Impressionism vs Post-Impressionism: Artistic Evolution

Key Differences Between Impressionism and Post-Impressionism

The major development was Impressionism's claim to a specificity of pictorial language, which placed painting on a plane totally different from the production of other images.

The Impact of Photography on Traditional Painting

It is important to remember that in those years, the birth of photography had made available a tool for the reproduction of reality that was totally natural. Photography records optical vision with a fidelity and speed that no painter could ever reach. Consequently, photography forcibly occupied the specific field for which painting was originally born: to reproduce reality. Competing with photography in terms of naturalism would be a losing and useless battle; therefore, painting required a new specificity.

Impressionist Techniques and Plein Air Study

The Impressionists painted outdoors with a rapid technique that allowed them to complete a work within a few hours (painting en plein air). They wanted to reproduce on canvas the sensations and visual perceptions that the landscape evoked in them at different times of day and under specific lighting conditions. The study of the real sky, air, and water supplanted indoor work in workshops—studies in which paintings were previously completed or where the greatest portraits were performed. However, many portraits were also made outdoors. The background or landscape is not something added but surrounds the figures. Objects and people are treated with the same broad and strong brushstrokes.

The Evolution of Post-Impressionism

Post-Impressionism is based on all these guidelines of art that developed in France in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Post-Impressionism is an artistic trend that goes beyond the concepts of Impressionism, keeping only some features to dig deeper into previous studies. This artistic movement seeks to recover the value of artistic forms and volumes and to extrapolate a more personal research process. The Post-Impressionist painters, in fact, reject the purely visual impression of color and embrace the freedom to venture down roads not yet traveled.

Comparing Artistic Elements and Styles

In Post-Impressionist works, one can still see elements that bind their painting to Impressionism, such as:

• Traces of paint and color touches (not understood in an absolute sense).
• Painting based on the contrast between complementary colors.
• Data from real observation, transparency, and realistic elements.

Distinctive Post-Impressionist Traits

Items that distance their painting from Impressionism include:

• The restoration of the contour line and design.
• A return to the use of brown and black.
• The drawing of flat colors and monochrome backgrounds.
• A trend toward linearity and a predilection for two-dimensionality.

Other features common to Post-Impressionists were the refusal of a single visual impression, the tendency to emphasize the robustness of the image, and a sense of certainty and freedom in color. Images are considered for their evocative power. Because of this, fantastic or mythological themes reappear, and images lose their realistic character in terms of volume, space, and color. They used art as a means of reacting against the values of 19th-century bourgeois society, though not always consciously.