Impressionists and Post-Impressionists - the most reproduced pictures in the world
These are the pictures on more walls than any others, and nearly all of it is a poster of a poster. The paintings are in museums; the question is how to buy a reproduction that still has the light, and whether any original is within reach.
- Buy from the museum that owns the picture. The National Gallery in London prints its Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Georges Seurat to order; the Philadelphia Museum of Art its Paul Cézanne Large Bathers; the MFA Boston Paul Gauguin's Where Do We Come From?; the Art Institute of Chicago Gustave Caillebotte's Paris Street; Rainy Day. Seurat above all needs to be bought large, or the dots turn to mush.
- Several of them made prints, and those are the realistic originals. Manet's etchings in the posthumous Dumont and Strolin editions; Pissarro's etchings, where lifetime and posthumous impressions come from the same plates; Renoir's and Cezanne's colour lithographs for Vollard; Gauguin's woodcuts, with his son Pola's 1921 Noa Noa edition as the honest affordable tier. Each has its catalogue, and a sheet without the number and the edition is not identified.
- Not everything with the name is by the hand. Every Degas bronze was cast after his death, some much later. For Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh their guides say plainly that originals are not realistic, so a "Monet lithograph" on a marketplace is a reproduction whatever it is called.
