After Impressionism. Four different answers

Georges Seurat · 1884

This is the final preparatory study for the monumental La Grande Jatte in Chicago. Separate patches precede the finished painting’s denser dots. Seurat called his method of dividing colours Divisionism. The study reveals changes of technique on the way to the large canvas.

Georges Seurat · 1884–1886; border 1888–1889

Seurat developed this leisure scene in 1884–86 through many preparatory studies. The people on La Grande Jatte appear almost motionless. Their placement and colour relationships are carefully planned around an ordinary Sunday outing.

Georges Seurat · 1887–88

Circus Corvi offered a free performance outside its entrance at Paris’s Gingerbread Fair in 1887. The display encouraged people to buy admission. Seurat’s first nocturne appeared at the Salon des Indépendants in 1888, bringing commercial entertainment into an experimental painting.

Georges Seurat · 1888

Seurat made six paintings during six weeks at Port-en-Bessin in 1888. Here he omitted a medieval tower and tourists on the cliff paths. Even brush marks follow the landscape's contours and extend into the painted border. The coastal visit became a controlled study of line and color.

Paul Signac · 1886

This Seine view belongs to Signac’s first experiments with dots and dashes of contrasting colour, following his friend Seurat. Signac paid particular attention to geometry. A blue triangle establishes a river bend, while trapezoid fields organise the hill in the distance.

Paul Cezanne · c. 1885

In a letter to Pissarro, Cézanne compared this view to a playing card because of its simple shapes and colours. Buildings, sea, mountains and sky form closely fitted bands. The landscape preserves depth while emphasising the flat canvas. Such experiments later mattered to painters developing Cubism.

Paul Cezanne · 1888–90

Hortense Fiquet was working as an artist’s model when she met Cézanne. They had a son and married in 1886. This portrait belongs to a series of four. Technical examination suggests Cézanne transferred its design from the first version, painted from life, and then reworked it.

Paul Cezanne · 1890–92

Provençal farmworkers modelled for Cézanne’s card players. He developed the arrangement through studies, carefully adjusting bodies, table and surroundings. Other versions simplify the gathering. A familiar pastime becomes a sustained investigation of how a painting holds together.

Paul Cézanne · About 1893

Cézanne painted The Basket of Apples around 1893. Every object is recognisable, yet the table edges fail to align across the cloth. Different viewpoints coexist within one arrangement on the canvas.

Paul Cezanne · ca. 1890

Flowering plants were unusual subjects for Cézanne. His slow working process risked outlasting the blooms. Here, the fragile plant joins more durable apples and pottery. Claude Monet, himself an enthusiastic gardener, once owned the painting.

Paul Cezanne · 1893/1895

Cézanne returned to the same studio objects to study their relationships. He later included this very canvas within his Still Life with Plaster Cupid. The bottles, fruit, and cloth thus belonged both to an arrangement of things and to his own continuing work with earlier paintings.

Paul Cezanne · 1888-1890

The pose recalls sixteenth-century Italian aristocratic portraits. Cézanne simultaneously divides the face and setting into colored planes. An older formal model becomes a basis for investigating form. Figure and space are assembled through areas of paint that remain independently visible.

Paul Cezanne · 1899-1904

Cézanne returned repeatedly to groups of nude figures in nature. He combined invented poses with figures drawn from earlier works. Hatching crosses bodies, trees, earth and water. The traditional subject of bathers became a means of balancing human figures with an entire landscape.

Paul Cezanne · c. 1904

Cézanne painted this view from a road leading east from Aix toward the mountain. Two umbrella pines anchor the foreground, and a branch at the left echoes the distant slope. He returned to Sainte-Victoire throughout his last two decades, changing the construction of space around a familiar subject.

Vincent van Gogh · 1887

In Paris, Van Gogh encountered Impressionism and Seurat’s experiments with separate touches of colour. During two years there he painted at least twenty-four self-portraits. This small work on prepared board records his changing palette. Red, green and blue help build the face alongside conventional light and shade.

Vincent van Gogh · 1887

Van Gogh repeatedly painted himself in Paris partly because he could not always afford models. Short coloured strokes show his engagement with Neo-Impressionism. This portrait occupies the reverse of an earlier study of a peasant woman peeling potatoes.

