ime in this city. They endured years of rebuff and suffering, but together they completely changed the course of Western art. They lived in Montmartre, a little village on a steep cliff overlooking Paris, and by 1860 this village had become a part of the city itself. It still had a village atmosphere, however, and it was quaint, picturesque, and cheap. The little village was the center of Bohemian life, and this life took place in the cafes of the area where the artists would congregate and discuss their art.
This was also a city of wealth at the time, and this contributed to the support of the arts by a number of collectors. The rulers of France had little cultivation in the arts, and their taste and the taste of the public was instead formed by the board of judges of the official Salon. The artists of Montmartre rebelled against this system and chose to be isolated, far from the Salon. They asserted their independence in various ways, from the way they dressed to their art itself. They painted in a new way, a way not accepted by the Salon in any case (Kielty, 141).
Impressionism was never a homogeneous school with a unified program and clearly defined principles. It was rather a loose association of artists linked by some community of outlook and banded together for the purpose of exhibiting (Chilvers, Osborne, and Farr, 249). Post-Impressionism was the term applied to various trends in painting that developed from Impressionism or in reaction to it. Roger Fry used it for an exhibition, Manet and the Post-Impressionists, held at the Grafton Galleries in London in 1910-1911. This exhibition was dominated by the works of CTzanne, Gauguin, and van Gogh, the central figures of Post-Impressionism. Post-Impressionist artists rejected the naturalism and preoccupation with monetary effects of the Impressionists. The approach taken by van Gogh would lead directly to Expressionism (Chilvers, Osborne, and Farr, 395-396).
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