Post-Impressionism

The term was coined by British critic Roger Fry for a 1910 London exhibition, decades after the painters it described — van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat — had mostly stopped working (van Gogh died in 1890). It was never a unified movement with a manifesto; it's a retrospective label for artists who inherited Impressionist color but rejected its purely optical aims.

Van Gogh arrived in Paris in 1886 already trained in darker Dutch realism, and Impressionist color transformed his palette almost overnight. Within four years, working first in Paris, then Arles, Saint-Rémy, and finally Auvers-sur-Oise, he developed his signature impasto — paint laid on so thickly the brushstrokes read as texture and motion, not just color.

Where Monet used broken color to record fleeting atmospheric effects, van Gogh used it to express interior states: the swirling sky over Saint-Rémy, the claustrophobic warmth of his Arles bedroom, the frank stare of a bowl of sunflowers. That expressive use of paint became a direct bridge to Fauvism and German Expressionism in the following decades.