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Art Guides · Post-Impressionism
The 10 Most Famous Post-Impressionist Paintings
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Log in or sign upPost-Impressionism is not one style. It is what happened when a handful of painters learned everything the Impressionists could teach and then went their own way: Van Gogh into colour and feeling, Seurat into science and dots, Cézanne into solid shapes, Rousseau into dreams. This guide explores ten famous Post-Impressionist paintings, selected using October 2026 search estimates and our catalogue, and for each one we tell you what you are looking at and the story behind it.
Van Gogh would have taken nine of the ten places on his own, so we allowed each painter five. Start with the top three, or read the whole list below.
1. The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh
Explore the artistVincent van Gogh →In May 1889, after the crisis in which he cut his ear, Van Gogh admitted himself to the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole at Saint-Rémy in Provence. From his bedroom window he could see a walled wheat field and the hills beyond. One morning in June he wrote to his brother Theo that he had watched the countryside for a long time before sunrise, "with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big." That star, Venus, is the bright one just right of the cypress.
He was not allowed to paint in his bedroom, so the picture was made in a studio room, from memory and imagination. The village with its pointed church spire is not the view from his window; the steeple looks more like the churches of his Dutch childhood. The sky transforms observation through imagination: rolling spirals, bright stars and a moon blazing like a sun. Van Gogh himself was not sure about it, and later listed it among his failures. Today it is one of the most recognised paintings in the world.
Collection reference: Museum of Modern Art, New York.
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The Starry Night by Van Gogh, painted by hand
Vincent Van Gogh · oil on canvas, made to order
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2. Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh
Explore the artistVincent van Gogh →
In August 1888 Van Gogh was waiting for Paul Gauguin to join him in Arles, where he dreamed of starting a studio for artists in the south. He decided to decorate Gauguin's bedroom in the Yellow House with sunflowers, and painted them as fast as he could, because the flowers wilted within days. He wrote to Theo that he was painting "with the gusto of a Marseillais eating bouillabaisse."
The boldest versions are almost entirely yellow: yellow flowers, yellow vase, yellow wall. New, cheap chrome yellow paint made it possible, and Van Gogh signed his name on the vase itself. Gauguin loved them so much that he asked for one, and painted Van Gogh at work on a sunflower picture. In 1987 one of the versions sold in London for almost 25 million pounds, three times the previous record for any painting.
Collection reference: National Gallery, London.
OWN IT.Sunflowers by Van Gogh, painted by hand $299.00
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Sunflowers by Van Gogh, painted by hand
Vincent Van Gogh · oil on canvas, made to order
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Real paintings, real brushworkSee what arrives at your doorBrowse all samples → 3. A Sunday on La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat
Explore the artistGeorges Seurat →
On summer Sundays, Parisians took the train out to La Grande Jatte, an island in the Seine, to walk, fish and lie in the shade. Seurat went there for two years, making around sixty drawings and small oil sketches, and then built this huge canvas in his studio, figure by figure. Many figures appear absorbed in separate activities. Their formal poses make the scene feel suspended, as if time had stopped.
The secret is in the surface. Instead of mixing colours on the palette, Seurat placed tiny dots of pure colour side by side and let the viewer's eye blend them, following the colour theories of the scientist Michel-Eugène Chevreul. Critics named it pointillism. When it was shown at the last Impressionist exhibition in 1886 it caused a sensation, and made his new approach impossible to ignore. Look for the elegant woman on the right walking a monkey on a lead, and for the woman fishing at the water's edge. A century later it inspired the Broadway musical Sunday in the Park with George.
Collection reference: Art Institute of Chicago.
OWN IT.A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Seurat, painted by hand $1,299.00
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A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Seurat, painted by hand
Georges Pierre Seurat · oil on canvas, made to order
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Real paintings, real brushworkSee what arrives at your doorBrowse all samples → 4. Café Terrace at Night by Vincent van Gogh
Explore the artistVincent van Gogh →
Van Gogh set up his easel on the Place du Forum in Arles, after dark, and painted the café terrace under its gas lamp. He was proud of the challenge he had set himself. To his sister he described it as "a night painting without black", made only with "beautiful blue, violet and green", with the lit square in "pale sulphur, lemon green."
