Stretching from Paris to Le Havre, the Seine river and the valley flanking it afford some of France's loveliest views. The ports, holiday homes and artists' houses, the boats, the washerwomen, the windmills, the open-air cafes, the picnics and the bathing supplied French painting with some of its most iconic images, particularly during the Impressionist era, when painting stepped out of the studio and into the world. It was in this period, as the industrial revolution began to get underway and the landscape began to alter accordingly, through the development of railways, ports and factories, that the rural world it threatened became an increasingly popular subject for painting. This volume brings together 60 paintings painted on the banks of the Seine, retracing the history of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism to Fauvism, from Eugene Boudin to Henri Matisse. En route we encounter such familiar figures as Manet, Renoir, Monet, Pissarro, Sisley and Caillebotte, but also lesser-known figures such as Armand Guillaumin, Henri Rouart and Maximilien Luce.

As one of the Tiny Folio Great Museum series, this book is designed as a tour of the National Gallery's collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings, drawings, prints and sculpture. Visitors to the National Gallery in Washington usually make straight for the rooms holding the museum's works by the greatest Impressionist artists, including Degas, Renoir, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne and many others. This miniature compendium includes all the favourites, along with many less-familiar works photographed especially for this volume.

During the 1860s, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley joined forces to revolutionize art with light- flooded landscapes that dispensed with the conventional imagery of the time. In 1874, with their penchant for working out of doors in order to capture fleeting sensory impressions directly on the canvas, they came to be known as the "Impressionists." Berthe Morisot, Paul Cezanne, and Gustave Caillebotte became affiliated with the new tendency as well. More than a decade later, artists such as Paul Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross developed their pioneering ideas further, and in 1901, during his first year in Paris, the young Pablo Picasso too drew inspiration from the Impressionist style. No comparable collection provides such a comprehensive overview of Impressionist landscape painting and its development as the one assembled in recent decades by Hasso Plattner, founder of the Museum Barberini. On its basis, Ortrud Westheider, the director of the Museum Barberini, presents the history of French Impressionism. With its focus on the transitory moment, the artistry of the Impressionists continues to exert a powerful fascination. Guided by the interplay between light and atmosphere, they created exquisite and timeless images whose innovative spirit and vitality continue to delight viewers today.

From humble beginnings in Nuenen and Antwerp to his last month in Auvers-sur-Oise, this captivating book on Vincent Van Gogh's life and works is the perfect introduction for all students and art lovers interested in late nineteenth-century and Post-Impressionist art. Featuring fifty of his finest works, each painting and drawing is described and analyzed in beautiful detail, within the context of the period, so that the reader can really understand what the artist was hoping to achieve with each work. Drawing from the many letters that Van Gogh wrote to his brother, friends and others, curator John Cauman provides an enthralling and accessible narrative about the artist and his work, introducing the milieu, key characters and themes and legacy that continues to this day. Among the fifty paintings featured, this book includes The Potato Eaters (1885), Pere Tanguy (1887), Self-Portrait in Front of the Easel (1888), Sunflowers (1888), Cafe Terrace at Night (1888), Bedroom in Arles (1888), Van Gogh's Chair (1888), Portrait of Joseph Roulin (1889), Irises (1889), The Starry Night (1889) and Wheatfield with Crows (1890).

Original compilation of 41 full-page and six half-page drawings-some finished sketches; others, studies for future works-depict dancers on stage, in the classroom, and at rehearsals. Charming, spirited views of dancers pirouetting, executing grand battements and ports de bras, practicing at the barre, adjusting their costumes in moments of repose, and more. Delightful drawings to be enjoyed by lovers of art or the dance.

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) was an artist perpetually in search of new horizons. This fascinating visual tour reveals the full extent of Gauguin's travels and their influence on his unique style. Gauguin's several lengthy trips to Tahiti and the Marquesas between 1891 and the artist's death, visits that provided the inspiration for many of his most famous canvases, are well known and documented here in rich detail. Less familiar are stories from his early years living with his family in Peru, which Gauguin would later describe as "idyllic," and his years in the French Navy, which would take him to numerous destinations including India. Throughout the 1880s, as a young man starting a family and struggling to become established within the art world, the restless Gauguin moved often-within Paris, to Rouen, to Copenhagen, and back to Paris. Abundantly illustrated with hundreds of vibrant images, including archival material and the artist's own works, The Gauguin Atlas brings to life the places that Gauguin visited and lived. The book's handsome design seamlessly integrates maps and other images with an accessible and engaging text that narrates Gauguin's travels; what emerges is a vivid picture of an artist continually seeking new experience and inspiration for his art.

Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Cezanne, Renoir, Degas, Sisley, Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt. Though they were often ridiculed or ignored by their contemporaries, astonishing sums are paid today for the works of these artists. Their dazzling pictures are familiar - but how well does the world know the Impressionists as people? In a vivid and moving narrative, biographer Sue Roe shows the Impressionists in the studios of Paris, rural lanes of Montmartre and rowdy riverside bars as Paris underwent Baron Haussman's spectacular transformation. For over twenty years they lived and worked together as a group, struggling to rebuild their lives after the Franco-Prussian war and supporting one another through shocked public reactions to unfamiliar canvasses depicting laundresses, dancers, spring blossom and boating scenes. This intimate, colourful, superbly researched account takes us into their homes as well as their studios and describes their unconventional, volatile and precarious lives, as well as the stories behind their paintings.

A native of Valencia, Spanish Impressionist Joaquin Sorolla (1863-1923) first went to Paris in 1885 as a young artist at the age of twenty-three. He exhibited at the international salons, winning the Grand Prix at the Exposition Universelle in 1900, and in 1906, he exhibited for the first time at the Galerie Georges Petit, one of the principal galleries of the Impressionists. The exhibition was a resounding success and helped establish Sorolla's international reputation. Known for his vigorous compositions, unusual color palette, and loose, radiant brush strokes, Sorolla's sundrenched landscapes, beach scenes, and luminous portraits even impressed such contemporaries as Claude Monet. Richly illustrated and with newly researched essays by noted scholars, this important book reveals much new information about Sorolla's activities and relationships with other artists in Europe. Included are more than one hundred paintings reflecting the artist's career, from his early work in Paris in which the influence of the French Impressionists is clearly evident, to the distinctive pictures that reflect his mature and celebrated style.

James Lawrence Isherwood (1917-1989) is widely regarded by his followers as one of the best impressionist painters this country has produced. Born and bred in Wigan, now part of Greater Manchester, England, he was a prolific painter and produced his best work from the early 1960s on. His work has always been considered truly original and is typified by strong brushwork and extravagant colours. His subjects ranged from rural and industrial landscapes to nudes and portraiture, and his work has found its way into art collections across the world. Now Dr. Brian Iddon has written this authoritative biography about James Isherwood and his work.

Paul Cezanne, whom Pablo Picasso called `the father of us all', is widely considered to be 20th-century modernism's presiding genius. Cezanne's pioneering synthesis of a theory of form with the visual immediacy of Impressionism in the late 19th century inspired Henri Matisse and the Fauves and led to the development of Cubism by Picasso and Georges Braque. This latest volume in the MoMA Artist Series guides readers through ten of Cezanne's most memorable achievements, selected fromThe Museum of Modern Art's substantial collection of his work. His iconic figure paintings The Bather and Boy in a Red Vest are featured, along with emblematic still lifes and landscapes from earlier and later years. A lively essay by Carolyn Lanchner accompanies each work, illuminating its significance and placing it in its historical moment in the development of modern art.

This is a concise and engaging, yet detailed and informative monograph that explores Gauguin's most Important works. Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) was one of the most important artists of the late 19th century, and one whose work was to have a profound influence on the development of art in the 20th century. He began as an Impressionist, but went on to develop a richly-coloured style in his constant search for pristine originality and unadulterated nature. This concise monograph collects the most important works by Gauguin, not only of his best known paintings of Tahiti in which the artist attempted to reconstruct the perfect life which he had failed to find in reality, but also of many powerful works that reflect the artist's contact with other seminal early modern masters like Van Gogh or Cezanne.

VINCENT VAN GOGH

Few artists command such fervent devotion amongst art lovers and such high prices in the salerooms of the art world. Love him or hate him, Vincent van Gogh is one of a handful of artists who is now a cultural event.

Stuart Morris's study concentrates on the paintings first, and employs van Gogh's eloquent letters as an aesthetic reference point. Much of the book is concerned with metacriticism - the way van Gogh has been critically received over the years.

Vincent van Gogh is one of the most celebrated of painters. It's a bit of a mystery. The mystery (or irony) is that his paintings have commanded the highest prices in the auction rooms of the contemporary art world (88 million dollars, 53 million dollars, and so on), yet he only managed to sell one painting during his lifetime, and he lived in poverty (with financial support from his brother Theo).

