This is a wonderful book full of not only intimate details of the artists but the time they lived in, including advances in technology. I have read it over and over.

This survey of the history of Impressionism includes more than 400 illustrations of paintings, photographs, drawings, and posters made between the 1860s and the 1920s. The book provides discussions of art events, exhibitions, specific works, and sales records, as well as details of the artists' personal lives. Also included are a biographical index of over 100 entries, complete with photographs of the artists, their models, friends, dealers, critics, and collections; maps and descriptions of significant Impressionist locales; and a chronology of western art from 1863 to the present. A detailed listing of important Impressionist collections throughout the world is sure to interest tourists and serious museum visitors alike. All of the material is presented with great clarity in an interesting and intelligent manner.

English critics Roger Fry and Desmond Mac Carthy came up with the word post-Impressionist to describe paintings by French modern artists for a showing at the Grafton Galleries in 1910. The term took in what came after Georges Seurat's "Une baignade a Asnieres," with its unspontaneous need for many preliminary studies, and "La grande jatte," with all its tiny round dots, ended the dominating outdoors, small-brushstroked, spontaneous style of Impressionism. Post-Impressionism took shape with Paul Cezanne's emotional art leaving out realities of atmosphere, light and shade in "The large bather" and "Still life with onions and a bottle"; Pierre Cecile Puvis de Chavannes's keeping going the Classical tradition of appeal to noble emotions, harmony in composition, and stability with subdued colors in "The sacred grove"; Odilon Redon's Hieronymus Bosch- and Pieter Bruegel-like irrationally unreal imagery leading into Surrealism, as in his "Origins" album, with a central eye in his flower drawing; Douanier Rousseau's primitive art, with his tigers Cezanne- and Claude Monet-like in their horizonless and skyless clearings, Paul Gauguin-like in their nostalgia for a lost paradise, proto-Pablo Picasso in their enchantingly mixed fantasy with reality, and Georges Seurat-like in their large-scale stillness; and Vincent Van Gogh's "Night cafe" becoming the most persuasive example of the Romantic abstract, unrealistic use of color. Post-Impressionism spread with the forming of artist-friendly galleries and organizations for showing works, such as the Societe des artistes independants; the avant-garde Les vingt, with such Pointillism practicing members as James Ensor and Alfred William Finch; Societe nationale des beaux-arts, for such decorative artists as Carolus-Duran and John Singer Sargent; and the Salon d'automne, with its striking showing of Henri Matisse's "Woman with a hat," proto-Fauvist in Cezanne-type solidity and violent colors. Post-Impressionism also spread with Japanese print- and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec poster-influenced compositions, proto-abstract art in their flat colored structure, such as the albums, book illustrations, posters, prints and theatre programs by Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard; with commercially successful printmaking, such as Felix Bracquemond's Societe des peintres-graveur album of individual artist prints and yearly exhibitions, Theatre d'art and Theatre de l'oeuvre founding actor manager Aurelien Lugne-Poe's commissioned posters, programs and stage designs from the Nabis, and Lucien Pissarro's Eragny Press booklets illustrated with colored engravings; and with close links to twentieth-century events and ideologies, such as Pablo Picasso's Spanish Civil War-based "Guernica." Author Bernard Denvir's appropriately illustrated and well-organized book reads particularly well with Florence E Coman's TREASURES OF IMPRESSIONISM AND POST-IMPRESSIONISM, Fogg Art Museum's IMPRESSIONIST AND POST-IMPRESSIONIST PAINTINGS, Sarah Halliwell's IMPRESSIONISM AND POSTIMPRESSIONISM, Thomas Parsons et al's POST-IMPRESSIONISM, Belinda Thomson's POST-IMPRESSIONISM, 24 FULL-COLOR POSTCARDS OF GREAT IMPRESSIONIST AND POST-IMPRESSIONIST PAINTINGS, and James N Wood's IMPRESSIONISM AND POST-IMPRESSIONISM AT THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO.