This is the first time stars appear in his paintings, nine months before The Starry Night. They are not invented: astronomers have matched them to the sky over Arles on 16 or 17 September 1888. He also named his inspiration, the opening of Guy de Maupassant's novel Bel-Ami, with its lit Paris cafés under a starry sky.
Collection reference: Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo.
OWN IT.Café Terrace at Night by Van Gogh, painted by hand $299.00
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Café Terrace at Night by Van Gogh, painted by hand
Vincent Van Gogh · oil on canvas, made to order
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Real paintings, real brushworkSee what arrives at your doorBrowse all samples → 5. Almond Blossom by Vincent van Gogh
Explore the artistVincent van Gogh →
On 31 January 1890 Theo van Gogh and his wife Jo had a son, and named him Vincent Willem, after his uncle. Vincent, still at the asylum in Saint-Rémy, was delighted, and painted this for the baby's room: almond branches, the first trees to flower in Provence, opening against a clear blue sky. A sign of new life in the middle of winter.
It is one of his calmest paintings, with flat colour and sharp outlines borrowed from the Japanese woodblock prints he loved. Jo hung it above the piano in the family's flat in Paris. Five months later Vincent was dead. The baby grew up to become an engineer who kept his uncle's paintings together and founded the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, where this painting still hangs.
Collection reference: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
OWN IT.Almond Blossom by Van Gogh, painted by hand $299.00
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Almond Blossom by Van Gogh, painted by hand
Vincent Van Gogh · oil on canvas, made to order
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Real paintings, real brushworkSee what arrives at your doorBrowse all samples → 6. Irises by Vincent van Gogh
Explore the artistVincent van Gogh →
Van Gogh painted Irises in his first week at the asylum of Saint-Rémy, in May 1889, in the overgrown garden of the hospital. He called painting a kind of "lightning conductor" for his illness, and this is the picture of a man getting back to work: every flower drawn with a strong outline, every leaf curling in its own direction, one white iris standing alone on the left.
Theo sent it to the Salon des Indépendants in Paris that September, where it was noticed. Almost a century later it made headlines of its own. In 1987 it sold at auction in New York for 53.9 million dollars, the most ever paid for a painting at the time. The buyer could not finish paying for it, and in 1990 it was bought by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
Collection reference: J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
OWN IT.Irises by Van Gogh, painted by hand $299.00
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Irises by Van Gogh, painted by hand
Vincent Van Gogh · oil on canvas, made to order
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Real paintings, real brushworkSee what arrives at your doorBrowse all samples → 7. The Sleeping Gypsy by Henri Rousseau
Explore the artistHenri Rousseau →
A woman in a striped robe sleeps in the desert, her mandolin and water jar beside her. A lion has found her and lowers its head to smell her. Nothing else happens. Rousseau, a former customs clerk who taught himself to paint, described the scene in a letter: a wandering musician falls asleep, exhausted, and a lion chances upon her but does not devour her.
He offered the painting to his home town of Laval, which turned it down. It then disappeared for a quarter of a century before it resurfaced in Paris in the 1920s, when the avant-garde had fallen in love with Rousseau's dreamlike style. Is the lion a threat, a guardian, or part of her dream? The painting never tells us.
Collection reference: Museum of Modern Art, New York.
OWN IT.The Sleeping Gypsy by Henri Rousseau, painted by hand $299.00
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The Sleeping Gypsy by Henri Rousseau, painted by hand
Henri Rousseau · oil on canvas, made to order
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Real paintings, real brushworkSee what arrives at your doorBrowse all samples → 8. The Basket of Apples by Paul Cézanne
Explore the artistPaul Cézanne →
At first it looks like a simple still life: apples, a bottle, a plate of biscuits, a white cloth. Then it starts to wobble. The bottle leans. The basket tips forward as if the apples are about to roll out. The front edge of the table is higher on one side of the cloth than on the other, and the biscuits are seen from above while the bottle is seen from the side.
These departures from consistent perspective are central to Cézanne’s construction of the image. They are often understood through shifting viewpoints: the objects seem seen from different positions, yet their shapes hold the composition together. "With an apple I will astonish Paris," he is supposed to have said. He did, and Picasso and Braque took his broken viewpoints all the way to Cubism.
Collection reference: Art Institute of Chicago.
