Van Gogh Museum celebrates 150 Years of Impressionism with New Exhibition

Thanks to an unprecedented collaboration between fifteen Dutch museums and private collections, the exhibition features more than a hundred of the most important French Impressionist works from Dutch collections, including Pissarro’s The Rainbow, Pontoise (1877) and Monet’s Poppy Field (1881).

It is 15 April 1874. Several young artists open their exhibition on a Paris boulevard. By organising their own exhibitions, they are exempt from the strict admission rules of the annual official Salon exhibition, where the established order dictates what is on show. Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas and Alfred Sisley capture their personal impressions of changing moments on canvas, using loose brushstrokes and bright colours.

The public is utterly shocked, it is nothing short of a revolution. 150 years on, this moment is considered to be the birth of one of the world’s most influential art movements: Impressionism.

Vive l’impressionnisme! Masterpieces from Dutch Collections includes more than a hundred French Impressionist works from Dutch collections. The entire range of media is represented: from Monet’s iconic painted landscapes to Cézanne’s pioneering watercolours, and from colourful pastels by Morisot and Degas to emotionally charged sculptures by Rodin.

A central question addressed in the exhibition is how and when these French Impressionist works arrived in the Netherlands. To what extent was the Netherlands ready to embrace a modern, colourful art movement from Paris around the year 1900?

Dutch taste at the time was predominantly conservative and there was a preference for traditional, dark colours. Vive l’impressionnisme!shows how several visionaries, including art dealer Theo van Gogh, ensured that Impressionism found its way to the Netherlands, and how the country eventually saw the light. Vincent van Gogh himself also embraced Impressionism, but it was only after he moved to Paris in 1886, when he saw what the Impressionists were doing himself, that his art changed radically, and for good.

Vive l’impressionnisme! Masterpieces from Dutch Collections is organised by the Van Gogh Museum and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, in close collaboration with the Kröller-Müller Museum, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Singer Laren, Teylers Museum, Museum de Fundatie, The Mesdag Collection and seven private collections.

Works by male and female Impressionists including Monet, Degas, Pissarro, Morisot, Cassatt, Sisley and Cézanne from Dutch collections are all on display.

Main Image: Claude Monet, Champ de coquelicots, 1881, oil on canvas, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, acquired with the collection of: D.G. van Beuningen 1958