Inventing Post-Impressionism: Works from The Barber Institute of Fine Arts

Beautiful exhibition at Charleston Farmhouse on Bloomsbury’s role in inventing Post-Impressionism.

The show was mainly based on examples of pictures from after Impressionism from the Barber Institute of Fine Art including a late Renoir used to discuss the change in style and the variety of this work.

It then also looked at Roger Fry’s role in organising the 1910 exhibition of the work and how he and a journalist coined the phrase. I loved the inclusion of a set of cartoons by Henry Tonks mocking the endeavour.

The culmination of the show was “The Cezanne in the Hedge” the painting, infamous in Bloomsbury lore, which Maynard Keynes brought back from a buying trip to France after the First World War and left in a hedge at Charleston as he had too much luggage to carry up the path. It was lovely to see it return. I wonder if it remembers?!

Closes 2 November 2026


Review

Telegraph


 

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