OWN IT.The Basket of Apples by Cézanne, painted by hand $299.00
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The Basket of Apples by Cézanne, painted by hand
Paul Cezanne · oil on canvas, made to order
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Real paintings, real brushworkSee what arrives at your doorBrowse all samples → 9. Mont Sainte-Victoire by Paul Cézanne
Explore the artistPaul Cézanne →
Mont Sainte-Victoire is a long limestone ridge east of Aix-en-Provence, the town where Cézanne was born and spent most of his life. He painted it again and again for more than twenty years, from different hills and at different times, more than eighty times in oil and watercolour.
Over the years the views changed. The early ones are calm and detailed; the late ones dissolve into blocks of green, ochre and violet, where every brushstroke is a small flat plane. He was still painting the mountain at the end. In October 1906 he was caught in a storm while working outdoors, collapsed, and died of pneumonia a few days later.
Collection reference: Philadelphia Museum of Art.
OWN IT.Mont Sainte-Victoire, painted by hand $299.00
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Mont Sainte-Victoire, painted by hand
Paul Cezanne · oil on canvas, made to order
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Real paintings, real brushworkSee what arrives at your doorBrowse all samples → 10. Bathers at Asnières by Georges Seurat
Explore the artistGeorges Seurat →
Seurat's first big painting shows young working men on a hot day at Asnières, an industrial suburb north-west of Paris: one sits on the bank in a straw hat, one lies on the grass, a boy stands in the water and calls out with cupped hands. Behind them the chimneys of Clichy smoke quietly. It is a monumental picture of an ordinary afternoon, as large and still as a classical fresco.
The official Salon rejected it in 1884, so Seurat showed it with a new group of independent artists. Then he turned to the other side of the river. Just across the water lies the island of La Grande Jatte, where he set his next and most famous painting, number three on this list, full of the well-dressed middle classes. The two paintings offer contrasting visions of leisure near the same stretch of the Seine.
Collection reference: National Gallery, London.
OWN IT.Bathers at Asnieres, painted by hand $299.00
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Bathers at Asnieres, painted by hand
Georges Pierre Seurat · oil on canvas, made to order
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Real paintings, real brushworkSee what arrives at your doorBrowse all samples → Questions people ask
What is the most famous Post-Impressionist painting?
Van Gogh's The Starry Night, by a very long way. People search for it more than for any other painting of the period, and more than for most paintings ever made.
What is Post-Impressionism?
A name for the painters who came after the Impressionists, roughly from 1886 to 1905, and pushed in new directions: Van Gogh and Gauguin towards expressive colour, Seurat towards a scientific method, Cézanne towards solid structure. The term was invented in 1910 by the English critic Roger Fry for an exhibition in London.
What is the difference between Impressionism and Post-Impressionism?
The Impressionists tried to catch a passing moment of light. The Post-Impressionists kept the bright colours but wanted something more lasting: emotion, order, symbols or dreams.
Who were the main Post-Impressionist painters?
Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat and Toulouse-Lautrec, with Rousseau, Signac and the Nabis around them. You can meet them in our ten famous Post-Impressionist artists.
Where can I see these paintings?
In New York at the Museum of Modern Art, in Chicago at the Art Institute, in Amsterdam at the Van Gogh Museum, in Los Angeles at the Getty, in London at the National Gallery and in Otterlo at the Kröller-Müller. All ten are available from us as hand-painted oil reproductions.
Explore more works in our Post Impressionist collection. Museum and catalogue records are linked beside each painting above.
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- Museum of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Van Gogh Museum, J. Paul Getty Museum, Kröller-Müller Museum and National Gallery, London: collection records for the paintings above.
- Vincent van Gogh, letters to Theo van Gogh and to Willemien van Gogh, 1888 to 1890, Van Gogh Museum edition (vangoghletters.org).
- Roger Fry and others, Manet and the Post-Impressionists, Grafton Galleries, London, 1910.
- The full stories, with their sources, are linked under each painting.
Ranking follows monthly US Google search volume for each painting's name (OpenSEO, October 2026), with at most five paintings by one artist. Van Gogh's The Potato Eaters would otherwise have been number seven. The Sleeping Gypsy and The Basket of Apples are tied. We do not publish the figures.
