Guarisco Gallery 2012

94 he greatly admired Impressionist and Post-Impressionist styles were mastered by many artists besides the well-known Pissarro, Sisley, Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh, and Gauguin. These pioneering artists worked alongside a group of equally talented contemporaries whose accomplishments are no less admirable. Among these are: Henry Moret, Georges d’Espagnat, Henri Le Sidaner, Maximilien Luce, Henri Lebasque, Henri Martin, Jean-François Raffaelli, and Gustave Loiseau. irca 1886, a large group of Impressionist painters migrated from Paris to Brittany including Gauguin, Paul Signac, Renoir, and Monet who painted breathtaking scenes of the Breton landscape. While in Brittany, they were joined by the young, academically trained Henry Moret. Though well-received in the academies, Moret found his artistic passions more closely aligned with the avant-garde ideas of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist schools. Moret was immediately accepted into a group lead by Gauguin and Emile Bernard. The canvases of Gauguin and Moret exhibit a striking similarity, and art historians have concluded that some of Gauguin’s paintings of this period are really the work of Moret with an altered signature. hile the Breton Impressionists and Symbolists created their boldly colored landscapes, another more scientific artistic approach to Impressionism was developing: divisionism, or Pointillism, also termed Neo-Impressionism, founded by Georges Seurat. Henri Le Sidaner and Henry Martin were influenced by this style. Seurat touted his style as a highly scientific approach to the optical mixing of the Impressionists. His technique involved placing dots of pure color side- by-side on the canvas. This careful juxtaposition of colors added depth and iridescence and, unlike the spontaneous Impressionist style, involved careful premeditation and forethought. ust as the Academic tradition continued long after the emergence of Impressionism, so did the Impressionistic technique continue to be utilized long after new modernist movements came into vogue. Artists such as Georges Manzana Pissarro, son of Camille Pissarro, and Jac-Martin-Ferrières, son of Henry Martin, truly represent the term “second generation” Impressionists. Unlike the contemporaries of the founders of the movement, these younger artists were born during and after the Impressionist movement and did not paint alongside the likes of Monet, Gauguin, and Cézanne. Instead, Manzana Pissarro and Martin-Ferrières, although exposed to all the modern movements, chose to paint in an Impressionist style. French Impressionism was pivotal in the history of art, setting the wheels in motion for the eventual abstraction of the 20 th -century schools. T HE C ONTEMPORARIES T HE N EXT G ENERATION T J C W