Shown from the chest up, a man with short, orange hair and green-tinted, pale skin looks at us, wearing a vivid blue painter's smock in this vertical portrait painting. His smock and the background are painted with long, mostly parallel strokes of cobalt, azure, and lapis blue. His shoulders are angled to our left, and he looks at us from the corners of his blue eyes. He has a long, slightly bumped nose, and his lips are closed within a full, rust-orange beard. He holds a palette and paintbrushes in his left hand, in the lower left corner of the canvas. The background is painted with long brushstrokes that follow the contours of his head and torso to create an aura-like effect.
Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait, 1889, oil on canvas, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. John Hay Whitney, 1998.74.5

Post-Impressionism

Post-impressionists took the impressionists’ recording of light and color in nature to more emotional and spiritual places. And each artist pursued unique subject matter and a distinctive style. Paul Cezanne was preoccupied with natural forms and spatial depth. Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh expressed themselves through bold color and brushwork.

  • We look across a forested ravine painted in deep greens and blues at a terracotta-orange building at the top of a hill at the center of this nearly square, loosely painted landscape. Spring and moss-green trees grow along the ravine in front of us and up the left side of the canvas. Shadows within the densely forested area are painted with slate and royal blue with touches of plum and lavender purple, and the blue continues into the sky in the upper right quadrant of the composition. The sky is visible through the pointed, arched windows on the upper level of the building, giving the impression that it might be incomplete or in ruins. The building is made up of two stories over a protruding base, which could be a fortress-like structure below or a cliff face. Loose, thick brushstrokes are visible throughout.
  • Two nude women with brown skin and long black hair stand with their backs to us at a riverbank in this stylized horizontal painting. The body of the woman to our left is angled to our left with her hands raised, presumably about to plunge into the teal-colored water. The woman to our right unwraps a cloth patterned with bright yellow flowers on a deep purple background from her waist. Between the women and farther away, a bare-chested man, also with brown skin, wears a tomato-red garment across his hips as he stands hip-deep in the water holding a long spear. The top of his head is cropped by the top edge of the painting. Along the left edge of the canvas, a gnarled tree is painted as a flat field of dark, charcoal gray, and it rises off the side and top of the composition. An area of the same color, perhaps a thick root or the trunk growing nearly horizontally, spans the width of the painting, separating the women from us. The area around the trunk to our left and right is painted with fields of evergreen and cool mint. Closer to us, along the front of the root, a field of rosy pink swirls with grape purple to suggest sand. This area is dotted with harvest-yellow and pumpkin-orange vines and stylized flowers. A bunch of vivid orange flowers with pine and spring-green leaves sits on the root near the trunk, to our left. Most of the painting, especially the landscape, is painted with areas of mostly flat color. In the bottom left corner, the artist has written the title of the painting in darkred paint: “Fatata te Miki.” In the lower right corner, he signed and dated the work with periwinkle blue: “P. Gauguin 92.”
  • Verdant green fields roll in undulating waves back alongside a road in this horizontal landscape painting. The fields take up the left and center of the composition and are painted with thick, curling strokes of emerald, pea, and celery green, and corn yellow to suggest grasses and plants. The pale green road runs up along the right edge of the painting, and is layered with strokes and daubs in butter yellow, spring green, and faint blue. The fields and road meet the horizon line about halfway up the canvas, where an aquamarine-blue sky swirling with white and periwinkle-blue clouds fills the top half of the painting.
  • The side silhouette of a nude woman with pale skin is reflected along the edge of a tall, rectangular mirror in a room painted in tones of marigold orange, butter yellow, rose pink, peach, aquamarine blue, turquoise, and deep fuchsia in this vertical painting. The left edge of the woman is reflected along the right edge of the mirror, which takes up the left two-thirds of the composition. Only the side of the woman's head and ear, shoulder, arm, breast, hip, and her right leg are captured in the mirror. She holds the hand we can see up to her brown hair. The wall behind the mirror is papered with a pattern of pale pink flowers with mint-green leaves against a field of golden yellow. A pale turquoise rectangle extends into the room from the lower left corner of the canvas, and some perfume bottles sit beyond the far end. The floor of the room in the reflection is patterned with rounded, floral fuchsia-pink shapes against a lilac-purple background. A deep magenta field below an electric-blue band suggests paneling beneath a chair rail. The wall above is streaked with peach, pink, and yellow. A table to our left at the back of the room perhaps holds embroidery. The woman’s body is painted in tones of soft pink with cool blue shadows. The scene is painted with loose, visible brushstrokes so some of the detail is difficult to make out, and it takes time to puzzle out what the scene captures. The artist signed the work with red paint in the upper right corner: “Bonnard.”
  • A screen made up of five tall, rectangular panels, set side by side and each surrounded by a gold frame, is painted as a single scene showing a tree-lined sidewalk curving around a park in a city. The scene is loosely painted with short, rounded brushstrokes. The top two-thirds to three-quarters of most of the panels are filled with the lime and olive-green leaves of the trees that line the sidewalk and park. In the leftmost panel, the sidewalk and road lead back to a row of caramel-brown building façades. The sidewalk is pale taupe, and the street is painted with dashes of the same taupe against terracotta brown, suggesting cobblestones. Spindly trees are spaced in a row along the sidewalk in round holes covered with smoke-gray metal grates. A black fence, painted with thin, sometimes broken black lines encloses the park beyond, which has a path around plantings and the vivid green lawn. Touches of pink on a sage-green tree to our left in the park suggest flowers. A gray statue on a high plinth is partially lost in the break between the two rightmost panels. Men, women, and children, painted with a few strokes of black, gray, or marine or periwinkle blue, walk along the sidewalk and the garden path, or sit at the base of the fence or on benches spaced along the sidewalk. The women seem to wear long dresses and the men dark clothing and hats. Two carriages are pulled up on the street near a lamp post alongside the sidewalk near the lower left. In the leftmost panel, horse-drawn carriages move along the road leading back to the buildings, and more people seem to be gathered on the sidewalk near the left edge of the panel in the distance. The artist signed the work with brown paint in the lower right corner: “E. Vuillard.” The panels of the screen have been set up so the panels rest on a platform or on the floor in a shallow zig-zag pattern, in a room with an off white wall and bisque-brown molding along the floor.
