PAINTING 241 



Realism had been a revolt against the tyranny of academic classicism. Post-Im- 

 pressionism derives from Impressionism (see E. B. xiv, 343) and is at 'the same time 

 the negation of Impressionist principles. It is an art of expression rather than of 

 impression. It derives from Manet's mass-impressionism, which had already done 

 much towards eliminating chiaroscuro and simplifying the planes in pictorial work. 

 It also derives from Monet's colour-impressionism with its analysis of light into the 

 constituent spectral colours and insistence on colour vibration as the principal factor 

 in the painter's art. 



In the hands of such neo-impressionists as Signac, Seurat and Cross, Monet's 

 application of the discoveries of spectral analysis had become purely scientific and 

 mechanical, their canvases being filled with a system of round dots or square touches 

 of identical shape and regular intervals. The first Post-Impressionists shrank from 

 the imitative objectivity of these Neo-impressionists, and used colour and form as 

 symbols for the expression of their personal emotions. One of the best definitions 

 of Post-Impressionism is " a new recognition of the principle that objects cannot 

 be depicted as they exist in reality, but only as they appeal to the spirit of the indi- 

 vidual; that their emotional significance the bond that links man to his surround- 

 ings can be expressed only by a full confession of personal experience." 



The three founders of the new movement the dominant personalities whose 

 achievement stands out from the bulk of eccentric, incompetent arid often absurd 

 productions of the lesser men who sailed under the same flag were Paul Cezanne 

 (1839-1906), Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), and Vincent Van Gogh (1833-1890). 



Cezanne, born in 1839 at Aix in Provence, the son of a prosperous banker, was 

 educated for the law, but felt strongly drawn towards art and was allowed to enter the 

 c r ^ Academie Suisse in Paris in 1862. Having failed to gain access to the Ecole 



des Beaux-Arts he had for a time to work in his father's bank; but he even- 

 tually returned to Paris and art, the influences to which he submitted being those of 

 Courbet, Manet and Pissarro. An allowance from his father enabled him to follow his 

 passionate love of art without having to depend on the very remote chance of selling 

 his pictures. He worked with real passion, struggling with all his might to arrive at 

 " the coherent architectural effect of the masterpieces of primitive art," and caring 

 little for what became of the pictures upon which he had spent his fiery energy. But 

 it was only on rare occasions that he was able to express his ideals. He was insuffi- 

 ciently trained, and remained to the end heavy and clumsy in his manipulation of the 

 brush. Cezanne took part in the Communist rising of 1871. He died at Aix on Sep- 

 tember 22, 1906. The character of Lantier in Zola's " L'Oeuvre " was partly drawn 

 from Cezanne 



Paul Gauguin was born in Paris in 1848, the son of a Breton father and a Creole 

 mother. It was only at the age Of thirty, after having been a cabin-boy and a bank 

 G . clerk, that under the influence of Pissarro, Degas and Cezanne he took 

 to painting, his early work being closely akin to that of Pissarro. His 

 whole temperament made it impossible for him to live and work in Paris, He went 

 first to Brittany, then to Martinique (in 1887), whence he only returned to go with 

 Vincent Van Gogh to the South of France, where the two collaborated until Van Gogh 

 after a murderous attack on his friend was removed to a lunatic asylum. In 1891 

 Gauguin finally broke away from Europe and civilisation and went to Tahiti, where 

 he took a native wife and lived the primitive life of the natives, interrupted only by 

 a few visits to his native France, until he died on May 9, 1903. 



In the primitive surroundings of the South Sea Islands he endeavoured, with a 

 good deal of success, to regain something of the decorative grandeur and expressive 

 simplicity of primitive art. That the barbarous splendour of his colour has great 

 decorative value, and that there is a certain archaic monumentality in his design, can- 

 not be denied. Yet it is equally certain that with him, too, the achievement fell 

 frequently short of the intention. Although trained in the Impressionist School, 

 Gauguin, in his later work, has nothing in common with its practice. His colouring 



