Arts et Plastiques - Organisation événements artistiques

02/05/2026

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When one thinks of French Impressionist painting, the names of the Big Eight come first to mind -- Manet, Monet, Degas, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Cezanne, though the last four are best seen as Post-Impressionists. But the group of artists that went under the name of "Independents" -- that is, working outside the tradition of the state-sponsored French Academy -- was a large and diverse one, united only by fresh and often daring approaches to subject and style. Today, art historians place in the group anyone who exhibited at the eight Expositions of Independent Painting that took place between 1874 and 1886. This is the first part of a four-part series of exhibits introducing the work of these Other Impressionists. We'll begin with three -- a man and two women -- whose backgrounds eased the way for the pursuit of their craft.

Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894), upper-class by birth -- his father a wealthy manufacturer of textiles for the military and a judge -- studied both law and engineering and practiced both until his mid-twenties, when he took up painting after his father's death made him independently wealthy. He exhibited with the Impressionists frequently, though the photo-realistic style of many of his paintings contrasted stylistically with their work. What he did share with them was subject matter -- urban scenes, domestic and familial scenes, tableaux of the country life, and a fondness for men and women boating. He used his wealth to build a large collection of Impressionist painting, which he willed at his death to the French government --which, perversely, refused it! The best place to view his work is the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. 109 of his paintings appear in this gallery.

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) hailed from a mainline Philadelphia family. In her teens she enrolled in art courses at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, one of the few such institutions on these shores to admit women at that time. Her father's first reaction to her declaration that she wished to become a professional artist was "I would rather see you dead." Encouraged by friends and husband, Cassatt persisted, finding little success or acceptance for her work until she moved to France in the early 1870s. There she found a congenial group of colleagues among the French Impressionists, particularly her mentor Edgar Degas, whose style of painting formed the basis for her own. She mostly painted women and children in everyday settings, particularly mothers bathing their small children. Cassatt's contributions to American art went well beyond her own paintings. She became the main publicist for the Impressionists in the U.S., urging her many wealthy friends, most notably Chester Dale, to purchase and collect their art. It is through her that we owe the outstanding collections of Impressionist art in places like Washington's National Gallery. Ninety-one of her works are included here.

Berthe Morisot (1841-1895), was also from an upper-middle-class family, but, unlike Cassatt's, one which from the start gave her its full support in her choice of career, having produced in the past several painters, most notably Fragonard. Her early work bears the mark of her association with the landscape painter Camille Corot, from whom she inherited a preference for broad, rapidly applied brushstrokes and a love of "plein air" painting. In Paris, she became friends with the Impressionist painter Edouard Manet, whose brother she was later to marry, and began exhibiting with the "Independents" as early as 1874. Her work resembles that of Cassatt in its choice of subject matter -- women engaged in various activities, all portrayed with an air of contentment free of the sentimentality which often characterized the genre painting of the period. Fifty-one of her paintings appear in this gallery.

Caillebotte's paintings are followed by those of Cassatt and then Morisot. I've arranged them in chronological order, and indicated in the comments which were exhibited at the Impressionist exhibits, also including snippets of contemporary reviews to add a little historical flavor, as well as other commentary giving more background on the artists and their work.

See also these other MWW galleries in this series:
II - Seurat and Signac
III - Camille Pissarro
IV - Alfred Sisley and a potpourri of others

23/03/2026

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22/02/2026

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06/11/2025

21/10/2025

"I advised him to go to New Orleans, but he decided it was too civilized. He had to have people around him with flowers on their heads and rings in their noses before he could feel at home." -- Edgar Degas on Gauguin

"I felt stirrings of rebellion: a whole clash between your civilization and my barbarism. Civilization from which you suffer. Barbarism which for me is a rejuvenation." -- Gauguin to August Strindberg

"A time will come when people will think I am a myth, or rather something the newspapers have made up." -- Gauguin to Georges-Daniel de Monfreid (Tahiti, October 1897)

An artist's life usually pales in interest beside his art. Gauguin may be the exception, for his life reads like that of a star-crossed hero of a romantic novel. He spent the greater part of his childhood in Peru, signed up as a novice pilot aboard a sailing ship at 17, spent a couple years wandering through South America, returned to France to join the Navy, sees action in the Mediterranean during the Franco-Prussian War, leaves the Navy at 23 to become a stockbroker and is by age 35 prosperous and married with two children, and gaining a reputation as an amateur painter. The stock market crash of 1882 leaves him without a job and much of his fortune. Unable to support them any longer, he leaves his family in the care of his wife's parents in Denmark. Over the next six years, he keeps painting, even exhibiting with the Impressionists, but is scrambling for a living, constantly on the move. An emissary for the radical republicans of Spain, a gig with a tarpaulin manufacturer in Roubais, a stint as a bill paster, an assistant to an art dealer, finally off to Panama to work on the Canal, where he contracts malaria and is forced to return after a year. In 1888, his luck changes. The art dealer Theo van Gogh, at his brother's urging, becomes his agent and offers him a monthly stipend if he will join Vincent in Arles. The stay there proves to be ill-fated, though it produces some fine paintings, and Gauguin, increasingly convinced that the industrial civilization of the West is completely "out of joint," moves to Brittany to live with and paint the peasants of that backward region of western France. Two years later, in the quest for an environment unsullied by the least trace of civilization, he moves to Tahiti -- a "missionary in reverse." as he put it -- where he spends all but two of the remaining years of his life, and occupies a modest grave to this day adorned only with one of his ceramic sculptures. Somerset Maugham's "The Moon and Sixpence" was inspired by his life.

Lure of the Exotic? Flight from Civilization? Quest for the Pristine? No matter what label one places on his unique career, the paintings and drawings remain as a living testimony to an exceptional and original talent. As with many of the other MWW Exhibits, the works here are arranged in rough chronological order and the selection aspires towards a representative sample of the artist's entire output. It also includes all of Gauguin's self-portraits, most which are accompanied by commentaries on various periods or aspects of his life.

Gauguin was prolific in several other media besides painting. Along with the over 300 paintings it includes, this gallery has a selection of his sculptures, watercolors, woodcuts and drawings. More of these form part of the MWW Sculpture Garden and Modern Prints & Drawings galleries.

See also the five MWW Van Gogh exhibits for a look at an artist closely associated with Gauguin.