  • Green hills roll back to a turquoise-blue sea in this almost square painting. The scene is built with layers of small dots in lavender, lilac, cool blue, warm green, yellow, and peach. The hill angles from nearly the top left corner of the canvas to the lower right, filling the bottom left half of the canvas. It is mostly variegated shades of green but there are two cliff-like, purple surfaces to our left and a lighter patch of yellow to our right. A pole and a cross-shaped structure atop the hill to the left could be utility poles. An object on the water in the distance to our right may be a buoy or a boat. Peach lines the horizon, which comes just over halfway up the composition, and straw yellow and cornflower blue ripple across the sky above.
  • A dark-haired, disembodied head of a haloed man with pale, peach skin floats against a red and yellow background in this vertical portrait. The man’s hair seems to be flattened against his forehead, and extends beyond his head at the back in a way that suggests it may become a cap or hood. His face turns toward us, and he looks down to our left under arched eyebrows. He has a prominent hooked nose and a brushy mustache. Behind his head, the background is divided into a tomato-red zone for the top half and a golden yellow field below, separated by a thin, pine-green line. Two red and green apples hang from a branch near the upper right corner. The thin yellow halo floats over his head to the left of the branch. A pine-green, stylized, vine-like form curves up from the bottom edge of the panel and ends with flat, sunshine yellow, square shapes, perhaps abstracted flowers or fruit. A hand near the lower right holds one end of the vine like a cigarette between fingertips. The vine seems to turn into a serpent’s head beyond the man’s fingers. Numbers and letters are painted in green in the lower left: “1889” and “P Go.”
  • Shown from the chest up, a man with short, orange hair and green-tinted, pale skin looks at us, wearing a vivid blue painter's smock in this vertical portrait painting. His smock and the background are painted with long, mostly parallel strokes of cobalt, azure, and lapis blue. His shoulders are angled to our left, and he looks at us from the corners of his blue eyes. He has a long, slightly bumped nose, and his lips are closed within a full, rust-orange beard. He holds a palette and paintbrushes in his left hand, in the lower left corner of the canvas. The background is painted with long brushstrokes that follow the contours of his head and torso to create an aura-like effect.
  • We look down onto nine pieces of fruit, a pitcher, a goblet, and a dish arranged on a rustic wood table in front of a floral curtain in this nearly square, loosely painted still life. The table extends off the left edge of the composition and the back, right corner of the table just touches the right edge of the canvas. At the center of the composition, five pieces of marigold-orange fruit with yellow highlights and scarlet-red shading are piled in the dish. The side of the dish to our right is slightly tipped up so the fruit settles near the rim to our left. The dish is painted with loose strokes of sky blue, shell pink, pale yellow, and parchment white. Three more pieces of fruit, including a lemon, sit to our left of the dish and one more piece of fruit sits near the back corner of the table, behind the dish, to our right. Immediately behind the dish is a stemmed glass with a tall, rounded bowl. To our left, between the fruit on the table and in the platter, is a tall, angular, tapering pitcher. The pitcher is painted with emerald and moss-green leaves against a background painted with strokes of light peach, blush pink, slate blue, and one wide stroke of amber orange. The wooden table is peanut brown streaked with strokes of apricot orange and pale sage green. One drawer at the front has a round, wooden pull. There seem to be at least two panels of curtains hanging behind the table. Down the center of the background is a panel of coral peach and saffron orange with a floral pattern painted in wheat brown and denim blue. To our right, the panel is streaked with vertical strokes of teal, midnight, and navy blue. The area to our left, behind the table, could be the panel of a door, painted with pale turquoise. The fruit, dish, vessels, table, curtain, and door are all outlined with cobalt blue.
  • Two animals with golden yellow, brown, and black fur peer out from behind dense jungle foliage in this stylized, vertical painting. Most of the composition is filled with broadly painted areas of sage, olive, moss, and lemon-lime green to create an impenetrable wall of plants and growth. An oval of slate-blue sky to the left of upper center is framed by plants that grow up and off the top corners of the painting. Small in scale and nestled back among the growth near the lower center, the animal to our right has black eyes that look at or toward us, a long nose, and gray around its mouth and eyes. It has triangular ears and its body, which extends to our right, is dark brown with a lifted tail. To our left, another smaller animal, perhaps a baby, is mostly obscured by a fern frond and grass. This animal has small black eyes and chestnut-brown and black fur. Three large, stylized flowers with fuchsia-pink centers and pale petals grow above the animals, to our left. An oversized white hyacinth grows to our right. A narrow, brick-red bird sits on a branch above the pink flowers, almost lost among the plants. The artist signed and dated the lower right corner, “Henri Julien Rousseau 1909.”
  • We look slightly down onto a balding, bearded man with pale, peachy skin and wearing a three-piece suit, seated in a wooden armchair behind an L-shaped desk, in this loosely painted vertical portrait. A tabby cat with a white chest sits on his lap. The room around them is packed with piles of papers, books, and paintings hung on scarlet-red walls. The man’s body faces us, and he looks off to our right under dark, bushy, peaked eyebrows. His round head is fringed with gray hair, and he has a full, light gray beard. His gray eyes are bloodshot beneath heavy lids, with dark rings underneath. He has a short nose, and the flesh of his cheeks hangs in loose paunches alongside his nose. Close inspection finds strokes of plum and lavender purple, mint and sage green, and ice blue creating highlights and shadows on this face. His left hand, to our right, hangs loosely over the arm of the chair, while his other hand gently rests around the chest of the small cat that sits on his lap. The man wears a chocolate-brown jacket over a charcoal-gray vest, and a dark bowtie with a white shirt that just shows at his throat and wrists. Reams of pink, yellow, white, green, and gold paper are arrayed on the desk in front of the man, and in tall, uneven piles to his left, with more on a chair against the wall behind him. A small paperweight globe of multicolored glass on a brass base rests on one sheet of paper on the desk. Two small and one large gilt-framed portraits hang on the velvety red wall in the background, and others are reflected in a gilt-framed mirror at the upper right corner of the painting. A white door with four horizontal panels is closed behind the man at the upper left corner. The brushwork in the painting is quick and loose, with touches of contrasting colors throughout. The artist signed and dated the lower left corner, “E. Vuillard 1912.”

