f the Orient; and for Seraut, obsessed with experimental vision of art. Until 1886, he had only known the Dutch painters and a handful of French landscape painters including Millet and the Barbizon group. Now, for the first time, he saw work by Delacroix (whom he later said had more influence on him than the Impressionists) and by Pissaro, Czanne, Renoir and Sisley. Light, color and brilliance burst upon him. He went about the streets with a palette of bright colors, as delighted by the cosmopolitan bustle of the city as Manet, Monet, Renoir, and the others had been twenty years before him. Van Gogh's Impressionist phase lasted two years. Although it was vitally important for his development, he had to integrate it with the style of his earlier years before his genius could fully unfold. Paris opened his eyes to the senses and beauty of the visible world and taught him the pictorial language of the color patch, but painting continued to be a vessel for his personal emotions. To investigate this spiritual reality with the ne!w means at this command, he went to Arles in the south of France. It was there, between 1888 and 1889, that he produced his greatest pictures. While Czanne and Seurat were making a more severe, classical art out of the impressionists style, van Gogh felt Impressionist art was pretty decorations and did nothing to evoke the sorrow of the human soul. He led the way in a different direction. He believed that impressionism did not allow the artist enough freedom to express his inner feelings. Since this was his main concern, he is sometimes called an expressionist. Expressionism is the idea of emotional spontaneity in painting. The portrait of Dr. Gachet is a perfect example of his melancholy, proto-Expressionist late work. By setting certain colors side by side he achieved effects of unearthly splendor. To color he brought dignity and form, the opposite of the abstracti...
