This volume celebrates the period in the late 19th century when a group of artists in France began producing work that ran contrary to the prevailing academic opinions regarding paintings. Venturing into the countryside, they broke with traditions and rules and represented reality on their canvases with rapid, fluid brushstrokes. Published on the occasion of an exhibition curated by Fred Leeman at Singer Laren in the Netherlands, the catalogue presents paintings and works on paper by impressionists and post-impressionists from the collection of the John and Marine van Vlissingen Art Foundation. Besides the popular early artists, it also includes later neo-impressionists and Fauvists.