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We look across a wide river with buildings lining the opposite bank as two tugboats painted with stripes and strokes of cherry red, white, and cobalt blue steam along from right to left in this stylized, horizontal landscape painting. The paint is loosely and thickly applied throughout. The water is painted with layers of short, horizontal strokes and daubs of ice and royal blue, shell pink, bottle green, and the red, white, and blue of the boats to suggest reflections. One tugboat is just left of center and passes the small village on the opposite bank. Smoke rising from that boat’s stack create eddies of cobalt blue, marigold orange, and petal pink. The bow of a second tug enters from the middle right. The riverbank directly in front of us, in the lower left corner of the composition, is painted with dashes of mustard yellow layered with horizontal strokes of burnt orange. The village on the far side fills the top third of the painting and parallels the river. Its buildings are butter yellow with blue or pumpkin-orange roofs. A few tall, narrow, emerald and avocado-green strokes suggest cypress trees growing amid the village. Horizontal strokes near the river’s edge could be another line of buildings. The building’s reflections are suggested by short, parallel strokes of golden yellow, orange, and green extending into the river. The trees, buildings, and boats are outlined in black. The sky above the village is mint green layered with thick strokes of white, and swirls of azure blue and light pink. The artist signed the painting with black letters in the lower left corner, “Vlaminck.”

