What Are the Best-known Post-Impressionist Paintings?

Post-impressionism was a diverse and eclectic art movement made up of artists toying with the loose brushstrokes and optical effects of Impressionism, yet also branching out in their own stylistic ways. Each artist associated with the movement ventured out into their own unchartered terrain, pushing forth various new ways of thinking about and making art for the modern age. From Vincent van Gogh’s expressionistic painting The Starry Night to Paul Cezanne’s epic Mont Saint-Victoire series, these are the remarkable masterpieces that emerged during this momentous period in art history, and came to define the Post-impressionist era. 

Of all the subjects the Post-impressionist artist Paul Cezanne painted throughout his long and prolific career as an artist, Mont Sainte-Victoire was by far the most enduring. He made 36 oil paintings and 45 watercolors depicting the Provencal mountain’s distinctive craggy surface in all kinds of weather, from one season to the next, remaining fascinated by it up until the last year of his life. Today Cezanne’s Mont Saint-Victoire paintings are scattered across museum collections around the world, each one depicting the mountain in an entirely new way.

What made these paintings so radical was the way Cezanne explored how to capture the mountain’s perceived structure and form through energized, faceted brushstrokes, which became increasingly abstracted and expressive over time.

Sometimes Cezanne would even leave passages of the raw canvas exposed, exploring a deliberately unfinished aesthetic, thus paving the way for the expressive, experimental practices of the early 20th century and beyond. 

Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte, 1884

French painter Georges Seurat’s most monumental artwork was his vastly scaled painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, in which he was able to consolidate his experimental, Pointillist vision. The painting was based on the people Seurat observed enjoying their leisure time on a Sunday afternoon in a leafy suburb of Paris, sunbathing quietly in the blazing sunshine or snoozing in the shade. Seurat painted the large canvas in his studio based on a series of small studies, each of which allowed him to study the form, volume and light of the scene.

In the final image, Seurat painted both people and the surrounding landscape with scattered showers of tiny dots, juxtaposing complimentary colors side-by-side which blend in the eye when seen from a distance. The end result is a masterful reflection on the ways form, volume and space are informed by the interplay of color, and it has become one of the most celebrated paintings in the entire history of art. 

One of the most famous and admired paintings of all time, Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night is another iconic masterpiece of the Post-impressionist era. He made this remarkable painting while staying in the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole near Saint-Remy-de-Provence in 1889, reimagining the star-filled night sky as a swirling mass of energized color and light. In the foreground, a wavering cypress tree flickers in the night-time breeze, forming a flame-like silhouette against the dazzling moonlight.

Van Gogh was fascinated by the threshold between the real world and imaginative realms throughout his career, and though he never veered into fictional content, his expressive, emotion-laden take on observed scenes was entirely original. The painting captures Van Gogh’s fascination with the imaginative possibilities of a star-filled sky, as he wrote, “Looking at the stars always makes me dream. Why, I ask myself, shouldn’t the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? Just as we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star.”

Paul Gauguin’s Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, 1897-8

By the time French artist Paul Gauguin made this monumental artwork, he had already left behind his life in Paris for the tropical climate of Tahiti. Painted onto heavy duty sackcloth, this vast, panoramic scene depicts humans and animals enmeshed in a complex narrative sequence which meditates on the true meaning of life, asking questions without giving away any answers. In the distance, Gauguin paints the volcanic mountains and sea of Tahiti, exploring how the lush environment can become a dream-like backdrop for symbolic, allegorical stories to play out.

This was the largest painting Gauguin would ever paint, and it demonstrates his commitment to exploring symbolic, emotive subject matter, while still having one foot tentatively balanced in the camp of observed realism.