The Impressionist Artists

Impressionism and Its Canon James E. Cutting 2006 University Press of America Library of Congress Control Number: 2005934187 ISBN 0-7618-3344-7 For Claudia Lazzaro, my wife, who offered encouragement, a wry smile, an open mind, and a promise of what could be Contents Image Credits vii Preface ix Chapter 1: Culture, Art, and Science 1 Chapter 2: Canons and Their Structure 9 Chapter 3: Categories and Their Measure 21 Chapter 4: The Impressionist Artists 41 Chapter 5: Museums 69 Chapter 6: Dealers and Collectors 91 Chapter 7: The Core Canon 119 Chapter 8: The Broader Canon 135 Chapter 9: Scholars and Curators 157 Chapter 10: A Second Sample 169 Chapter 11: The Public and Mere Exposure 183 Chapter 12: A Theory of Canon Formation and Maintenance 199 Appendices 219 Bibliography 269 Index 279 Author Information 299 Image Credits Cover: Jean-Louis Forain, Au café (At the café, ~1879, Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Nashville, TN). This image was exhibited at the 4th Impressionist exhibition. Forain is not usually considered an Impressionist painter, and this image definitely not in the Impressionist canon. (New image for this edition.) Figure 2.1, page 11: Edgar Degas, La mélancholie (Melancholy, 1867-70, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC). Edgar Degas, Repasseuses (Women ironing, 1884-86, Musée d’Orsay, Paris). Figure 4.2, page 50: Armand Guillaumin, Place Valhubert, Paris (1875, Musée d’Orsay, Paris). Claude Monet, Le bassin d’Argenteuil (The Argenteuil basin, 1872, Musée d’Orsay, Paris). Figure 4.3, page 52: Jean-François Raffaëlli, La place d’Italie après la pluie (Place d’Italie after the rain, 1877, Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Nashville, TN). Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Le pont neuf (Pont Neuf, Paris; 1872, National Gal- lery, Washington, DC). Figure 5.3, page 80: Camille Pissarro, Verger en fleurs, Louveciennes (Orchard in bloom, Louve- ciennes, 1872, National Gallery, Washington, DC). Camille Pissarro, Printemps. Pruniers en fleurs (Orchard with flowering fruit trees, Pontoise, 1877, Musée d’Orsay, Paris). Figure 6.2, page 101: Gustave Caillebotte, Le pont de l’Europe (variante) (On the European bridge, 1876-77, Kimball Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX). Gustave Caillebotte, Raboteurs de parquet (Floor scrapers, 1875, Musée d’Orsay, Paris). viii Image Credits Figure 6.3, page 109: Edgar Degas, La leçon de danse (The Dance Lesson, 1879, Metropolitan Mu- seum of Art, New York). Edgar Degas, Danseuses à la barre (Dancers Practicing at the Bar, 1876-77, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Figure 8.1, page 138: Berthe Morisot, Dans les blès (In the wheat fields, 1875, Musée d’Orsay, Paris). Berthe Morisot, La chasse aux papillons (The butterfly chase, 1873, Musée d’Orsay, Paris). Figure 11.1, page 186: Alfred Sisley Village de Voisins (Village of Voisins, 1874, Musée d’Orsay, Paris). Alfred Sisley, Cour de ferme à Saint-Mammès (Farmyard at St. Mammès, 1884, Musée d’Orsay, Paris). Figure 11.2, page 188: Paul Cézanne, Les cinq baigneurs (Five bathers, 1875-77, Musée d’Orsay, Paris) . Paul Cézanne, Baigneurs au repos, III (Bathers at Rest, 1876-77, Barnes Foundation, Merion, PA). Figure 12.1, page 213: Edouard Manet, Croquet à Boulogne or La partie de croquet (The croquet game, 1868-71, private collection) Edouard Manet, Plage avec personnages (On the beach, Boulogne-sur-mer, 1869, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA). Preface If ever there was a study . needing as it does the co-operation of so many sciences . it is surely that of Art-history, and I would make the claim that the benefits it would confer would be at least equal to those it would re- ceive. We have such a crying need for systematic study in which scientific methods will be followed wherever possible. Roger Fry, Last Lectures With these words Roger Fry (1866-1934)—artist, art critic, Bloomsbury group member, and enthusiast for the arts and humanities—invited the appear- ance of a book like this one. He recognized that there is much to learn in art from science and in science from art. Moreover, throughout his varied career he was very much involved with the topic of study here—French Impressionism. Fry was among the first art professionals in the English-speaking world to extol its virtues. From 1905 to 1910 he was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and he urged expansion of its collections in Impression- ism. In 1907 he arranged for the museum’s purchase of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Mme Charpentier et ses enfants (Madame Georges Charpentier and her children, 1878).1 It was purchased for a considerable price from the Paris art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel after the Charpentier estate sale. It is now one of the prized Im- pressionist possessions of the Met. Moreover, as I will show, it is one of the thirty most reproduced images in