Fishing Fleet, from the seventh album of L'Estampe originale

Following the final Impressionist exhibition in 1886, a coterie of young painters began to expand the Impressionist project – that is, the examination of the immediate evocation of fleeting light and atmosphere – in a bold new direction. Their intense colors, simplified planar forms, and conspicuous brushstrokes prefigured the Fauvist, Cubist and Expressionist movements that would come to define Modern art in the 20th century. Prominent among these innovators was Théo van Rysselberghe, who deftly syncretized Belgian realism, French color theory, Moroccan luminosity and American cosmopolitanism into a style both eminently of the moment and entirely his own.

Ghent, Belgium