Impressionism and Post-Impressionism

Abstract Virginia Woolf’s work responds not only to her extensive reading of literature, but also to debates about visual art circulating within her intellectual circle: her friend Roger Fry introduced ‘Post-Impressionism’ to England; her sister Vanessa Bell and Bell’s lover Duncan Grant were both painters. From early stories like ‘Kew Gardens’ through major novels like To the Lighthouse, Woolf conceived the task of fiction in terms that address the premises of Impressionist painting and literature and Post-Impressionist painting. Her 1925 essay ‘Modern Fiction’ influentially argues that new fiction must register how the mind really apprehends the world: as ‘impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel … an incessant shower of innumerable atoms’. Her fiction raises questions about abstraction and form that are central to Post-Impressionist painting. This chapter provides readers with the context to see how Woolf’s writing shares aesthetic questions with contemporary art.