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P OST -I mPressIonIsm hasn’t anything to do with fence posts. The post part of the title of this chapter means after .It is Latin word. So the title might be After-Impressionism which means the newer kinds of painting that came after the Impressionistic paintings. You remember Monet’s work is Impressionism, where light is the most important person.
The father of Post-Impressionism was Paul Cézanne. He was a Frenchman, like Manet and Monet. At first he was an Impressionist himself, but he said he wanted to make Impressionism something solid and lasting like the art of the Old Masters. And after a while his work did become more solid, although none of his pictures became as well known as those of the Old Masters. Cézanne worked hard all his life at painting, but he never became popular as a painter until after his death. Luckily for him, he had money enough to live on without having to sell his paintings, for he found he couldn’t sell them — no one wanted to buy them.
Another Post-Impressionist who was younger than Cézanne had a very different kind of life. This other painter didn’t live quietly on a farm in southern France as Cézanne did, as you will soon see. His name was Vincent Van Gogh(pronounced Van Goch, the Goch rhyming with the Scotch word loch ). He was a Dutchman. He tried working in an art store for his living, but if he thought his customers wanted to buy poor pictures, he gave them such lectures that he didn’t get along well at all. So he tried being a schoolmaster for a few months. I don’t believe he could have been a very good teacher, because he had a violent temper. Then he decided to be a clergyman, a minister. This didn’t work, either, because he soon got tired of the college for ministers where he was studying. And so he set out as a missionary to the workers in the Belgian mines. He felt so sorry for these poor miners that he gave away all his money and nearly starved, himself. At this time he began to draw pictures, sketches of the people he wanted so much to help.
His brother sent him money to live on and got him to go to Paris to study art. Then Van Gogh went to live in a little town in southern France, and there he painted many pictures.
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These paintings are made up of squirming lines of paint instead of the dots of paint that the Impressionists used. A friend of his said, “He paints so fiercely that it is terrible to watch him.” His pictures look as if he had painted them with fierce intensity.
And now comes a sadder part of Van Gogh’s life. His mind began to give way. He began to go crazy. One day a friend of his, who was a waitress in a café where Van Gogh sometimes went, asked him for a present and just in fun she said to him,“Well, if you can’t give me anything else, you might give me one of your big ears.”
Just before Christmas the waitress received a package. She thought it was a Christmas present. But when she opened it,out fell — an ear! The waitress was horrified. Poor Van Gogh was found in bed, completely out of his mind. He had cut off his right ear with a razor.
Of course he had to be taken to an asylum, where he finally got well enough to paint some more pictures. But the attacks of brain trouble kept coming back and during one of them Van Gogh shot himself.
A third Post-Impressionist was named Paul Gauguin (Goganh). Gauguin was a Frenchman of a different kind from Cézanne, and he led a life almost as strange as Van Gogh’s.
Gauguin began a different life early. He ran away from home when still a boy, got on a ship and went to sea. He made several voyages as a sailor to different parts of the world. Then he came back to Paris and went into business.
Perhaps Gauguin would never have become a painter if he had not run away to sea. For one day when he was walking down the street he came to a shop window that had some paintings in it. These paintings had the brightness and color that Gauguin had seen in the faraway Pacific isles. They brought back to him memories of his voyages so clearly that he asked who the painters were. Thus he became acquainted with the Post-Impressionists who had painted these pictures.Gauguin began then to paint too. He became a friend of Van Gogh and even lived with that artist for a while before Van Gogh lost his reason. Later, Gauguin moved to another part of France.
But he could not forget the beautiful tropic islands of the Pacific he had seen on his voyages. One day he packed up again and sailed for the island of Tahiti. There in Tahiti the painter found the life he liked best. He lived like one of the native islanders instead of like a civilized white man. And there he painted his best pictures.
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These paintings are bright with the color of the tropics and show in their brightness the people of the islands in their play and rest and work. These South Sea pictures are the ones that made Gauguin a famous painter.