. The sitter is probably the wife of the artist’s schoolboy friend Paul Valpinçon; Degas immensely enjoyed outings to their country house, Ménil-Hubert, and the dahlias, asters, and gaillardias in the bouquet would suggest a late summer visit. The painting was preceded by a pencil drawing of the woman, also dated 1865 (Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Mass.).

A Woman Seated beside a Vase of Flowers (Madame Paul Valpinçon?)

Edgar Degas, 1865

Description:

Reviewers of the 1882 Impressionist exhibition were dazzled by this 'very appealing' still life of 'a certain fruit bowl of 'Peaches,' whose velvety execution verges on a trompe l'oeil.' Painted the previous summer at the country house of Renoir’s patron Paul Berard, it is one of two still lifes that feature the same faïence jardinière; the other version also belongs to the Metropolitan Museum (56.218).

Still Life with Peaches

Auguste Renoir, 1881

Description:

The distinctive silhouette of Mont Saint-Victoire rises above the Arc River valley near the town of Aix. To paint this scene, Cézanne stood close to Montbriand, his sister’s property, at the top of the hill just behind her house; the wall of the neighboring farmhouse is barely visible. Cézanne sought to reveal the inner geometry of nature, 'to make of Impressionism something solid and durable, like the art of museums.' Indeed the railroad viaduct that cuts through this pastoral scene is evocative of a Roman aqueduct, recalling paintings by Nicolas Poussin.

Mont Sainte-Victoire and the Viaduct of the Arc River Valley

Paul Cézanne, 1882–85

Description:

Cézanne enthused about the fishing village of L’Estaque to Pissarro in 1876: 'It is like a playing card. Red roofs over the blue sea. . . . The sun is so terrific here that it seems to me as if the objects were silhouetted not only in black and white, but in blue, red, brown, and violet.' Cézanne painted some twenty views of L'Estaque over the next decade, a dozen of them facing toward or across the gulf of Marseilles. In the distance of this painting, atop the hill to the right of the jetty, the towers of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde stand watch over the city of Marseilles.

The Gulf of Marseilles Seen from L'Estaque

Paul Cézanne, 1885

Description:

While in Arles, Van Gogh painted two very similar portraits of Marie Ginoux, the proprietress of the Café de la Gare, wearing the regional costume of the legendary dark-haired beauties of Arles. The first version, which he described in a letter of November 1888 as 'an Arlésienne . . . knocked off in one hour,' must be the more thinly and summarily executed portrait in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris. In it a parasol and gloves lie on the table instead of books. This portrait belonged to the sitter until she sold it in 1895.

L'Arlésienne: Madame Joseph-Michel Ginoux (Marie Julien, 1848–1911)

Vincent van Gogh, 1888–89

Description:

Despite the many areas of canvas left bare, this is one of the few paintings Cézanne signed and thus regarded as 'finished.' It shows a view of the Jesuit estate of Saint-Joseph, situated on a hill, the Colline des Pauvres, on the road between Aix and the village of Le Tholonet, an area beloved by the artist since his youth. This picture was the first by Cézanne to enter an American museum: the Metropolitan acquired it from the historic Armory Show in 1913, for the highest price of any work in the exhibition.

View of the Domaine Saint-Joseph

Paul Cézanne, late 1880s

Description:

Van Gogh produced more than twenty self-portraits during his Parisian sojourn (1886–88). Short of funds but determined nevertheless to hone his skills as a figure painter, he became his own best sitter: 'I purposely bought a good enough mirror to work from myself, for want of a model.' This picture, which shows the artist's awareness of Neo-Impressionist technique and color theory, is one of several that are painted on the reverse of an earlier peasant study.

Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat (obverse: The Potato Peeler)

Vincent Van Gogh, 1887

Description:

Of the four portraits that Cézanne painted of his wife wearing a shawl-collared red dress, this is the only one to show her in an elaborately furnished interior. Seated in a high-backed yellow chair and wedged between well-placed props that seem to bend to her form and shift to her weight, Madame Cézanne is the lynchpin of a tilting, spatially complex composition. The mottled blue wall, the dark red band that edges the wainscoting, and the mirror over the fireplace at left identify the setting as the apartment that Cézanne rented at 15 quai d’Anjou, Paris, from 1888 to 1890.

Madame Cézanne (Hortense Fiquet, 1850–1922) in a Red Dress

Paul Cézanne, 1888–90

Description:

In May 1890, just before he checked himself out of the asylum at Saint-Rémy, Van Gogh painted four exuberant bouquets of spring flowers, the only still lifes of any ambition he had undertaken during his yearlong stay: two of irises, two of roses, in contrasting color schemes and formats. In the Museum’s Irises he sought a “harmonious and soft” effect by placing the “violet” flowers against a “pink background,” which have since faded owing to his use of fugitive red pigments. Another work from this series, Roses (1993.400.5), hangs in the adjacent gallery. Both were owned by the artist’s mother until her death in 1907.

