Printmaking skills of Manet, Van Gogh and more celebrated in Bath show | Art

They may be best known for their vibrant oil paintings, but an exhibition opening in the British West Country is instead focusing on the fine printmaking skills of artists including Édouard Manet, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin.

More than 50 prints, mostly created by impressionists, post-impressionists and cubists, will be on display at the exhibition. Holburne Museum in Bath.

The idea of ​​the show, called Beyond ImpressionismIt is to highlight how artists known primarily for their paintings helped to revive outdated printmaking in the mid-19th century.

Chris Stephens, Holburne’s director, said: “We are thrilled to have brought so many great artists here. The paintings of the Impressionists are so familiar but we seem to have forgotten that the same generation of artists and their successors radically changed printmaking. We wanted to commemorate this great moment in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.”

Stephens got the idea for this exhibition when he saw some of Gauguin’s etchings at the Frieze Masters international art fair in London. “I was stuck with their sense of urgency,” he said.

Likes Rembrandt in the 17th century and later, goya Printmakers were famous, but Stephens said by the 19th century the process tended to be associated more with commercial reproductions of famous works.

“Many of the leading painters of the 19th century returned to the medium of printmaking, elevating its status as a form of artistic expression in its own right,” he said.

The image used in the exhibition’s promotional material is an 1872 lithograph by Manet’s artist friend Berthe Morisot. Manet was a key member of the Société des Aquafortistes, founded in Paris in 1862 to promote etching as a medium equivalent to painting and drawing.

Stephens said the inherently collaborative nature of printmaking encouraged the exchange of ideas among artists of the period. They also looked at Japan’s major printers.

Most of the works in the exhibition, created from the 1850s to the 1930s, come from public collections, including the Courtauld Gallery in London and the Ashmolean in Oxford, although some are on loan from private collections and are therefore rarely seen by the public.

Stephens said he was particularly impressed by James McNeill Whistler’s engravings, which captured scenes on the River Thames in London and Venice.

He said: “It’s interesting to see how he uses the kind of soft shading you can do in etching. It has the same effect as the blue, moody, hazy effect he achieves in his paintings.”

Visitors will be able to see Van Gogh’s works Gardener Near the Apple TreeA scene he observed and drew while visiting a nursing home.

The exhibition explores how advances in lithographic printing enabled the production of large, color prints such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s prints promoting Paris nightlife.

There is also a print of Frugal Meal and a number of Pablo Picasso pieces, including some minotaur etchings from the 1930s. The exhibition explains how Picasso fully embraced this medium, pushing the boundaries and ensuring the survival of the prints.

“It’s wonderful to be able to show the revival of woodcuts, from Whistler’s Venetian night paintings to Picasso’s minotaurs, alongside rare woodblock prints by Gauguin and lithographs by Toulouse-Lautrec,” Stephens said.

• Beyond Impressionism: Printmaking from Manet to Picasso will run from May 23 to September 13.

• Another printmaking exhibition opens in Bath on 22 May. Transience of Light The works of landscape artist and master printmaker Norman Ackroyd are on display at the Victorian art gallery.