The very vividness of an Impressionist picture is a consequence of the transient nature of the experience underlying it, and many valid-qualities in earlier pictorial traditions were sacrificed to attain its substantial and solid form, texture, organized pattern, and the like. A generation of painters succeeding the Impressionists in the late years of the 19th century reveals a trend away from the limited descriptive naturalism of Monet and Pissarro. The later group uses the heritage of Impressionist color but with constructive or expressive aims instead of a descriptive one. Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas (1834-4917) created in the bright pastels of countless pictures of ballet dancers patterns of rhythmic movement that have more than passing affinity with the great linear tradition of Oriental art. Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) uses the strong color of the Impressionists in decorative compositions that establish him as a 19th century Rubens, especially in themes involving the treatment of his preferred motive, the feminine nude figure. Georges Seurat (1859-1891) restudied the whole problem of color harmony and structure which the Impressionists had posed and developed a style consisting of the use of countless thousands of dots or points of pure color called pointillism; his Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte (1885), now in the Chicago Art Institute, achieves in this rigorously exacting technique a severe and monumental order of highly impressive character.

The somewhat similar intention of Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), as stated in the painter's own words, was "to remake Poussin after nature," by which he meant the realization, in terms of the vital color of the Impressionists of the qualities of order and substance and inherent formal significance that characterize the work of the 17th century master. Painting over and over again the well-known and familiar forms of the landscape around his native city of Aix-en-Provence-a notable series is that devoted to the Montagne Ste.-Victoire-or the groupings of dishes, fruits, and flowers of innumerable still lifes, whose immobility allowed the continuity of visual apprehension upon which the painter depended for the complete knowing that was basic to his thorough pictorial interpretation of experience, Cezanne established a conception of painting as an art of significant form which was an influence of unrivaled importance in the art of the early 20th century.