Irises

Vincent van Gogh, 1890

Description:

From 1889 to 1891, Lautrec experimented with the plein-air approach of the Impressionists, producing a group of studies showing figures set against the foliage in the garden of Monsieur (Père) Forest, his neighbor in the Paris district of Montmartre. Lautrec referred to these self-imposed exercises in technique as 'impositions,' for which friends as well as models posed. The clothes and hairstyle of this sitter suggest that she is a working-class woman.

Woman in the Garden of Monsieur Forest

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1889–91

Description:

One of Gauguin’s most treasured possessions was a painting by Cézanne, Still Life with Fruit Dish (1879–80, now Museum of Modern Art, New York ), which he emulates in this picture. Within a similarly compressed space, Gauguin substituted mangoes for Cézanne’s apples and a Tahitian-style printed cloth for a French floral wallpaper design. One significant departure is the human figure at the upper right, glimpsed through a door or window. The year after he completed this work, Gauguin’s finances were so dire that he arranged for the sale of his prized Cézanne.

Still Life with Teapot and Fruit

Paul Gauguin, 1896

Description:

Cézanne was in his fifties when he undertook a painting campaign devoted to giving memorable form to a subject that inspired the likes of Caravaggio and Chardin. He was determined from the start—as we see in this sturdy Provençal scene—to make it his own. Cézanne carefully crafted this composition from figure studies he had made of local farmhands. Once he had puzzled-out his conception, he continued to fine-tune the poses and positions of the card players, until they—like the four pipes hanging on the wall behind them—each fell perfectly into place. Cézanne channeled the quiet authority he achieved here into a much larger variant (Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia) and punctuated the series with three works in which he pared away extraneous details to focus his gaze on a pair of players.

The Card Players

Paul Cézanne, 1890–92

Description:

At the Salon des Indépendants in 1888 Seurat demonstrated the versatility of his technique by exhibiting Circus Sideshow, a nighttime outdoor scene in artificial light, and Models, an indoor, daylight scene (Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia). This is Seurat’s first nocturnal painting and the first to depict popular entertainment. It represents the parade, or sideshow, of the Circus Corvi at the annual Gingerbread Fair, held in eastern Paris around the place de la Nation, in spring 1887. Sideshows were staged outside the circus tent, for free, to entice passersby to purchase tickets. The onlookers at the far right are queued on stairs leading to the box office.

Circus Sideshow (Parade de cirque)

Georges Seurat, 1887-88

Description:

As early as 1901 the woman in this painting was identified as a streetwalker. Her name, however, has been lost to history; only the nickname La Casque d'Or (Golden Helmet), which refers to her wig, has survived. She sits in the garden of Monsieur Forest, Lautrec's neighbor in Montmartre.

The Streetwalker

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1890–91

Description:

Of the five versions of Van Gogh’s portrait of Augustine Roulin, wife of his friend the postmaster of Arles, the present canvas is the one the sitter chose for herself. Van Gogh remarked that 'she had a good eye and took the best.' He began the portraits just before his breakdown in Arles, in December 1888, and completed them in early 1889, calling them 'La Berceuse,' meaning 'lullaby, or woman who rocks the cradle,' indicated by the rope held in the sitter’s hand, which is attached to the unseen cradle.

La Berceuse (Woman Rocking a Cradle; Augustine-Alix Pellicot Roulin, 1851–1930)

Vincent Van Gogh, 1889

Description:

The mood and palette of this pensive figure study relate it to Cézanne's celebrated series of paintings showing men playing cards. This particular individual does not appear in any of those pictures, but there can be no doubt that he, like the models for the card players, was one of the workers at Jas de Bouffan, the Cézanne family estate in Aix-en-Provence.

Seated Peasant

Paul Cézanne, 1892–96

Description:

Cypresses gained ground in Van Gogh’s work by late June 1889 when he resolved to devote one of his first series in Saint-Rémy to the towering trees. Distinctive for their rich impasto, his exuberant on-the-spot studies include the Met’s close-up vertical view of cypresses (49.30) and this majestic horizontal composition, which he illustrated in reed-pen drawings sent to his brother on July 2. Van Gogh regarded the present work as one of his “best” summer landscapes and was prompted that September to make two studio renditions: one on the same scale (National Gallery, London) and the other a smaller replica, intended as a gift for his mother and sister (private collection).

Wheat Field with Cypresses

Vincent Van Gogh, 1889

About

I created this comparison based off my love for art history and Impressionism in particular. I love the colours in Impressionist paintings and wanted to compare them to a similar movement, Post-Impressionism, to see what differences might appear in the way colour is used.

How were colour classifications decided?

To decide on a main colour in each painting, I ran each image through colour simplifying programs to narrow down the primary colours, but often I used my own judgement. For example, if an image did not have an obvious main colour, I considered the overall hue of the painting as well as which section of colour was the most prominent.

Futher Reading:

Impressionism and Post-Impressionism: Oxford Art Online

Sources

MET API Documentation

GitHub Public Datasets