by G. Fernández - theartwolf.com
No artistic period has been as commented or discussed as the Impressionism. But, as an image is worth a thousand words, theartwolf.com has decided to showcase 50 paintings to resume the very best of this fascinating Art movement

G. Fernández - theartwolf.com
When talking about Impressionism, an error is often committed when assigning to this movement a series of painters who nothing or almost nothing had in common with it -Rousseau, Redon-, others who, despite feeling an early attraction to the new movement, soon separated from it -Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne- and others who, though being generally considered as representative members of this movement, cannot be called "pure impressionists". In this last group, we have to differentiate between those who develop his style before the impressionist dawn - Edouard Manet- and those whose interests led them to search even beyond the Impressionism -Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir-. If we want to look for the "pure", essential impressionist painters, those who developed their impressionist style without interferences from any other style, the list -with the risk of use a dangerously simplistic purism- would be reduced to only three names: Claude Monet -the real Michelangelo of the impressionist era-, Camille Pissarro -the great chronicler of the rural life- and Alfred Sisley. Nevertheless, in this list we will include not only the "pure" Impressionist painters, but also those related to the so-called Post-Impressionism. We all accept that Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin... are not truly Impressionist painters, but their relation with that Art movement is more than evident

The paintings are listed following the alphabethical order of the name of their author. Click on a image to see the high-resolution version.

FRÉDERIC BAZILLE: "The artist's studio - Bazille's Studio; 9 rue de la Condamine" - 1870 - oil on canvas, 98 - 128.5 cm. - Paris, Musée d'Orsay - view high resolution image

Friend of Monet, Sisley and Manet, and born in a wealthy family, Bazille is the tragic figure of the Impressionism, dead at the Franco-Prussian War when he was only 28 years old. "The artist's studio" is widely considered as his masterpiece, in which we can find some important names in the Impressionist movement, painters like Monet, Renoir and Manet; and friends like Emile Zola or Edmond Maître

EUGÈNE BOUDIN: "Dock at Deauville" - 1869 - oil on canvas, 23 - 32 cm. - Paris, Musée d'Orsay - view high resolution image

Boudin was one of the first French landscape painters to paint outdoors, and is widely recognized as one of the most important influences to the first Impressionist painters. When he moved to Saint-Siméon in 1862, some young painters began to imitate his brushstroke, starting the "Saint-Siméon School", considered nowadays one of the origins of the Impressionism

GUSTAVE CAILLEBOTTE: "Les raboteurs (The floor scrapers)", 1876 - oil on canvas, 102 - 146.5 cm. - Paris, Musée d'Orsay - view high resolution image

Caillebotte reunites an almost photographic focus with a composition marked by a stranger and vertiginous perspective, a constant characteristic in his first works. This work exemplifies as no other the stupor that Caillebotte could cause between the assistants to the firsts impressionist exhibitions. Zola, who really appreciated Caillebotte, described it like "an antiartistic, clean painting, frost and bourgeois, by force of exactitude."

GUSTAVE CAILLEBOTTE: "Paris Street, rainy day" 1877 - oil on canvas, 212.2 - 276.2 cm. - Paris, Musée d'Orsay - view high resolution image

This is Caillebotte's most famous and ambitious painting, exhibited at the Third Impressionist Exhibition at la Rue Le Peletier, where it was not well accepted by the critic. L'Évenement wrote about this painting that "the drawing is of good quality, but Caillebotte has forgotten to include the rain". Anyways, this is one of the best representations of the 19th century Paris ever painted

This strange landscape is arguably Cézanne's first masterpiece, and was one of the 3 works exhibited by the artist at the Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1874, where it was purchased by Count Armand Doria. While "The Hanged Man's House" can still be considered a Impressionist painting, the work is finished in Cézanne's early and very personal style, working the surface of the canvas with a palette knife.

Cézanne is arguably the greatest master the Still Life Painting of any era, and this shining painting constitutes one of his most ambitious compositions. Where is this basket? Placed in a very unstable position in the upper right corner of the table, or, in a complex game of perspective, is on the ground along with the wood piece partially depicted at the right of the painting? Here Cézanne has created a double perspective to paint a sensational work in which the cubism begins to appear

This is the smallest of the three versions of this subject in which we see two card players, but is quite probable that this was also the last of them, and the most elaborated. While the composition is really simple (two players facing each other, with a black bottle that silently divides the canvas in two parts) the fabulous psychological intensity in the faces of the players make of this small canvas one of the masterpieces of the post-impressionist painting.

