In celebration of the 150th anniversary of Impressionism, the Van Gogh Museum presents the major retrospective Vive l’impressionnisme! Masterpieces from Dutch Collections. 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).
Revolution
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.
Theo and Vincent van Gogh
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.