What the label is, and isn’t
None of these men called themselves Post-Impressionists. Four of them were dead before the word existed. The shape of “five anchors” is Roger Fry’s curatorial argument from 1910 (Chapter 8), not the shape of the field in 1886.
Painting did not stop and reorganize itself when Seurat hung La Grande Jatte. Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) kept working, increasingly under the influence of the Japanese prints that Lautrec and the Nabis would also seize on. Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) painted through the early Post-Impressionist decade and died in 1895. Paul Signac, Émile Bernard, Bonnard, Vuillard — the field around the five anchors is most of the next chapters’ true subject, and we’ll meet them in Chapter 7. The five are the figures Fry put on the wall; they are not the only figures who were painting.
A table of contents, in faces
Treat this chapter as the table of contents. Each anchor gets a longer chapter of his own; these are the tags.
Paul Cézanne (1839–1906; Aix-en-Provence). The architect. He wanted to take the Impressionist palette and use it to rebuild the picture out of solid planes — geometry that lasts. (Chapter 3.)
Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890; Dutch, working in France). The colorist of feeling. Color was not optics; color was what yellow did to the man standing in the wheatfield. A ten-year career, about 900 canvases, one painting sold for real money. (Chapter 4.)
Paul Gauguin (1848–1903; ex-stockbroker, dies in the Marquesas). The synthesist. Flat areas of saturated color, dark contour lines, the picture’s meaning on the surface — and a life whose colonial frame the 21st century cannot skim past. (Chapter 5.)
Georges Seurat (1859–1891; Paris). The scientist. He took Chevreul’s and Rood’s color theory and built Divisionism — what outsiders called Pointillism — small separate dots of pure pigment, optically combining in the eye. Dead at 31. (Chapter 6.)
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901; Albi-born, Montmartre by adoption). The chronicler. He painted the cabaret at midnight, made the modern poster a fine-art medium, and drank himself to death at 36. (Chapter 6.)
These five lived in different rooms — Aix, Auvers, Pont-Aven and then Tahiti, Paris, Montmartre — and sometimes hated each other (Gauguin and Van Gogh in Arles, December 1888, will turn out badly). They got grouped because, in 1910, an English critic named Roger Fry needed a name for a roomful of pictures he had borrowed for a London gallery. By 1910, Cézanne had been dead four years, Van Gogh twenty, Gauguin seven, Seurat nineteen, Lautrec nine. Not one of the five was alive to argue with him. He called them, in want of a better word, Post-Impressionists. Chapter 8 is the story of how that room came together.