Claude Monet

Claude Monet (14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926) was the founder of French Impressionist painting and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement’s philosophy of expressing one’s own perceptions before nature. The term Impressionism comes from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise.

The defining feature of Monet’s work is his commitment to Impressionism and its core principles, such as a focus on texture, light and brushstrokes. Monet’s attention shifted from the subject – a boat, a landscape or a person – to the way color works on the canvas. His art seeks to capture what the eye sees and the dynamic changes of a landscape with perspective and light. This devotion to Impressionism began as a way of breaking free from the rigid constraints of the Paris Salon, but it endured as the signature style that defined his body of work.

Edgar Degas

“Yesterday I spent the whole day in the studio of a strange painter called Edgar Degas,” the Parisian man of letters Edmond de Goncourt wrote in his diary in 1874. “Of all the subjects in modern life, he has chosen laundresses and ballet dancers. . . it is a world of pink and white. . . the most delightful pretext for using pale, soft tints.”

Edgar Degas, then 39, would go on painting ballerinas for the rest of his career. “People call me the painter of dancing girls,” Degas later told a Paris art dealer. “It has never occurred to them that my chief interest in dancers lies in rendering movement and painting pretty clothes.”

Degas wanted to change the image people had of him, for his words express a love of the grace of drawing and the charm of color. As a student, Edgar Degas dreamed of drawing like Raphael and Michelangelo, and he later revived the French pastel tradition that had flourished with the 18th-century master Chardin. But like his contemporaries Manet, Cézanne and the Impressionists, he lived in the age of photography and electricity, and he turned to aspects of modern life – slums, brothels and horse races. Bathing nudes became a favorite subject, and he once compared his more modern studies with Rembrandt’s with mocking wit. “He was lucky, that Rembrandt!” he said. “He painted Susanna in the bath; I paint women in the tub.”

Paul Gauguin

Paul Gauguin’s style changed over his years of work, but many of his major works share the following traits:

Bold brushstrokes
Paul Gauguin used thick, expressive brushstrokes. He often added wax to his paints to make them smoother.

Expressive use of color
In his Synthetist period, Gauguin often painted vivid areas of color surrounded by thick, dark outlines. His color tones became more subdued later in life.

Unprimed hessian canvas
During his years in Tahiti, Gauguin painted mostly on unprimed hessian or on sacking. The coarse material let the weave of the fabric show through the paint. Gauguin probably chose it because he could not afford more expensive canvas, but he found that it gave his paintings a texture that heightened the aesthetic he was after.

Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne’s modern style and technique were avant-garde and were therefore misunderstood for many years. Even other famous painters of his day, the Impressionists, scorned Cézanne’s progressive style. After the first Impressionist exhibition, many of them asked that he be barred from exhibiting with them at later shows, because Cézanne’s compositions were too controversial.

Cézanne worked with thickly applied layers of paint and undefined forms, trying to simplify everything into shapes that could be broken down. Although he was close to the Impressionist Camille Pissarro and was influenced by his plein-air painting, Cézanne was not an Impressionist. He was a thoroughly modern artist who fitted no category of painting style. His style paved the way for Fauvism and Cubism.