Impressionism: Visual Encyclopaedia of Art - Softcover

The Visual Encyclopaedia series provide up to 300 beautiful photographic and artwork images, illustrating subjects of perennial cultural interest. Images are accompanied by narrative providing background, brief criticism, and details on relevant museums, brief biographies and time lines.  Images, The book are flexi bound with flaps with 340 pages

Amidst the innovatory developments of the second half of the 19th century, a new trend in painting made its way to the fore in France. From 1874 onvvards, it came to be called Impressionism. Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir, Edouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot were the leading lights of this movement, vvhich was to spread throughout Europe and the United States. Their aim: to give art a modern dimension, free from the contents and conventions dictated by academic tradition. This outlook gave rise to the development of painting outdoors - en plein air- in vvhich brushstrokes evoked a vibrant reality created by the ever-changing effects of light. Landscape became the subject matter par excellence for Impressionists, as did the city of Paris, vvhere they depicted cafe life, the opera, and the daily life of the bourgeoisie and ordinary people.Impressionist painters took part in various exhibitions, such as the memorable shovvs held by Nadarand Durand-Ruel betvveen 1874 and 1886. İn these decisive years, reactions to Impressionism led to the emergence of new and important trends, including Pointillism and Post-lmpressionism. Pointillism was developed in France by such masters as Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, vvhose research, featuring pseudoscientific notions, involved painting tiny dots of püre colour so arranged as to compose shapes and volumes no longer subject to the fleeting nature of momentary impressions.Post-lmpressionism involved a vvide-ranging array of trends, including the ground-breaking vvork of men like Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Vincent van Gogh. İt vvas their vvork, with its broad colour fields and dense, expressive brushstrokes, that cleared the way for the historic avant-garde movements of the 20th century.