Why is Vincent van Gogh so popular? His legend has developed relatively rapidly. His art is loved by the critics and public. The crazy prices paid for single oil paintings are the manifestations of the fervour that van Gogh seems to generate. He is one of the handful of painters who cause great excitement every time exhibitions of his work are put on. One thinks also of Claude Monet, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonaroti and Pablo Picasso. These are artists that the public go mad for, so that when they are exhibited, there are huge queues trailing around the block.

The 1990 centenary celebrations of 'poor Vincent' showed how much he is exalted. There were films about him, discussions and conferences, TV documentaries, magazine articles, reviews, letters, and much merchandize was sold, to the great glee of the manufacturers: posters, tea towels, calendars, mugs, souvenirs of all kinds. What would the dishevelled, obsessive man who painted those small canvases in the years up to 1890 in Southern France make of the amazing fuss that now surrounds his work? What would van Gogh think of just one of his paintings being bought for 88 million dollars? It is a huge sum even in today's expensive world. You could build a hospital or two with the money. Imagine it Did Vincent know that when he painted those blue irises on that small, standard-size canvas, that it would one day be 'worth' millions of dollars?

I shall count myself very happy if I can manage to work enough to earn my living, for it worries me a lot when I think that I have done so many pictures and drawings without ever selling one.

Like the workers he depicted in numerous images, Vincent van Gogh himself worked very hard to improve his art. With a dogged determination van Gogh copied the Old Masters, as well as Japanese prints. His determined self-education and self-improvement paid off, resulting in more than 800 paintings in about 8 years. The years of van Gogh's art are relatively few - nearly all of the important works were made in the decade 1880-90. Hence his paintings are credited in art history books with the month and sometimes the day as well as the year of production. For most artists, 1889 would suffice. For van Gogh, the credit is October 1889. Producing 800 paintings in 8 years is an average of a hundred per year, or one every three and a half days. More likely, van Gogh would have worked on a number at the same time, or within a short space of time.

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) viewed wheat as a central metaphor of the cycle of life and the creative process. As such, it was a theme that he consistently explored throughout his career. This book examines the artist's personal and visual fascination with wheat, analyzing the significance that the motif--and by extension, the peasant at work in nature--played within the social and cultural framework of 19th-century France and in the works of other artists of the time. Focusing on his Sheaves of Wheat at the Dallas Museum of Art--one of thirteen canvases completed in the last month of his life--this beautiful book features illustrations of Van Gogh's works as well as personal correspondence and letters. Related images by such prominent contemporary artists as Emile Bernard, Jules Breton, Charles F. Daubigny, Paul Gauguin, Jean-Francois Millet, Claude Monet, and Camille Pissarro are also included. Together these works reveal the larger social and political trends of 19th-century France. Distributed for the Dallas Museum of Art Exhibition Schedule: Dallas Museum of Art (October 22, 2006 - January 7, 2007)

"Post-Impressionism to World War II" is an exciting anthology of the best art history writings of the Post-Impressionist period. Several key essays by critics including Benjamin, Greenberg and Burger knit together primary sources and classic, "canonical" criticism.
Collects the most important writings on art history from Post-Impressionism to the mid-20th century, covering both canonical and contemporary perspectives
Offers a chronicle of avant-garde practice during an especially creative, if volatile, period of history
Features several key essays by critics including Benjamin, Greenberg and Burger
Includes recent critical interventions from a range of methodological perspectives - both well-known and less familiar
Organizes material thematically, and features introductory essays to each of the five sections
Provides a valuable, stimulating resource for students and teachers alike and offers new ways to think about and teach this important period in art history.

During the 1870s and 1880s, a loose group of French artists, including Pissarro, Monet, and Renoir, adopted a style of painting and subject matter that challenged the art prompted by the Academie Francaise and the Salons where "official" assumptions about the meaning of painting prevailed. What has been called "the revolutionary nature of the Impressionist enterprise" emerged from political radicalism, belief in science and individualism, and a view of art true to modern life and to immediate visual perception. In all these respects, Impressionism initiated the radical tendencies of modern art.

Today the revolutionary aims of Impressionist artists are generally overlooked. Impressionist art has been marketed more successfully than any other style: the price of Impressionist paintings surpasses that of the Old Masters, exhibitions draw blockbuster crowds, and books and mass reproductions are ubiquitous.

