Last Impressionists

After the successful exhibition Last Impressionists – Time of Intimacy presented in 2015-2016 in eight Japanese museums, the first retrospective devoted to the intimate current of the Belle-Époque occured in Europe in 2018-2019. The exhibition is dedicated to the Société nouvelle de peintres et de sculpteurs, the most famous and most characteristic brotherhood of artists during one of the richest periods of French and European art.

For half a century, faced with a modernity that would gradually devour everything, our artists were able to seduce audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, critics, curators and international exhibitions. Coming from the glorious Symbolist generation, each of them had their own style, perfectly identifiable, but all shared a sentimental vision of nature: to make beings and nature as we see them, leaving guess what they have deep, tragic or mysterious. This is how they were described as intimate.

The intimisme was the last major current of French art to be devoted to nature. The successive movements of contemporary art have since departed from it. At the end of their career, our artists were regarded by the observers of their time as the last representatives of Impressionism.

The painters Edmond Aman-Jean, Albert Baertsoen, Albert Besnard, Jacques-Émile Blanche, Henry Caro- Delvaille, Eugène Carrière, Émile Claus, Charles Cottet, André Dauchez, Georges Desvallières, Henri Duhem, Antonio de La Gandara, Gaston La Touche, Ernest Laurent, Henri Le Sidaner, Henri Martin, René Ménard, René-Xavier Prinet, Jean-François Raffaëlli, John Singer Sargent, Lucien Simon, Frits Thaulow, Eugène Vail and the sculptor Auguste Rodin will be presented in the exhibition. The group has not been reunited since the war, this retrospective will be unpublished in Europe.

This book, catalogue to a series of exhibitions, constitutes a comprehensive reference for the intimist movement of the Belle Époque and the Années folles. More than 800 reproductions from a very important collegiate documentation alternating the most famous paintings and family photos of our artists will illustrate essays and catalog.