Fauvism

Saturated, unnatural colors and powerful brushstrokes made fauvist paintings radical—and widely criticized. Henri Matisse, André Derain, and Maurice de Vlaminck were among the artists dubbed “fauves” (wild beasts). While short-lived (about 1904 to 1908), fauvism was the first avant-garde wave of the 20th century.  

From low on a hillside, we look up at a light-skinned woman and boy standing in tall grass against a sunny blue sky in this vertical painting. The woman stands at the center of the composition, and the moss-green parasol she holds over her head almost brushes the top edge of the canvas. Her body faces our left but she turns her head to look at us. Her long dress is painted largely with strokes of pale blue and gray with a few touches of yellow. Her voluminous skirts swirl around her legs to our left. She holds the parasol with both hands, and her brown hair is covered with a hat. Long strokes of white paint across her face suggest a veil fluttering in the breeze. The tall grass she stands in is dotted with buttercup yellow and plum purple, and she casts a long diagonal shadow along the grass toward us. The young boy seems to stand on the other side of the hill, since the grass and flowers comes up to his waist. He wears a white jacket and pale yellow straw hat. His arms are by his sides, and he seems to look off into the distance to our left. A sunny blue sky behind the people is dotted with bright blue clouds. The painting is created with loose brushstrokes throughout, and they are especially choppy in the clouds. The artist signed and dated the painting in royal-blue letters at the lower right: “Claude Monet 75.”

Impressionism

Impressionism is a style of painting that helped redirect art toward personal expression and artistic process. The movement originated in and around Paris in the late 19th century. Impressionists had stylistic differences, but they shared an interest in accurately capturing modern life and the fleeting effects of light and color.