This volume includes many of the great masterpieces of Impressionism. The brilliant colours of Rouen Cathedral as captured by Monet; Manet's once-shocking nude in "The Picnic"; the many beautiful women depicted by Renoir in Paris cafes and Degas' snapshot visions of ballet dancers on and off stage. But the book presents not only the works of the original Impressionists but also paintings by less familiar artists such as Fantin-Latour, Cassatt and Guillaumin. The full scope of Impressionism, however, was not limited to its immediate adherents, and this book also traces its later flowering in the work of the Post-Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists through reproductions of paintings by Seurat, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec. The author follows the history of the movement and of the individual artists and describes how they struggled against poverty and the hostility of the artistic establishment. He also relates how recognition eventually came through perserverance, and discusses how the artists influenced each other throughout their lives, looking at how they differed in their personal and artistic aims. - from Amzon