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The impressionists Monet, Seasley, and Vissaro were in love with natural light.

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They were more interested in what light did to colors and shapes than in objects themselves.

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The woman seems no more important in this picture than the boat or the reflections in the water.

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You would never know from this painting that Monet was desperately poor, begging money from his friends for paint and canvas.

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He recorded what he saw, not what he might have been feeling.

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Guy de Maupassant said,

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Last year I often followed Claude Monet in his search of impressions.

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He was no longer a painter in truth, but a hunter.

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He proceeded, followed by children who carried his canvases, five or six canvases representing the same subject at different times of the day and with different effects.

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He took them up and put them aside in turn, following the changes in the sky.

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And the painter before his subject lay in wait for the sun and shadows, capturing in a few brush strokes the ray that fell or the cloud that passed.

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The impressionists were criticized in their own day for painting everyday subject matter in an unfinished technique.

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The carriages in this painting by Vissaro are only a collection of brush strokes until we see the whole composition.

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Stazan looked for the structure beneath appearance, building blocks of the visual world.

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The impressionists were content with nature the way it was.

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Stazan wanted to recreate it.

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Stazan was a proud and lonely man.

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He lived most of his life in Aix, a small town in the south of France.

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He lived modestly and never tired of the countryside around his studio.

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He painted his landscapes out of doors, his portraits and still lifes in this room.

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Duncan Phillips, the collector, wrote,

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Stazan had pondered every touch, no wasted motions, no hastily improvised devices.

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His composition was built from top to bottom and from end to end.

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And when it was finished, the relations of one thing to another seemed inevitable, as if determined from the beginning of the world.

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Stazan's cosmos within a frame is so compact and complete that there is nothing more to say.

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Vissaro paints people hanging in the blinding light of midday,

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where the edges of things become blurred.

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The generation that followed, the expressionists Van Gogh and Gauguin, lacked not only public support but couldn't get along with each other.

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These men lived short, hard lives and suffered both psychologically and physically.

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Van Gogh's paintings expressed his own state of mind more than the way the world looked.

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Even in his portraits, which were records of the people he liked, such as this painting of Dr. Ray, who treated Van Gogh at Arles,

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there is a tortured quality in the repressed, twisting patterns of the wallpaper.

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In this landscape, yellow pigment becomes the equivalent of sunshine.

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The surfaces of Van Gogh's pictures are thick with paint, often applied with a loaded palette knife.

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The paint takes on a life of its own, separate from the objects it describes.

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The torment of Van Gogh's last years is reflected in this painting, in its slashing brushstrokes and acid color.

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In my own work, he wrote to his brother Theo, I am risking my life, and half my reason has been lost in it.

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Gauguin said scornfully of the Impressionists, they look for what is near the eye and not at the mysterious centers of thought.

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Gauguin saw the peasant women of Arles as mysterious and exotic, more like witches than housewives.

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With Gauguin, you can see the texture of the linen canvas beneath the paint.

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He paints much more thinly than Van Gogh in veils of color rather than thick strokes.

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Having spent his childhood in Peru, Gauguin carried the art of painting in his own hands.

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He was not aware of the idea of a primitive world in his mind.

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In 1891, Gauguin sold enough paintings in Paris to escape France and look for his new Eden in Tahiti.

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What is he? asked August Strindberg, the 19th century dramatist.

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He is Gauguin, the savage who hates an encumbering civilization, a bit of the titan who, jealous of the creator, in his spare moments makes his own little creation.

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The child who takes apart his toys to make others from them.

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He who swears and flaunts, preferring to see the sky red rather than blue with the crowd.

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Some artists, like Rousseau, stayed in Paris but inhabited a strange world of their own.

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Europe was changing rapidly. Enormous technological advances were taking place.

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Trains, airplanes, automobiles, dirigibles, suggesting the breaking up of traditional ideas of time and space.

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Rousseau included some of these real objects from the modern world in his fairy tale settings.

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Rousseau treated both the jungles he never visited and modern technology which was all around him as equally strange phenomena.

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There are no airplanes in Picasso or Braque, but there are reflections of the breaking up and reforming of the world around them.

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Since the camera could reproduce the real world, painters didn't have to anymore.

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Together, Picasso and Braque invented cubism, which combined geometric simplification and faceted shapes.

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Said Braque, we were like two mountaineers roped together.

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If it weren't for the face, the still life on the table and the hands, this painting of Picasso's dealer, Conveiler, would be totally abstract.

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The Impressionists recorded the world they saw. The Expressionists Van Gogh and Gauguin made their emotions visible.

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And of the Cubist Picasso, the poet Apollinaire said, since anatomy no longer existed in art,

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Picasso had to reinvent it and carry out his own assassinations with the practiced and methodical hand of a great surgeon.

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The Impressionists