The term goes back to the English painter and art critic Roger Fry, who used it in 1910 on the occasion of the exhibition he organised, Manet and the Post-Impressionists, at the Grafton Galleries, London. Paintings by
Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh, among others, were shown there. The distinction from Impressionism is, however, blurred. Cézanne in particular is occasionally assigned to one category or the other.
Through the Impressionists, a clearly changed conception of art had become visible in the 1870s, a first step on the way to modernist art. The late Impressionists continued along this path, but developed new ideas of order to the spontaneity and virtuosity of their predecessors. The tendency was to see the picture more and more clearly as an independent art form. It was to become an object of pure presentation of colour and form, aiming at aesthetic pleasure and the transmission of subjective feelings of the artist. The viewer is thus invited to value the sensual experience of colours and lines more highly than the natural appearance of things, to which less and less importance was attached.