Faces of Impressionism explores the character and development of the portrait in French painting and sculpture from the late 1850s until the first years of the 20th century. The major figures of Impressionist portraiture—Caillebotte, Cézanne, Degas, Monet, and Renoir—will be represented in depth. Among the approximately 70 masterworks on loan will be Cézanne’s Portrait of Gustave Geffroy and Woman with a Coffeepot; Degas’s Self-Portrait with Evariste de Valernes and Absinthe; and Renoir’s Portrait of Claude Monet and Yvonne and Christine Lerolle at the Piano. Artists who worked alongside them but who did not exhibit with the Impressionists will also be featured with some of their best-known works. Manet’s Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets and Stéphane Mallarmé will be shown with Fantin-Latour’s renowned group portrait of Manet and his followers, A Studio in the Batignolles. Additionally, the artists working just after the Impressionists—some of whom participated in the Impressionist exhibitions—will take their place in the discussion; among the featured works will be self-portraits by Gauguin and Van Gogh, pointillist studies by Seurat and Signac, The Clown Cha-U-Kao by Toulouse-Lautrec, and Denis’s monumental group portrait, Homage to Cézanne.
