Hard on the heels of the Impressionists came artists with a different agenda. Dissatisfied with the essentially short-term effects Impressionism had mastered, they strove in their different ways for an art of a more permanent, structured and expressive kind. By refining and codifying, dismantling and reassembling the procedures of Impressionism, artists such as Seurat, Cezanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh rewrote the rules for representational painting at the turn of the twentieth century. The arbitrary color, exaggerated forms, and abstraction of their works marked a new distance between artist and nature and prepared the public for the freedoms of the next generation of innovators. In this study Belinda Thomson introduces the artists responsible for these important and influential stylistic changes and sets them in their intellectual and historical contexts.