Impressionism & Post-Impressionism
Art History II: Baroque to Contemporary
Course 2 · Chapter 6 · Impressionism & Post-Impressionism
The Salon System, and Breaking From It
The official Paris Salon, run by a conservative academic jury, was for most of the 19th century the near-only path to a painter's own reputation and livelihood — favoring polished finish, idealized form, and traditional subject matter above almost everything else.
An unusually large number of rejections that year provoked such outcry that Napoleon III ordered a separate exhibition of the rejected works. Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe became its principal scandal — a nude woman in an ordinary, contemporary outdoor setting alongside clothed men.
Monet, Renoir, Degas, and others organized their own exhibition entirely independently — a genuine institutional rupture, opting out of the Salon system rather than merely being rejected by it.
Monet: Painting What a Camera Couldn't
Formally, loose, visible, rapid brushstrokes render a hazy harbor sunrise at Le Havre — the sun a single bright dab of orange, boats reduced to a few quick dark marks, the whole scene deliberately unfinished by the Salon's own polished standard. This is the direct answer to Chapter 5's own open question: an 1870s photograph, requiring a long exposure, could not capture a specific, fleeting instant of shifting light and atmosphere the way a fast, gestural brush could. Painting's own new purpose becomes documenting subjective, momentary visual sensation, not literal, static likeness.
Post-Impressionism: Beyond Pure Optical Sensation
A loose successor movement, Post-Impressionism keeps Impressionism's own bright palette and visible brushwork while pushing past its purely optical, in-the-moment goal — toward structure, symbolism, or raw emotional expression instead.
Painted at the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where Van Gogh had voluntarily admitted himself following a mental health crisis. Formally, thick, swirling impasto brushwork renders the night sky as a churning, almost physically turbulent force, with an invented village added beneath a real view from his own asylum window — not a literal transcription of what he actually saw, but an emotional, imagined intensification of it. This is a genuinely different goal from Monet's own optical fidelity: an interior emotional state, projected outward onto the landscape itself.
Cézanne painted the same mountain near his home in Aix-en-Provence roughly eighty times over the last two decades of his life. In an 1904 letter to the painter Émile Bernard, he advised: "treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone." Formally, his own late canvases build the mountain from faceted, distinct patches of color functioning almost like geometric building blocks — pursuing the stable, underlying structure beneath appearances, rather than Impressionism's own fleeting surface effect.
Two Genuinely Different Post-Salon Goals
| Aspect | Impressionism (Monet) | Post-Impressionism (Van Gogh / Cézanne) |
|---|---|---|
| Primary goal | Capturing a fleeting optical/sensory impression | Emotional expression (Van Gogh) or underlying structure (Cézanne) |
| Brushwork | Loose, rapid, atmospheric | Expressive/thick (Van Gogh) or faceted/structural (Cézanne) |
| Relationship to observed reality | A momentary, literal optical record | Deliberately reworked — emotionally or structurally |
Questions to Sit With
Louis Leroy's insult became the movement's own proud name. Can you think of another example, in art or elsewhere, of a dismissive label being reclaimed the same way?
Van Gogh painted an imagined village beneath a real view, rather than what he actually saw. Does adding invented elements make a painting more or less "truthful" than Monet's own more literal optical record?
Organizing an independent exhibition outside the Salon system was a genuine institutional risk in 1874. What do you think it takes for a group of artists today to make a similarly risky, independent break from whatever the current dominant gatekeeping institution is?
Quick Reference — Chapter 6
- 1863 — the Salon des Refusés; Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe scandal
- 1874 — the first Impressionist exhibition, organized entirely independently of the official Salon
- Louis Leroy's mocking review coined "Impressionism"; the artists proudly kept the name
- Monet's Impression, Sunrise (1872) — capturing fleeting light/atmosphere a slow camera couldn't
- Van Gogh's The Starry Night (June 1889) — emotional intensification, not literal record
- Cézanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire series (1880s-1906) — geometric structure beneath appearances, a bridge to Cubism
What's Next
Next chapter: Early 20th-Century Modernism — Cubism, Fauvism, and Expressionism; Picasso, Matisse, and Kandinsky, and the real conceptual break of abandoning single-point perspective after 500 years.