the Impressionist literature. Fry may also have lost his job in the fallout over this acquisition. Nonetheless, he soon returned to England and much later was made a professor at Cambridge. He inhabited an important intellectual niche prior to the “two cultures” era, where at the same university C. P. Snow would later decry the lack of communication between humanities and the sciences.2 Unlike Fry or Snow, however, I will not try to address or redress any larger division within larger intellectual pursuits. Instead, my aim is more modest. This book is an example showing that empirical analysis, although it can take vastly different forms, can be applied appropriately and usefully to many fields x Preface beyond its usual purview. Moreover, as a psychologist and cognitive scientist I feel I have some things to offer those concerned with the arts and culture. I am bold enough to offer, and to provide evidence supporting, an explicit theory of canon formation and maintenance. My key motivation stems from a personal experience that many will have shared. I have enjoyed going to art museums in North America and Europe for decades. I am consistently pleased by, and interested in, the images in them that I had never seen before. These are often more interesting and more rewarding to study than better known works—indeed, than the very ones I went to the museum to see. I have often asked myself: Why have I not seen these images before? The answer usually is that they are not part of any artistic canon. Why not? This book attempts to provide an answer. Among other forces acting on individuals within a society, there would seem to be genes that guide us to our particular pursuits and interests. Surely, as I will suggest in Chapter 1, we all possess genes that help shape a focus on art. Music, painting, dance, and more—even if officially banned in a given culture—are everywhere, universal to all peoples. Equally surely, there would appear to be genes channeling analytic pursuits. The history of science and tech- nology across all cultures is testament to this. Today, academics may lead a broader society in the possession of this trait, but engineers, doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers, chefs, hackers, numismatists, coaches, media commentators, and others cannot be far behind. Nonetheless, the unrestrained enjoyment of one peculiar type of analysis—the use of statistical methods on freshly culled data—may be the manifestation of one of the rarest of genes. Happily and un- apologetically, I confess to be such an individual. Indeed, this book is the result of the intersection of what may be the most widespread of our predisposi- tions—interest in things artful—and perhaps one of the least widespread—interest in things statistical. Nonetheless, the statistically averse should not worry. What I present is nei- ther frightful nor arcane. Statistics are merely rhetorical devices that many scien- tists use to convince one another. Since my intended audience is only partly a scientific community, I have placed obfuscating numbers and statistical tests outside the text in endnotes. With these adjustments, the flow of my argument is less disrupted by needless visual noise. Given that statistical rhetoric is ap- preciated by a smallish sector of humanity, it is necessary to convert its force into something more widely digestible. Indeed, the author of this revelation in my own educational background was fond of noting that the most powerful of all statistical tests is “the intraocular trauma test.”3 That is, the important pat- terns deserving of our attention are those that, when properly presented, are so obvious that they just hit you between the eyes. The key here is in finding an effective medium in which to deliver this blow. The best way to do this, I be- lieve, is to graph the data of interest, making it a picture. But what are these pictures of? A pivotal distinction for research in the humanities, and particularly in the study of history, is that between primary and secondary sources.4 Given a particular event, primary sources are those told by actors or written immediately thereafter by witnesses; secondary sources are those written at a distance, in Preface xi space or time. Of course, most historical study uses primary sources. It is less common, but by no means rare, to study history through secondary sources. In- deed, this is called historiography. Since this book is the result of the study of many hundreds of secondary sources and since it uses statistics, it is an example—likely the first—of an empirical historiography of art. My secondary texts are all books ever published on Impressionist art and re- lated topics. To limit the scope manageably, I confined my search to all books in the Cornell University Library, one of the premier research library systems in the world, with more than seven million bound volumes and with an extensive Fine Arts collection.

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