The second Impressionist exhibition, with twenty participants, is held in Paris at No. 11 rue Le Peletier, Galerie Durand-Ruel, in April 1876.

The Impressionists stubbornly strive to produce light-suffused paintings from which black is excluded, but their pursuits lead to many disappointments, as their paintings, so divergent from traditional formulas, continue to be frequently rejected by the juries of the Salon and are extremely difficult to sell.

Georges Seurat, who has seen and been strongly influenced by the monumental symbolic paintings of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, now meets the ninety-eight-year-old chemist Michel-Eugéne Chevreul.

He experiments with Chevreul's theories of the chromatic circle of light and studies the effects that can be achieved with the three primary colors, yellow, red, and blue, and their complements.

Seurat is moving away from the empirical standpoint of Impressionism toward a technique and a form that are increasingly deliberately designed.

For his large composition Baignade, Asniéres, (1883-84, Bathing at Asniéres, National Gallery, London) he uses small, detached strokes of pure color too small to be distinguished when looking at the entire work but making the painting shimmer with brilliance.

When the jury of the Salon refuses the picture in 1884, Seurat decides to participate in the foundation of the Groupe des Artistes Indépendants, where he shows his Baignade in June.

Seurat falls in with Paul Signac (who is to become his chief disciple), and paints many rough sketches on small boards in preparation for his masterpiece, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.

In December 1884, he exhibits the Baignade again, with the newly founded Société des Artistes Indépendants (which is to be of immense influence in the development of modern art.)

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, at sixty-three still France's leading mural painter, begins work on a series of murals at the Sorbonne in 1887.

Gustav Moreau, Odilon Redon and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes develop Symbolist art in Paris.

The subdued hues and monumental style of Puvis’s murals will influence the Symbolists of a later era.

Pierre Puvis executes an important series of murals for Paris's Hôtel de Ville (completed in 1893).

Gauguin achieves the consummate expression of his developing vision in 1897 in his chief Tahitian work, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Tompkins Collection).

An enormous contemplation of life and death told through a series of figures, beginning with a baby and ending with a shriveled old woman, the work is surrounded by a dreamlike, poetic aura that is extraordinarily powerful.

Gauguin had flattened his imagery with sometimes unsuccessful results before the 1890s, but his "primitivism" has become less forced throughout this decade.

The influences of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes have led him to create increasingly rounded and modeled forms and a more sinuous line; as a result, Gauguin's images become more luxuriant and more naturally poetic as he develops marvelously orchestrated tonal harmonies.