This is one of the most developed versions of the numerous views that Paul Cézanne painted of the Mount Sainte-Victoire in the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence. We can say about this work that this is “cubist before the cubism”: the triangular mountain and the prairie elements -geographic or edificatory- acquire volume thanks not to the perspective, but to the superposition of chromatic planes.

This is the largest canvas Cézanne ever painted, and the fabulous culmination of the "Bathers" series. The painting is reminiscent of some of Titian's finest paintings, such as the "Bacchanal of the Andrians", while the almost sculptorical representation of the human body link this canvas with some of Michelangelo's frescoes at the Vatican. Two other "finished" Bathers paintings exist, one in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the other in the National Gallery, London

EDGAR DEGAS: “L'absinthe (absinthe drinkers)", 1876 - oil on canvas, 92-68 cm. - Musée d’Orsay, Paris - view high resolution image

"What a slut!", George Moore commented about the woman in this painting, adding that "the tale is not a pleasant one, but it is a lesson", and that "no one has said so much in so little space, and no one has expressed in such a simple way (...) thanks to the science of the drawing, invisible but omnipresent, almost impersonal". The sad and melancholic "Absinthe drinkers" appears to have influenced works of later artists, such as Picasso's interiors from the Blue Period, or Edward Hopper's urban scenes.

PAUL GAUGUIN - "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?", 1897 - oil on canvas, 139- 375 cm. - Boston, Museum of Fine Arts - view high resolution image

This work is not only the most colossal canvas that Gauguin painted in his entire life, but also the work that expound the entire philosophical and pictorial doctrine of the artist. Structuring the canvas in an inverted chronological order, Gauguin seems to point the primitive, the innocent, as the only one way to the artist

CHILDE HASSAM: "The Avenue in the rain" - 1917. Oil on canvas - White House Museum - view high resolution image

Childe Hassam (1859-1935) was a key figure in the American Impressionism, though his only contact with a French Impressionist artist was when he took over Pierre Auguste Renoir’s former studio and found some of the painter’s oil sketches left behind. His most famous works are the “Flag” paintings, completed during World War I, and the stunning "The Avenue in the rain" is his most impressionistic painting in the series

KONSTANTIN KOROVIN: “Spring” - 1917 - oil on canvas, - The Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia - view high resolution image

"Paris was a shock for me … Impressionists… in them I found everything for what I was scolded back at home, in Moscow". Korovin (1861-1939) was, along with his friend Valentin Serov, the main figure of the Russian Impressionist painters. Highly influenced by the French Impressionists, he developed, however, a very personal style that mixes the typical elements of the French Impressionism with the rich colors of the Russian Art of his era

WINSLOW HOMER: “Summer night” - 1890 - oil on canvas, 76.7- 102 cm. - Paris, Musée d' Orsay - view high resolution image

When talking about Impressionism, an error is often committed when considering it an exclusively French movement, when some North American painters deserve to appear next to Monet, Degas, Pisarro… Of all of them, the most important is with no doubt Winslow Homer, and "summer night" is one of his undisputed masterpieces. The spontaneity with which the artist represents the charm and magic of a summer night makes of this painting one of the masterworks of the North American painting

EDOUARD MANET: "Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe (Luncheon on the grass)", 1862/63 - Paris, Musée d'Orsay - view high resolution image

Some experts have called this work "the origin of the Impressionim", as it is clearly not a realist painting. Manet shocked the Art world when he exhibited the work at the Salon des Refusés in 1863. Émile Zola wrote about this monumental canvas: "It is, in short, this vast ensemble, full of atmosphere, this corner of nature rendered with a simplicity so just, all of this admirable page in which an artist has placed all the particular and rare elements which are in him"

EDOUARD MANET: "Olympia", 1863 - oil on canvas, 130.5 - 190 cm. - Paris, Musée d'Orsay - view high resolution image

We can say that this is one of the most controversial paintings in the Art history, and it was not well received by the critics when it was first exhibited in 1865. "Who is that yellow odalisque?", asked Jules Claretie from L'Artiste, while Antonin Proust declared that "If the canvas of the Olympia was not destroyed, it is only because of the precautions that were taken by the administration". The painting was, however, admired by Émile Zola

EDOUARD MANET: "Bar at the Folies Bergere", 1882 - London, Courtald Institute Galleries - view high resolution image

Manet's paintings of cafe scenes are observations of social life in nineteenth century Paris, and this stunning and complex canvas is one of his most famous masterpieces. Note that the woman in the reflection should appear directly behind the image of the woman who is facing us. Is this a terrible fault by Manet, or is the artist expressing a double reality in this famous work?

