French Impressionists

This handbook presents a selection of sixty-four of the Fitzwilliam Museum's finest paintings and drawings by French Impressionist painters. It includes paintings by Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, Cezanne, Seurat and Boudin which are widely considered to be among these painters' greatest works, as well as other lesser-known works by Gauguin and Signac, and several which are published here for the first time. Degas features prominently in the book, with a particularly splendid group of watercolours, pastels, drawings and paintings, many of them early works. The Introduction gives a lively account of what an 'Impressionist' painter was - and came to mean - and also explains how these works came to be in Cambridge collections, against the background of the developing taste for Impressionist painting in Britain.