Printmaking skills of Manet, Van Gogh and more celebrated in Bath show

They may be best known for their vibrant oil paintings but an exhibition opening in the English West Country is focusing instead on the subtle printmaking skills of artists such as Édouard Manet, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. More than 50 prints created mainly by impressionists, post-impressionists and cubists are going on display at the Holburne Museum in Bath. The idea of the show, called Beyond Impressionism , is to highlight how artists primarily known for their paintings also helped revive printmaking, which had fallen out of fashion by the mid 19th century. Chris Stephens, the director of the Holburne, said: “We’re beyond excited to be bringing such a range of major artists here. The paintings of the impressionists are so familiar but we seem to forget that the same generation of artists, and their successors, radically changed printmaking. We wanted to acknowledge this great moment in the late 19th and early 20th century.” Stephens got the idea for the show when he saw some Gauguin woodcuts at the Frieze Masters international art fair in London. “I was stuck by their sense of immediacy,” he said. The likes of Rembrandt in the 17th century and, later on, Goya had been celebrated printmakers but Stephens said by the 19th century the process tended to be more associated with commercial reproductions of famous works. …