Vincent van Gogh · 1889

Van Gogh painted five versions of Augustine Roulin rocking a cradle beyond the picture. He made this one soon after returning from hospital following his quarrel with Gauguin. Later he gave it to Gauguin as a gesture of reconciliation, suggesting it should hang between two paintings of sunflowers.

Vincent van Gogh · September 1889

The room was in the Yellow House in Arles, but Van Gogh painted this version in Saint-Rémy in September 1889. He returned to a composition from the previous year, associating its simple forms and colours with rest.

Vincent van Gogh · June 1889

Van Gogh painted this nocturnal landscape in several daytime sessions in June 1889, during his stay at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy. A letter to Theo describes the countryside before sunrise and an unusually bright morning star. The painted village and church were invented, bringing observation together with remembered and altered forms.

Vincent van Gogh · 1889

Van Gogh painted this landscape outdoors during his stay at Saint-Rémy. In July 1889 he sent Theo drawings of the composition, then made two studio repetitions in September. Similar images in different museums can therefore be separate versions painted by the artist himself.

Vincent van Gogh · 1889

Van Gogh painted himself while recovering from a severe crisis at Saint-Rémy. This is one of his last self-portraits. Brushes and palette show him continuing to work. The vigorous marks and color relationships belong to deliberate artistic decisions considered alongside his circumstances.

Vincent van Gogh · 1889

While receiving treatment at Saint-Rémy, Van Gogh was allowed to paint outside the hospital. He described the workers, heaps of sand, and enormous yellowing plane trees in a letter to Theo. He later repeated the composition; research identifies the Cleveland painting as the first version, made through direct observation of the site.

Vincent van Gogh · 1890

In May 1890, before leaving the asylum at Saint-Rémy, Van Gogh painted four flower still lifes. This bouquet belonged to that group. Red pigment has faded, turning the originally violet irises blue and paling the pink background.

Vincent van Gogh · 1890

The roses were originally pink, but fading changed their relationship with the green ground. The paint was so thick that Van Gogh left the canvas at Saint-Rémy to dry in May 1890. It reached him later in Auvers. Present color and transport history reveal the work's material life.

Vincent van Gogh · 1890

After returning to northern France, Van Gogh renewed his attention to cool greens and blues. Long strokes connect the movement of field and sky. The painting spent decades in Paul Mellon's Virginia home before entering the museum in 2013. A familiar rural subject receives a new color organization.

Paul Gauguin · 1889

Gauguin painted this self-portrait on a cupboard door in a Le Pouldu inn. A halo, apples, and serpent combine signs of sanctity and temptation. The image constructs an exceptional role for the artist. Its caricatural face and disembodied hand make the self-presentation deliberately provocative.

Paul Gauguin · 1891

Gauguin gives a Christian subject Tahitian figures in his first major canvas made there. Much of the arrangement derives from a photograph of a relief at Java’s Borobudur temple. The painting combines different cultural sources within a European artist’s construction of Tahiti.

Paul Gauguin · 1892

Gauguin associated Tahiti with a search for life beyond French materialism and secular culture. His island scenes express that idealized vision. Color and poses in this seaside painting follow his pictorial choices. The image records a visiting painter's outlook and cannot by itself establish the actual lives of Tahitians.

Paul Gauguin · 1893

Thirteen-year-old Tehamana wears a missionary-style dress and holds a Samoan fan. Behind her, Gauguin combines Easter Island signs with motifs from different religious traditions. The mixture expresses his own idea of another culture. The portrait needs to be understood within colonial Tahiti and the inequality between the adult artist and his young model.

Paul Gauguin · 1894

Gauguin painted this scene in Paris after his first journey to Tahiti, drawing on memory and invention. Figures beside water, a statue and broad colour fields create an imagined setting. The painting cannot be treated as an accurate record of a Tahitian ritual, despite its long reception as a view into island life.

Paul Gauguin · 1897–1898

Gauguin made his largest painting in Tahiti during a personal crisis. He had expected an inexpensive, untouched paradise but encountered a modern colonial society and conflicts with French authorities. Figures of different ages develop the questions in the title. The scene assembles the artist's worldview rather than documenting island life transparently.