In her perceptive new survey, Belinda Thomson challenges both sentimentalized and simplistic views of Impressionism. Drawing upon recently discovered documents -- critical reviews and letters between artists, writers, and dealers -- she illuminates the thinking and the personal lives of the artists themselves, examining the factors and experiences that allowed Impressionism to develop when it did. She investigates the family background of the Impressionists, the importance of the art market and collecting, and the influence of the critical reception to their exhibitions.

Discover how scenes of daily life and delicate dabs of color shocked the art world establishment. In this TASCHEN Basic Art introduction to Impressionism, we explore the artists, subjects, and techniques that first brought the easel out of the studio and shifted artistic attention from history, religion, or portraiture to the evanescent ebb and flow of modern life. As we tour the theaters, bars, and parks of Paris and beyond, we take in the movement's radical innovations in style and subject, from the principle of plein air painting to the rapid, broken brushwork that allowed the Impressionists to emphasize spontaneity, movement, and the changing qualities of light. We take a close look at their unusual new perspectives and their fresh palette of pure, unblended colors, including many vividly bright shades that brought a whole new level of chromatic intensity to the canvas. Along the way, we recognize Impressionism's established greats, such as Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, and Camille Pissarro, as well as many associated artists worthy of closer attention, including Marie Bracquemond, Medardo Rosso, and Fritz von Uhde. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art History series features: approximately 100 color illustrations with explanatory captions a detailed, illustrated introduction a selection of the most important works of the epoch, each presented on a two-page spread with a full-page image and accompanying interpretation, as well as a portrait and brief biography of the artist

Collectors played an essential yet misunderstood role in the success of Impressionism. Even though they were not immune to economic and social woes, they were often engaged in defending this artistic movement that they had helped come to life, establish itself or make known, each according to their times. It is this group of committed collectors that the present work seeks to examine. From assembling a collection to donating it to a museum, from supporting artists within the borders of France to publicising the movement internationally, from the first intimate private showings to the questions raised by the presentation of these works in museums, collectors were present at every stage of the development of Impressionism, from the dawn of the movement to the middle of the 20th century. This volume aims to re-examine and reassess the importance of these collectors in the political, social and economic contexts of their times through the contributions of 16 international specialists. Depeaux, De Nittis, the Palmers, O'Hara, Buhrle, Caillebotte, Fayet: whether they are the subjects of dedicated case studies or part of a broader discourse, the multiplicity of profiles of these collectors and the paths they followed will allow readers to gain a better understanding of their importance in the history of the Impressionist movement.

Michael Doran has gathered texts by contemporaries of Paul Cezanne (1839-1906)--including artists, critics, and writers--that illuminate the influential painter's philosophy of art especially in his late years. The book includes historically important essays by a dozen different authors, including Emile Bernard, Joaquim Gasquet, Maurice Denis, and Ambroise Vollard, along with selections from Cezanne's own letters. In addition to the material included in the original French edition of the book, which has also been published in German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese, this edition contains an introduction written especially for it by noted Cezanne scholar Richard Shiff. The book closes with Lawrence Gowing's magisterial essay, "The Logic of Organized Sensations," first published in 1977 and long out of print. Cezanne's work, and the thinking that lay behind it, have been of inestimable importance to the artists who followed him. This gathering of writings will be of enormous interest to artists, writers, art historians--indeed to all students of modern art.

Throughout his career, Henri Matisse used imagery as a means of engaging critically with poetry and prose by a diverse range of authors. Kathryn Brown offers a groundbreaking account of Matisse's position in the literary cross-currents of 20th-century France and explores ways in which reading influenced the artist's work in a range of media. This study argues that the livre d'artiste became the privileged means by which Matisse enfolded literature into his own idiom and demonstrated the centrality of his aesthetic to modernist debates about authorship and creativity. By tracing the compositional and interpretive choices that Matisse made as a painter, print maker, and reader in the field of book production, this study offers a new theoretical account of visual art's capacity to function as a form of literary criticism and extends debates about the gendering of 20th-century bibliophilia. Brown also demonstrates the importance of Matisse's self-placement in relation to the French literary canon in the charged political climate of the Second World War and its aftermath. Through a combination of archival resources, art history, and literary criticism, this study offers a new interpretation of Matisse's artist's books and will be of interest to art historians, literary scholars, and researchers in book history and modernism.