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.“Many of the leading painters of the 19th century returned to the medium of printmaking, elevating its status as a form of artistic expression in its own right,” he said.Preparations for the exhibition. Photograph: Karen Robinson/The GuardianThe image used in the exhibition’s publicity material is Manet’s lithograph of his fellow artist Berthe Morisot from 1872. Manet was a key member of the Société des Aquafortistes, founded in Paris in 1862 to promote etching as a medium on a par with painting and drawing.Stephens said the inherently collaborative nature of printmaking fostered the exchange of ideas among artists of the day. They also looked towards the great printmakers of Japan.Many of the pieces in the exhibition, created from the 1850s through to the 1930s, come from public collections, including the Courtauld Gallery in London and the Ashmolean in Oxford, but some have been borrowed from private collections and so are rarely seen by the public.Stephens said he was particularly taken with etchings by James McNeill Whistler capturing scenes of the Thames in London and of Venice.He said: “It’s interesting to see how he uses the kind of soft shading that you can make in an etching. That sort of has the same effect as the blue, moody, misty effect he got in his paintings.”Van Gogh’s Gardener By an Apple Tree at the Holburne Musuem. Photograph: Karen Robinson/The GuardianVisitors will be able to view Van Gogh’s Gardener By an Apple Tree, a scene he observed and sketched while visiting a retirement home.The exhibition probes how advances in lithographic printing enabled the production of large, colourful prints such as the ones by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec that promoted Parisian nightlife.There are also a series of Pablo Picasso pieces including a print of The Frugal Meal and some of his minotaur etchings from the 1930s. The exhibition explains how Picasso fully embraced the medium, pushed the boundaries and cemented the standing of prints.Stephens said: “It is wonderful to be able to demonstrate the revival of etching from Whistler’s Venetian nocturnes to Picasso’s minotaurs alongside Gauguin’s rare woodblock prints and lithographs by Toulouse-Lautrec.” Beyond Impressionism: Printmaking from Manet to Picasso runs from 23 May to 13 September. Another exhibition of printmaking opens in Bath on 22 May. The Transience of Light at the Victoria art gallery showcases the work of the landscape artist and master printmaker Norman Ackroyd.