CLAUDE MONET – "Terrace at Sainte Adresse" (1867) - New York, Metropolitan - view high resolution image

"Terrace at Sainte Adresse" is arguably Monet's first masterpiece, and still one of the most famous paintings from the early Impressionism. The bourgeois scene is developed under a strong "plein air" light. The clear limits between land, sea and sky divide and hierarchies the composition, vertically organized by the two flags fluttered by the ocean breeze.

CLAUDE MONET – "Impression, sunrise" (1873) - Paris, Musée Marmottan - view high resolution image

“Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape ", said of this canvas Louis Leroy, an Art critic, when the painted was exhibited at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1877. And this is just an example of how most of the critics of the time reacted to this painting, and by extension, to the whole Impressionist movement (a movement that owes its name to this painting) It’s not surprising, then, that nobody offered 1,000 francs, the asking price for this painting.

CLAUDE MONET – “Le gare Saint Lazare (Saint Lazare Station)”, 1877 – oil on canvas, 75-100 cm. - Paris, Musée d'Orsay - view high resolution image

"It's a pictorical symphony", observed the magazine L'homme libre when this painting was exhibited at the Third Impressionist Exhibition in 1877, one of the few positive critics to a painting in that show. "Monet likes this station, and he has already depicted it with less success. This time is really wonderful. He has painted not only the movement, the colour and the activity, but also the noise. It's unforgettable"

CLAUDE MONET – “Meules (Haystacks, white frost)” - 1891 - oil on canvas - Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington - view high resolution image

Between 1890 and 1891, Monet created a series of 15 canvases representing a group of haystacks in the outskirts of Giverny. Wassily Kandinsky had the opportunity of seeing one of these haystacks in an exhibition in Moscow in 1895, and was impressed to the point of suggesting it as the first abstract painting of the Art history: "And suddenly, for the first time, I saw a picture. I read in the catalogue that was a haystack, but I could not recognize it (.) I realized that there the object of the picture was missed (.) What I had perfectly present was the unsuspected -and until then hidden- power of the palette"

CLAUDE MONET – “Poplars au bord de l'Epte, view from the marshes” - 1891 – oil on canvas, 88- 93 cm. - USA, private collection - view high resolution image

Claude Monet is the Impressionist painter par excellence. His greatest lyrical achievement is reached in this strangely irresistible picture. The composition so beautifully resembles the beauty of a Japanese haiku, asymmetric and touching, while the poplars leaves sing in red, purple, and ending in a blue that would make Yves Klein green with envy. It's Monet in his full bloom, the artist who wanted “to paint as the bird sings”.

CLAUDE MONET – “The Portal of Rouen Cathedral (soleil), harmony in blue and gold" - oil on canvas, 101 - 65 cm. - 1893. Paris, Musée d'Orsay - view high resolution image

"The climax of Impressionism". That's how the series of views of Rouen Cathedral painted by Monet between 1892 and 1894 has been best described. The series - consisting of 31 canvases showing the facade of the Gothic Rouen Cathedral under different conditions of light and climate- caused an immediate admiration among the critics of his time, and was praised by many later masters, from Wassily Kandinsky to Roy Lichtenstein. The election of the palette reflects the different shades in which the daily light was dyeing the Cathedral facade: form the smooth blues of the morningto the vivid ochre and golden shades in the soleil pictures, as this one

CLAUDE MONET – “Nympheas (water lilies)" - oil on canvas, 219-602 cm. - 1920-1926 - Paris, Musée de l'Orangerie- view high resolution image

Monet's series of the "Nympheas" have been described as "The Sixtine Chapel of the Impressionism".

PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR: "Moulin de la Galette", 1876 - oil on canvas, 131-175 cm. - Paris, Musée d'Orsay - view high resolution image

This painting has been described as "the most beautiful painting of the 19th century". The scene depicted one of the numerous dances celebrated in the Moulin de la Galette , one of the most frequented clubs of Montmartre and a paradise for bohemians and artists like Toulouse-Lautrec, van Gogh or Renoir himself. One of the supreme masterworks from the early Impressionism

PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR: "Le déjeuner des canotiers (Luncheon of the boating party)", 1880-81 - oil on canvas, 129.5 × 172.7 cm - Washington, Phillips Collection - view high resolution image

The light is the main protagonist of this famous painting, in wich Renoir has depicted a group of his friends relaxing on a balcony along the Seine river (among them, another famous Impressionist painter, Gustave Caillebotte, who can be seen in the lower right of the canvas).

PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR: "The Umbrellas", 1881-86 - oil on canvas, 180 - 114 cm. - London, National Gallery - view high resolution image

"About 1883, a rupture occurred in my work. I had come to the end of Impressionism, reaching the conclusion that I didn't know how to paint or draw. In one word, I was at a dead end". "The Umbrellas" is a complex work in which we can find Renoir in two different periods of his career. While the precise drawing of the girl on the left can be easily ascribed to his Impressionist period, some figures on the right should be identificated with his the "dry" or "Ingres" period, started in 1883

THEODORE ROBINSON: "La débâcle", 1892 - oil on canvas - Scripps College, Claremont, California - view high resolution image

Theodore Robinson (1852-1896) is without question one of the key figures in the American Impressionism. A close friend of Claude Monet, he created some of his best works while living in Giverny, just few months before returning to America. "La dèbâcle" is a typical work by Robinson, executed "au plen air", and depicting a young woman in a leisure activity

"Sunday afternoon on the island of La Grande Jatte" is his Seurat's masterpiece (he spent more than two years painting this huge canvas, creating more than 50 preliminary sketches and drawings), the best example of the "pointillism" and a milestone of the late 19th century Painting.

ALFRED SISLEY: "Chemin de la Machine, Louveciennes", 1873 - Paris, Musée d'Orsay - oil on canvas - view high resolution image

If we want to look for the "pure", essential impressionist painters, the list would be reduced to only three names: Claude Monet -the real Michelangelo of the impressionist era-, Camille Pissarro -the great chronicler of the rural life- and Alfred Sisley. Sisley's paintings of the small town of Louveciennes are arguably his greatest achievements, and this simple but powerful canvas is perhaps the best of all them

ALFRED SISLEY: "L'inondation à Port-Marly", 1876 - Paris, Musée d'Orsay - oil on canvas - view high resolution image

Sisley painted several canvases depicting these floods in Port-Marly, but the two more outstanding examples are those that show the river's waters around a wine shop in the Rue of Paris. We can suggest a link between these paintings and the turbulent biography of their creator: it's possible that Sisley saw the floods in the quiet town of Port-Marly as a reflection of its own life, troubled, overflowed , after events as unforeseeable and inevitable as the floods of the Seine River

HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC: "At the Moulin Rouge", 1890 - oil on canvas, 115-150 cm. - Paris, Musée d'Orsay - view high resolution image

Van Gogh's "sunflowers" are not only one of the artist's favorite subjects (seven canvases of vases with sunflowers, plus three earlier works depicting the sunflowers alone), but also one of the most famous and popular series of paintings in the world. "The sunflower is mine in a way", said van Gogh to his brother Theo. The work illustrated here is one of the brightest of all the series, with a fabulous spectrum of yellow pigments. One of these sunflowers canvases smashed the auction record for a painting when it was sold to a Japanese investor for almost $40 million in March of 1987. Recent rumors have suggest that that work could not be a genuine van Gogh, but a copy by Emile Schuffenecker

VINCENT VAN GOGH: “La chambre de Van Gogh à Arles (Van Gogh's room at Arles)”, 1889 - oil on canvas, 73-92 cm. - Chicago, Art Institute - view high resolution image

Van Gogh painted his room in Arles in October 1888 (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum Van Gogh), and one year later he painted two more versions while living in Saint-Rémy, being the work illustrated here the most ellaborated of the three. "This time is simply my bedroom" -commented Van Gogh in a letter - "and the only really important thing is the colour; the simplicity gives the objects more style"

One of van Gogh's most brilliant and famous works, commonly associate to his increasing madness, and that actually is the result of the artist's interest for the astronomical investigations. We can observe real and fantastic elements. While a study made by the Griffith Park Observatory demonstrated that van Gogh represented the Moon, Venus, and several stars in the exact position in which they were placed that cleared night; the showy spiral that occupies great part of the work is a clearly fantastic element