Author(s): Suzanne Greub

Artists & Styles

Starting with the precursors of plein air painting, including Camille Corot and Gustave Courbet, the show gradually guides the audience through major works by the Impressionists with Claude Monet in their centre: Landscape painting, riverscapes and seascapes, cityscapes and as crowning final the spectator is invited to view Monet's startling water lilies paintings developed in his famous garden in Giverny. Thanks to their extraordinary use of colours and their innovative nature, the paintings of Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley, Morisot, Manet, Caillebotte and their contemporaries still fascinate today - with the public's enthusiasm hardly on the wane. One of the most popular and intriguing genres of that period is that of landscape, as it allowed artists to freely investigate light and colour outdoors, en plein air. These paintings not only tell us about the time and context of their production, but also about favourite activities such as picnics and promenading, about popular places like the banks of the Seine and the beaches near Pourville (Normandy) and about innovations of that time such as the railroads and trains.
Divided into seven sections the book will present outstanding paintings by Claude Monet, Edouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot, Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Gustave Caillebotte and Paul Gauguin. The reproduced works are from prestigious institutions such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The National Gallery of Art Washington, D.C., the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, and the Neue Pinakothek, Munich, to mention but a few.