HART 358 Impressionism and Post-Impressionism

Impressionism is by far the most beloved art movement in the Western world. Visitors all over the world flock to museum exhibitions featuring Impressionism, and paintings by masters like Claude Monet sell for tens of millions of dollars. But for all of its popularity Impressionism is often not taken very seriously. Paul Cézanne, himself an Impressionist in the 1870s, later said of Monet: “[He] was just an eye, but my god what an eye!” The phrase neatly summarizes the prevailing opinion about Impressionism: that it is beautiful, but essentially took things as they are and thus lacked artistic intervention or metaphysical depth. The status of the term “Impressionism,” is also uncertain itself, as the term was only partially recognized by many of the artists themselves. Was Impressionism one of the first genuinely avant-garde movements, in which artists like Monet, Pissarro, Degas and Morisot grouped together in a collective rejection of academic and/or societal norms? Or is Impressionism merely an inappropriate, arbitrary grouping for a number of individuals who exploited the newly secularized, urban culture of France for the advancement of their careers?

Even more, what might lie behind Impressionism’s often sunny surfaces? What issues of race, gender, sexuality and colonialism are a part of its discursive environment, and does Impressionism represent an active attempt to obscure those potentially troubling topics? Furthermore, how did artists like Seurat, van Gogh, Cézanne and Toulouse-Lautrec respond to these developments in what we now call “Post-Impressionism"?

In answering these questions it will become clear that Impressionism was also in every a sense an artistic movement of Paris. Its artists lived there, exhibited there and depicted its rapidly changing spaces. Even when they painted natural places around Paris and France, they were doing so for the benefit of their urban audience. Thus, we will not only visit the places they painted in Paris but immerse ourselves in the urban fabric that gave rise to this movement. from the “grands boulevards” of the Right Bank to the “petit boulevards” of bohemian Montmartre. We will visit museums with unparalleled collections of these artists to study the work in person and visit sites where they lived and work outside Paris like Giverny and Auvers-sur-Oise.

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This course is 3 Rice credit hours.

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Yes, students will receive D1 credit for this course.

The Department of Art History may have funding to support students taking a HART course on the Paris Summer Program. Please fill out the Summer 2027 Paris Art History – Supplemental Funding Application (LINK). Funding is limited so submit your request early.

Priority Deadline: December 9, 2026
Final Application Deadline: February 15, 2027

For details on these two deadlines, please navigate to the How to Apply section of the Program Information & FAQs page.

For questions regarding the course content, please contact the course instructor (see below).

For questions regarding the program (budget, application process, financial aid, global awards), first read through the Rice Global Paris Summer Program Information and FAQs page on our website. If you cannot find the answer to your question, email us at globalowls@rice.edu.