This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Rather than a single school, Post-Impressionism is best understood as four distinct artistic experiments that unfolded alongside one another in France during the 1880s and 1890s, each of which shaped a different strand of twentieth century modern art. Georges Seurat's Pointillism, sometimes called Divisionism or Neo-Impressionism, applied scientific theories of optical color mixing to painting, building large compositions such as A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte from countless small dots of unmixed color that the viewer's eye blends at a distance. Seurat's rigorous, almost mathematical method attracted followers, notably Paul Signac, and represented an attempt to put Impressionist color on a scientific footing. Vincent van Gogh took a nearly opposite approach, using thick impasto, swirling, directional brushwork and saturated, often symbolic color, as in The Starry Night and his late wheat field paintings, to externalize emotional and psychological states, a path that fed directly into twentieth century Expressionism. Paul Gauguin's Synthetism simplified form into flat planes bounded by strong outlines and used color for symbolic rather than descriptive effect, an approach he developed partly through contact with Breton folk art and later Polynesian culture, and which influenced the Nabis group and, eventually, Fauvism. Paul Cezanne pursued the most structural of the four paths, treating landscape, still life and the human figure as arrangements of underlying geometric volumes built through repeated, faceted brushstrokes, a method that Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque would draw on directly when they developed Cubism after 1907. The four painters rarely worked together and left no shared theoretical statement; their grouping under a single name is the invention of the critic Roger Fry, writing a generation after the fact. That the label has nonetheless endured, and that each of the four approaches can be traced forward into a distinct branch of early modernism, is part of why Post-Impressionism remains a pivotal, if contested, chapter in the history of Western painting.