Post-Impressionism

Whilst Impressionism was a French movement considered a rebellion against neo-classicism and romanticism, post-impressionism was its own revolt at impressionism. Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Seurat, all of whom apart from Van Gogh were French like the impressionists, and exhibited works together in a similar style, though the post-impressionists had a more individualistic painting style, and preferred to chase their own ideas and work individually in private studios.

The post-impressionist movement borrowed the thick paint, bright colours and playful brushstrokes to record ordinary subject matter and still life, however the artists differed in terms of the use of light, forming pointillism and divisionism as subdivisions of the movement.

Pointillism was the use of small dots in pure colour, similar to how a modern printer works, when the viewer moves further from the image, the dots combine to form an image, thus pointillism, pioneered by the artists Seurat and Signac, was the focus on scientific optical theories of the time; allowing the paint amalgamated to make produce the image in the viewer's eye.

Divisionism worked in a similar way and developed alongside pointillism, where rather than dots, the artists used strokes of mixed pigments; particularly primary colours.