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Famous paintings of Vincent van Gogh,
impressionist Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro,
Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Paul Cézanne, Degas and
Manet. Famous Romantic artist: J.M.W.Turner, John
Constable, Eugene Delacroix.
Famous Post impressionist artist Paul Gauguin and
Silhouettist John Miers & others |
Click a thumb to explore a famous painting
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Claude Monet |
Auguste
Renoir |
Camille Pissarro |
Alfred
Sisley |
Famous Impressionist paintings
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J.M.W.Turner, The Fighting Temeraire |
Claude
Loraine |
John
Constable, The Haywain |
Eugene
Delacroix |
Famous
Romantic painting
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Paul
Cézanne |
Paul
Gauguin |
Vincent
van Gogh |
Manet,
Olympia |
Famous
Post impressionist
paintings
and
Silhouettist
Biography of famous Artist
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French
Impressionist painting is currently the most popular
of all European bodies of art. Part of the romance of
Impressionism comes from the stories of uphill
struggles against the famous Academic painters and
critics who dominated 19th-century French art, only to
be swept into obscurity by the famous artists they had
scorned. However, a reaction was bound to set in, and
during the final decades of the 20th century, a number
of politically oriented critics began to argue that
far from being radicals, the Impressionists appealed
to bourgeois tastes partly because their technique was
easy to digest and their subject matter inoffensive.
They point out that the industrialization of Europe is
rarely reflected in their works, and that they paid
little or no attention to the sufferings of the urban
poor. Many of them were acutely conscious of their
popularity, and eager to cash in on it.
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In the early years of
Impressionism, artists struggled to find markets for
their work, and many lived hand-to-mouth.
Impressionism changed when artists quarreled with one
another, withdrew from exhibitions, or, like Monet and
Renoir, reverted to a more Academic style they hoped
would lure buyers. Cézanne also turned away from
Impressionism, disappointed that he hadn’t been able
“to make of Impressionism something solid and durable
like the art of the museums.”
However, one visionary
Paris art dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, recognized the
greatness of Impressionism as early as 1870. “A true
picture dealer should also be an enlightened patron;
he should, if necessary, sacrifice his immediate
interest to his artistic convictions,” Durand-Ruel
wrote. He regularly bought, sold, and promoted
Impressionist paintings during the early years.
Finally, in the 1880s and ‘90s, the world the
Impressionists painted began to embrace them. American
collectors were largely responsible for this reversal
of fortune, buying enough paintings to keep several
artists at work. The Musée de Luxembourg in Paris
mounted the first museum exhibition of Impressionist
art in 1897, and an exhibition at the 1900 World
Exposition sealed the artists’ reputations. Paintings
sold twenty-five years earlier for a mere fifty
francs, noted Durand-Ruel, now fetched 50,000 francs.
What caused the public’s
change of heart? “Ironically,” writes art historian
Ann Dumas, “the Impressionists” former status as
renegades enhanced their appeal to the connoisseurship
and speculative skills of the bourgeois
collector...(it was) a new art for a new class that
wanted images of the world they inhabited.”
Perhaps more crucial to
its present-day popularity is the broadly appealing
color, spontaneity, and freshness of Impressionist
art. Before the first exhibition in 1874, the art
critic Armand Silvestre observed of these paintings,
“A blond light pervades them, and everything is
gaiety, clarity, spring festivals, golden evenings or
apple trees in blossom. They are windows opening on
the joyous countryside, on rivers full of pleasure
boats stretching into the distance, on a sky which
shines with light mists, on the outdoor life,
panoramic and charming.”
Impressionism: Paintings Collected by European Museums
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