Impressionist Portraiture
Impressionism and Post-Impressionism Portrait Art in Nineteenth Century France.
Visual Arts Guide

Impressionist & Post-Impressionist Portraits

Impressionism, the dazzling new school of art that burst upon Paris and the world in the early 1870s, specialized predominantly in landscape and genre painting, rather than portrait art. Even so, the movement did produce a wealth of figure drawing (eg. by Edgar Degas, in pastels, crayon and chalks) and figure painting as well as a number of famous portraits.

Impressionist Portraitists

The great modernist Edouard Manet, whose style encompassed Neo-Classicism and Realism as well as Impressionism, produced A Bar at the Folies-Bergere (1882), a reinterpretation of Velazquez' Las Meninas (1656), and Berthe Morisot (1872) a picture of his artist sister-in-law.

Berthe Morisot, herself an Impressionist, completed Portrait of the Artist's Mother and Sister (1869) and The Cradle (1872). Similar to Manet in style, was the Swedish artist Anders Zorn, who executed a variety of plein-air nudes as well as numerous portraits of the rich and famous. His works include: Mrs Walter Rathbone Bacon (1897), Hugo Reisinger (1907) and Mrs John Crosby Brown (1900). Claude Monet, the founding member of Impressionism, focused on landscapes but also painted several portraits including: Madame Monet and Her Son Jean (1875). His fellow Impressionist, Pierre-Auguste Renoir also created numerous nude portraits, such as the unusual El Greco style Young Boy with a Cat (1868), the close-up portrait The Reader (1874) and the dappled Nude in the Sunlight (1876). The virtuoso French ballet artist, Edgar Degas, executed numerous genre-portraits, of which his most famous is L'Absinthe [The Absinthe Drinker] (1876). Likewise, the poster-specialist Henri Toulouse-Lautrec populated his genre paintings of night clubs (eg. At the Moulin Rouge, 1892) with mini portraits of friends and real-life personalities.

Neo-Impressionism also featured pictures, such as Model: Front View (1886), by Georges Seurat, founder of the Divisionist technique known as Pointillism which broke down colour into dots of pigment.

Post-Impressionist Portraits

Post-Impressionism - a vague description, denoting several famous artists (chiefly Gauguin, Cezanne and Van Gogh) who moved beyond Impressionism to Symbolism, Expressionism and more formal styles - produced a number of self-portraits. The influential pre-Cubist Paul Cezanne painted The Boy in the Red Waistcoat (1894), and the Portrait of Gustave Geffroy (1895). The Dutch artist and draughtsman Vincent Van Gogh executed Portrait of Armand Roulin (1888), Portrait of Dr. Gachet (1890), as well as an extended series of autobiographical self-portraits. The post-Impressionist fauvist Henri Matisse painted numerous highly coloured pictures of his wife, while primitive artist Paul Gauguin experimented with various styles. His painting included: Young Breton Woman (1889), and Nevermore (c.1898).

Among the leading American Impressionists were Childe Hassam, Mary Cassatt, Julian Alden Weir and Theodore Robinson.

The next article covers Expressionist Portraiture.

• For info about portrait painters in Ireland, see: Irish Portrait Artists.
• For more about the different types of painting (portraits, landscapes, still-lifes etc) see: Painting Genres.
• For details of landscape and portraiture in Ireland, see: Irish Art Guide

• How to Update This Mini Review of Impressionist Portrait Art

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