A comprehensive survey of the distinctly British version of Impressionism.

Late in his career, Claude Monet returned to London to paint the fog that had entranced him years before. The resulting sequence of pictures represents some of the fascination that French painters felt for Britain. Similarly, many British collectors and young painters embraced and were influenced by the work of the French Impressionists. This book describes the activities of the French Impressionist painters on their visits to Britain, considers the dissemination of Impressionist painting through British dealers and collectors, explores the response of artists from Britain and Ireland to the Impressionist movement, and sets all of these against the backdrop of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. McConkey and Robins describe the work of Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, and other Impressionists working in London, showing how this art influenced the community of young British painters disenchanted with British art schools and art exhibiting standards. The authors investigate the role played by two innovative painters who were American expatriates, James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent. And they explain how such artists as William Orpen, George Clausen, Stanhope Forbes, Henry La Thangue, Walter Sickert, and Philip Wilson Steer sought out new and radical approaches to picture making, formed new secessionist art societies, and articulated new concepts of the role of art, rejecting historical pageants and fashionable aestheticism and focusing on modern rural and urban conditions. The book is the catalogue of an exhibition that will be at the Barbican Art Gallery in London from January to March 1995, and then move to Dublin.

As this major contribution to art history shows, Impressionism was far more than a French movement that spread to other countries; rather, it was an approach to art adopted by artists of all nationalities who responded to light and atmospheric conditions, to landscape and cityscape, with an explosion of enthusiasm that was felt around the globe.

First Published in 1988, Post-impressionists in England documents the response of English taste to modern French art from the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1910 to the outbreak of the First World War. The notion of ‘Post-Impressionism’, unlike its earlier counterpart, Impressionism, was an exclusively English contribution to art history. Originally used to denote the work of Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse and the Fauve painters, it rapidly assimilated Futurism, Cubism and recent English work like Vorticism. By focusing on one aspect of an important and complex period in British cultural history, J.B. Bullen illuminates not only aesthetic questions but also the way in which those aesthetic issues were determined and conditioned by social and political concerns. Changes in English attitudes to art in this period were so rapid and were modified with such speed that the author has taken a strictly chronological approach to the subject. He sets out clearly the month-by-month developments in English attitudes and traces in detail the debates about modernism in England. To make matters clearer the book is divided into three major parts, each complementary to the others. The introduction surveys the period as a whole and places attitudes to art in the general context of the culture of the time. In the second part the extracts provide selected, concrete and particular examples of the huge range of material upon which the findings of the introduction are based; the writers represented include Roger Fry, Bernard Berenson, Desmond McCarthy, John singer Sargent, Walter Sickert, Clive Bell, Virginia Woolf and Wyndham Lewis. In the third part a chronology sets out in tabular form month-by-month events- exhibitions and major publications- as they occurred in Britain and in France. This is a must read for scholars and researchers of British cultural history and art history.

This title charts the story of the French artists who took refuge in London during and after the devastating Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune. Following these traumatic events there was a creative flourishing in London as the exiles responded to British culture and social life - regattas, processions, parks, and of course the Thames.

Brimming with illustrations of some of the world's best loved Impressionist paintings, this book offers fresh and fascinating insights to explain why, initially, Impressionism was considered radical--and why it remains one of the most popular artistic movements of all time. By focusing on Impressionism's earliest stages, the book offers a thorough and satisfying exploration that paves the way for a deeper understanding of the movement's myriad hybridizations and, eventually, the birth of abstraction. This delightful overview also offers readers a thoughtful context from which to appreciate these most beautiful works of art.