Progression of Art

The style of painters from the Romantic Era to modern times radically changed as their environment, other artists, and their overall worldviews influenced them. It is fair to say that the way artists created their world progressed from painting what they would see to how they would see the subject and ultimately how they felt about a subject much like Van Gogh did. After Romanticism and then Realism, in Europe at least, many painters were used to painting what was in front of them, eventually using real life as their subject. But something changed in Paris in the last thirty years of the nineteenth century that caused its painters to rebel and experiment with a painting style called Impressionism.
After the Haussmanization of Paris, artists were ready to incorporate the bourgeoisie into their subject matter and paint outside or “en plein air”, and to really capture light and color. Such as in Monet’s ‘Sunrise’, color became more important than line in the creation of shimmering surfaces of vibrating color. Impressionism was not concerned with details, but with overall effects. Impressionist artists were more interested in recreating the effect that their subject had on the eye rather than recreating the subject itself. This concern with the artist’s perception rather then meticulous recreation was a radical change in terms of peoples approach to art, and was to influence many modern art movements that followed. One way people sometimes define impressionism is to say that it tries to capture the image of something as the viewer would see it if they only glimpsed at it, and impressionist paintings tend to be very bright and bold with little detail. Following this art movement was, as the name says, Post-Impressionism, but the artists in this category are different than in the rest of the movements.
Post-Impressionist, while all falling after Impressionists, didn’t necessarily share the same style, but rather simply existed during the same time. It is in this