Looking at paintings

Impressionism vs Expressionism

Two paintings of a city street, sixteen years apart. One wants to show you what the light was doing that afternoon. The other wants to show you what it felt like to stand in the crowd.

The names get mixed up constantly, and not because people are careless. Both movements broke the old rule that a painting should record the world exactly as it looks. The difference is what each broke it for — and it shows up in three places you can learn to check: the brushwork, the colour, and what the painting is about.

A wide Paris boulevard in spring, painted in small soft dabs of green and grey — One of each, both the real paintings. Which is which — and what on the canvas tells you? Hold your answer: you will make this exact call, with evidence, before the end of this page — and then the same call on paintings you have never seen. Every painting in this lesson is real, from the museum that holds it, fetched with its licence checked at build time.

Elongated figures in harsh pinks and blues crowd a Berlin street — One of each, both the real paintings. Which is which — and what on the canvas tells you? Hold your answer: you will make this exact call, with evidence, before the end of this page — and then the same call on paintings you have never seen. Every painting in this lesson is real, from the museum that holds it, fetched with its licence checked at build time.

Next · Three things to check ↓

§1 · The method

Three things to check

Put the labels aside for a moment and look at what a painter actually decides: how the paint goes on, what colours to use, and what deserves painting at all. The two movements answer all three differently, and each answer is visible from across a room. Run the checks in order, and let the majority decide — a painting can lose one check and still be called by the other two.

Check one: what is the brush doing?

An Impressionist stroke is a dab — a short, soft touch of paint, laid next to hundreds of others. Up close it looks like confetti; step back and the dabs fuse into shimmering light. The painters worked fast, often outdoors, racing the weather. The dab is a tool for catching how light actually lands on the eye.

An Expressionist stroke is a jag — long, angular, and emphatic, dragged rather than touched on. It does not record how anything looked. It records pressure, agitation, force. Where the dab hides the painter's hand in a crowd of touches, the jag is the painter's hand, left visible on purpose.

The two strokes, side by side

The dab — Impressionist

Short touches, close colours, no outlines. The eye mixes them into light.

The jag — Expressionist

Long pulls, sharp direction changes, colours that fight. The stroke is the feeling.

Drawn to exaggerate the difference — the real thing is subtler, which is why the next device uses real paint.

Look for the difference on real canvases. Monet’s haystacks are built from thousands of small touches — snow, shadow and straw all rendered as neighbouring dabs of blue, violet and orange. Schiele’s tree is a handful of long, wiry, angular lines against a bare sky; the tree reads less like a plant than like a nervous system.

Haystacks in snow, their shadows violet-blue, built from small soft touches — Dab against jag, on real paint — and below, each surface four times closer. Which marks vanish into their subject, and which stand apart from it?

A bare autumn tree, thin black branches whipping at sharp angles across a pale sky — Dab against jag, on real paint — and below, each surface four times closer. Which marks vanish into their subject, and which stand apart from it?

Check two: is the colour observed or invented?

The Impressionists were radical about colour in one specific way: they painted what the eye receives rather than what the mind knows. Snow is not white — at dusk it is blue and violet; at sunset it is pink. Their shadows are full of colour because real shadows are. The colours can look heightened, but they answer to something seen. Call this observed colour.

Expressionist colour answers to nothing seen. A horse can be blue, a face green, a sky blood-orange — because the painting is about a feeling, and colour is the loudest way to carry one. Call this invented colour. The test is simple: could a person standing where the painter stood have seen these colours, in some real light? If no light could produce them, they were chosen for their charge.

Horses painted a saturated blue against red and yellow hills — Both wildly coloured. Run the test on each: could a person standing there have seen these colours in some real light?

A haystack at sunset, glowing pink and orange against frosty blue ground — Both wildly coloured. Run the test on each: could a person standing there have seen these colours in some real light?

Check three: what is the painting about?

Subject is the quietest check, and the one that settles close calls. Impressionist paintings are about the visible world at a particular moment — boulevards, gardens, riverbanks, dancers, weather. The moment matters more than the people in it; faces stay soft because a face is just another surface catching light.

Expressionist paintings are about a state of mind wearing the world as a costume. The city is not a place to stroll but a crowd that presses in; a portrait is not a likeness but a confession. If the painting seems to be about an emotion — dread, isolation, ecstasy — and the scene exists to carry it, you are in Expressionist territory.

Run all three checks — you decide

Three questions, one fresh pair — two crowds, no labels, painters revealed as you answer. Click the painting that answers each question.

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Next · Calling them solo, and the traps ↓

§2 · The hard part

Calling them solo, and the traps

In a museum nobody hangs the two movements side by side for you. You get one painting and the checks have to work alone. The habit that makes solo calls reliable is the same one from §1 — checks in order, majority decides — held onto even when the painting has a strong vibe pulling you elsewhere.

And then there are the painters who sit between the movements — which is where everyone gets burned.

The Van Gogh trap

Ask a room to name an Expressionist painting and half of it says The Starry Night. The instinct is understandable — the sky churns with feeling, the cypress writhes. But Van Gogh died in 1890, fifteen years before Expressionism existed as a movement, and his method still belongs to the world of looking: broken strokes descended from Impressionism, colour heightened but anchored to a real night sky over a real village. Art history shelves him as a Post-Impressionist — the generation after Impressionism that kept its surface and rejected its detachment.

What makes him a trap is that the mistake is almost right. The young German Expressionists saw his paintings in gallery shows after 1900 and took from him exactly the thing everyone senses in that sky: the stroke as a carrier of emotion. He is the bridge the movement walked across. On an exam, the honest sentence is: Van Gogh is not an Expressionist, and Expressionism is hard to imagine without him.

Munch, and Expressionism before the name

Edvard Munch runs the other way. The Scream was painted in 1893 — also before the movement — yet it sits comfortably in the Expressionist family, because everything in it already works the Expressionist way: the sky is blood-orange because the figure is in terror, the landscape bends around the emotion, and the subject is the emotion. Munch is usually called a forerunner of Expressionism, and the German painters treated him as one of their own. Date is evidence, never the verdict: the checks decide, and on Munch all three point one way.

Next · The final ↓

Closed book

The final

Nine questions: six paintings this lesson has not shown you, two claims to judge, and one written call. Reference locks while this is open. Answer everything, then submit — nothing is scored until you do.

Next · What you can do now ↓

Where you stand

What you can do now

These fill in as you get things right. Your results stay in this browser.

Read brushwork, colour and subject off a canvas

Call unfamiliar paintings, including the in-between painters