In "Contre Sainte-Beuve," French novelist Marcel Proust separated art from private life. But Henri TOULOUSE-LAUTREC drew on what interested him in art and life, that is, personality through how the model looked and stood: Edgar Degas- and Edouard Manet-type young girl down in the dumps in "La gueule de bois"; his first large-scale dance scene figures in "Un coin du Moulin de la Galette"; model Suzanne Valadon in 3/4 profile with a Vincent Van Gogh-type turban and in the Camille Pissarro-type "Poudre de riz" front portrait; and Jean Antoine Watteau- and Degas-type popular entertainer Jane Avril, without facial details but immediately recognizable by her shoes with bows, stage stance, and tilting shoulders in an all-blue composition except for the yellow-splashed meeting between knees and skirt. With his Paul Gauguin- and Van Gogh-type expressive color areas, he was hard to beat: "L'anglais au Moulin Rouge" lithographing girlish brightness against black, blue, his favorite olive green, purple, red, and yellow; "Le dernier salut" in flat and narrowly ranged blue, purple and yellow, with a Chat Noir Chinese theater-type hearse driver and hired mourners profiled in black; his Moulin Rouge poster, dark violet from richly mixed black, blue, and red scatter sprayed over each other from a heavily charged brush through a sieve, with the foreground figure slightly sinister and the background dancer in gold, pink, and white; his rare landscapes, light in small-scaled and lively colored freshness, playing early Pissarro- and Alfred Sisley-type light and shade; "Routy" put together Frans Hals-style, with Manet-type expressive blacks and lightly sketchy brushwork; his stained glass window for Tiffany's, sketched and designed from Japanese-style ballet dancers around a water lily-covered lake; and "Un examen a la faculte de medecine de Paris," just over a month before he died, in sombre black and green brightened in the window light by a red academic gown and white writing paper and with Honore Daumier-type accurate draughtsmanship and confident brushwork. He applied his Manet-type dramatic profiles and simplified color areas to subjects from a Degas-type working woman's world: "A la toilette" linking the sitter's auburn hair to a mosaicized background and the pale blues of her dress to what was on her dressing table and her shelf, for a heavily downward brushstroked, overall melancholy; "Au Moulin Rouge," with Gustave Caillebotte-type diagonals for depth and with Degas-type cropped snapshot-style lighting from below to bring out a girl's masklike face; and "Au salon de la rue des Moulins," with one girl seen from the back cut off, Japanese- and snapshot-influenced Impressionist style, by the canvas edge. His post-Impressionist color and style lasted into the twentieth century, among others, in the accent diagonals on Edvard Munch's horizontally-shaped program for Jean Gabriel Borkman's acting a Henrik Ibsen play at Theatre de l'oeuvre; blue period color and form in Pablo Picasso's "Frugal meal," "Green stockings," and portrait of Joaquin Mir; color lithographic advertising, science fiction illustrations, and such strip cartoons as "Asterix"; Expressionism; and Auguste Rodin's watercolors. I like the way that author Bernard Denvir has placed the fifteen artistic years of this people's artist so well within what was and would be happening within the art world. His reader-friendly book of straightforward text and well-chosen illustrations sits nicely on the shelf with Linda Bolton's GAUGUIN, Pascal Bonafoux's VAN GOGH, Robert Gordon's DEGAS, Alan Krell's MANET AND THE PAINTERS OF CONTEMPORARY LIFE, Bruce Laughton's HONORE DAUMIER, Joachim Pissarro's MONET AND THE MEDITERRANEAN, Richard Shone's SISLEY, Richard Thomson's CAMILLE PISSARRO, and Richard Verdi's CEZANNE.

As a student of the visual arts I have encountered many art books, but few have the wealth and quality of reproductions as this one. The criticism of Parsons and Gale is emminently readable, if not at times simplistic, and provides a thorough introduction to a sweeping period of history. But even if this book contained not a single sentance of history or criticism it would be worth purchasing, simply for the images which take up most of this 400 page book. Featuring masterpieces, both well known and obscure, many of the images are given large size, full page, high quality photographs and others are given double page fold outs. Furthermore, Parsons and Gale do not restrict themselves to the Parisian Avant-Garde but extend there scope to include Russia, America, Britain and all of Europe. If you are after a pictorial history of modernism, this is the best I've ever seen.