oncern in rendering daily life and the fleeting effects

Alongside the Impressionists' concern in rendering daily life and the fleeting effects of light came a new focus on the formal qualities of painting. In Man on a Balcony, for example, any illusion of depth created by the receding trees dissolves in the passage of green between the man's back and the window. For the following generations of European avant-garde artists the expressive effects of colour, brushwork, and compositional pattern gained even more precedence over naturalistic representation. Throughout these aesthetic investigations the window motif maintained its power, as demonstrated by expressionist works like Vincent van Gogh's View of a Butcher's Shop (1888), and Henri Matisse's Open Window, Collioure (1905). The latter, a pivotal painting in modern art, transforms the view through the open window from an illusionistic representation of a lived-in scene to an exuberant declaration of the visual pleasure of paint on canvas.