Broadly speaking the term Post-Impressionism embraces the artists working in France in the 1880s, immediately after the Impressionists. It was coined by Roger Fry for his exhibition of 1910 in which he showed Cezanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin and Seurat.
The classification covers artists who were aware of Impressionism but who sought to move beyond it - the term is sometimes applied to late work of the original Impressionists.
In the main, the post-Impressionist artists were less concerned with recording optically accurate appearances - as the Impressionists had been - than with the symbolic or expressive possibilities of representation.