Dickens was both a product of his time and a considerable influence on his period. Van Gogh was neither.He was out of step with his age. His chief involvement with contemporary art was his brief association with the Impressionists, some thirty painters who were rejected by the art establishment of Paris and denied participation in official exhibitions.They banded together to hold their own shows and ran counter to accepted tradition in several ways. Instead of painting pictures that told stories in a slick, photographic style, they presented images of ordinary people in the city or countryside. The Impressionists worked out of doors, trying to catch fleeting changes of light, the shimmer of summer haze, the poetry of weather.Academic art was conventionally colored, but the Impressionists loaded their canvases with brilliant hues, forcing the observer's eye to blend their dabs of blue and yellow into green, pink and blue to violet, etc.The academics were still mining the Renaissance for picture structure while the Impressionists borrowed from the off-center compositions of Japanese prints.

Van Gogh would learn all these things from the Impressionists and then leave them behind as he made his own work stronger, starker, even more expansive, more emotional, and more powerful.The Impressionists led him to a new universe of color, but he wrote his own cosmology.Art historians list him among the "Post-Impressionists." Tragically for him, he was too far ahead of his contemporaries for his work to find much acceptance and understanding during his own lifetime.

Van Gogh branched off from the Impressionists because, for him, blazing light and color were not ends in themselves, but merely the means toward

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