ART HISTORY Journey Through a Thousand Years

“The Canvas of the Eye”

Week Twelve: Impressionism

Impressionism: Painting Modern Life - Renoir: Finding Structure - What is Impressionism? – How the Impressionists Got Their Name - Inside the Artist’s Garden - Monet Was Here – Looking east: how Japan inspired Monet, Van Gogh and other Western artists - Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose – Edgar Desgas, The Dance Class - Impressionists’ Pictorial Space

Claude Monet: “Impression, Sunrise,” 1871, Oil on Canvas

Dr. Charles Cramer and Dr. Kim Grant: "Impressionism: Painting Modern Life" From smARThistory, (2019)

Claude Monet, The Railroad Bridge in Argenteuil (Le pont du chemin de fer à Argenteuil), 1873-74, oil on canvas, 54 x 71 cm (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) Aggressively modern This is one of many paintings by Monet of the railroad bridge leading to Argenteuil, a small town on the outskirts of Paris where the artist lived in the 1870s. The painting demonstrates the Impressionists’ well-known interest in depicting nature and the effects of weather and light, seen here in the expanse of white clouds in blue sky and the reflections in the rippling surface of the river. Highly textured dark green bushes and grass are built up with visible brushstrokes and anchor the painting’s composition on left and right. The subject of the painting, however, is not a timeless rural scene (these were popular with the public — see, for example, this painting by Corot), but an aggressively modern one of a railroad bridge with a train heading over the river. The bridge was rebuilt at the beginning of the decade after its predecessor was destroyed in the Franco-Prussian war, and its parts were forged at the local ironworks. The steam engine racing across the bridge creates its own billowing gray steam clouds, competing with the natural ones. The sweeping perspective of the bridge suggests the speed and dynamism of modern transportation technology, but Monet also shows that technology as integrally connected to the natural world. The rickety wooden fence in the foreground creates a contrast between old construction materials and the massive concrete and iron pylons supporting the new bridge. Old and new strain to integrate in the modern landscape.

Claude Monet, Boulevard des Capucines, 1873-74, oil on canvas, 80.3 x 60.3 cm (Nelson- Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City) Subjects that matter Until the last decades of the twentieth century the scholarship on Impressionism paid relatively little attention to the subject matter chosen by the artists. Before then, art historians mostly concentrated on the style of the works and the way Impressionist innovations in form heralded or consolidated what seemed to them to be the most significant feature of modern art: the liberation of the artist from the constraints of convention, and the “evolution” of art toward flatness and abstraction. In recent decades, however, art historians have seriously considered the subject matter represented in Impressionist paintings and how this subject matter would have been understood by contemporary viewers. Painting modern life The Impressionist style can, of course, be applied to any subject matter, but Impressionist artists concentrated on a surprisingly limited range of subjects: typically, middle-class leisure in modern urban or suburban environments such as the Paris boulevard depicted in Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines or Railroad Bridge at Argenteuil. In one sense, the Impressionists continued the tradition of earlier nineteenth-century Realists like Jean- François Millet (for example in his painting L’Angélus) in their insistence on painting scenes from contemporary life. They rejected historical, mythological, and other exotic subjects and took as their dictum, “Il faut être de son temps,” “one must be of one’s own time.”

Jean-François Millet, L’Angélus, c. 1857-1859, oil on canvas, 21 x 26 (53.3 × 66.0 cm) (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) However, for the Impressionists, unlike the Realists, contemporary subjects typically did not mean rural or provincial scenes, which often suggested timeless forms of life and labor (as in Millet’s L’Angélus), but rather urban and suburban subjects that were changing rapidly. In this they are among the first artists to examine an important change in human geography that had significantly transformed the human experience: the shift of populations from primarily rural to urban areas that accompanied the Industrial Revolution and its large-scale economic shift from agricultural to industrial production. In 1863, the poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire wrote an influential essay titled “The Painter of Modern Life” that called for an artist who would stroll through the new spaces of the city, keenly observing the actions of its inhabitants and viewing the streets and crowds as though they constituted a sort of improvised theater put on for his observation. Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines presents a characteristically modern scene of the broad, tree-lined boulevards that were cut across the older, less regular streets and alleys of Paris, offering a sweeping perspective that was not previously available in the city.

Édouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, oil on canvas, 1882 (Courtauld Gallery, London) Although they did not insist upon technological subjects as much as later modern art movements such as Italian Futurism or American Precisionism did, the Impressionists had a recognizable predilection for painting the spaces of Paris as it had been transformed within the past few decades. Along with the more stereotypical plein-air garden and landscape subjects, the Impressionists also frequently turned to scenes of contemporary urban experience. They painted Parisian cafés and beer halls; they painted the large theaters, opera houses, and cabarets of the city’s night-life, illuminated by the eerie green glow of the new gas lighting; they painted the bridges and grand boulevards of modern urban planning; they painted the new train stations, glass-and-iron cathedrals to modern technology and its promise of rapid movement of goods and ease of travel; and they painted the suburban restaurants, racetracks, beach resorts, and parks where the rising middle classes spent their leisure hours. These subjects may appear charmingly quaint to our eyes, but at the time they were as aggressively contemporary as paintings of skyscrapers, airports, highway rest areas, and office parks would be today.

Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street; Rainy Day, 1877, oil on canvas, 212.2 x 276.2 cm (The Art Institute of Chicago) Middle-class leisure Also unlike the Realists, the Impressionists tended to paint middle class leisure rather than lower class labor. This is a somewhat surprising limitation. Living alongside affluent urban professionals and moving through the same streets were thousands of poor manual laborers. But when we examine a panoramic street scene such as Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day—another view of a modern boulevard—it is surprising to note there is only one person on the street whose dress marks him as lower class and whose occupation signals active labor: a distant man carrying a ladder, easily overlooked just to the right of the foreground man’s head. The exceptions to this general rule that the Impressionists painted bourgeois leisure rather than lower-class labor actually help to prove the rule. Impressionist paintings that show lower-class labor tend to depict the support industries of middle-class leisure: café waiters, beer-hall waitresses, cabaret singers, ballet dancers, laundresses, milliners, and prostitutes (and not the labor necessary to maintain the infrastructure of the city and the basic needs of its inhabitants). Even the paintings of lower class labor are fundamentally about middle class leisure. Cathy Locke: “Pierre Renoir: Finding Structure” From “Musings on Art”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Photograph

Famous for charming scenes of carefree Parisians […,] Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) was a far more complex and thoughtful painter than is generally known. His work is about pleasure and happiness, giving him the nickname, “the painter of happiness.” He had a keen eye for capturing the movement of light and shadow, which he applied with staccato brush strokes and playful flecks of vibrant color. It is not only his application of paint, but the human element in his work that sets him apart. As the son of a tailor and a seamstress, Renoir naturally developed an eye for fashion. This is why we see so many well-dressed Parisians in his paintings. As well, Renoir’s work reflects the feeling of intimate domesticity of middle-class life, all of which came from his upbringing. As a teenager, Renoir worked as a decorative painter in a porcelain factory near his home. It was only natural that his early influences as a painter were decorative French rococo masters, such as Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) and François Boucher (1703-70). These painters’ soft, loose handling of paint with individual brushstrokes had a great influence on Renoir. In 1862, Renoir began his formal training in Paris under the Swiss-born academic painter, Charles Gleyre (1806-74). Gleyre became an influential teacher and was able to take over the atelier of Paul Delaroche (1797-1856) in 1843. Also studying with Gleyre during this period were Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904), Alfred Sisley (1839-99), Jean Frédéric Bazille (1841- 70) and Claude Monet (1840-1926). Gleyre did not charge his students a fee, but expected them to pay the rent and the models. In 1866 Renoir joined the Barbizon painters and began plein air painting in the forest of Fontainebleau, south of Paris. This became a favorite painting spot for Renoir. Thanks to his friend Jules Le Cœur (1832-82), who owned a house in the area, Renoir was able to visit frequently. By the end of the 1860s Renoir was ready to move beyond the restrained atelier environment and began painting shoulder-to-shoulder with Monet. Renoir painted a number of genre scenes during this time of Parisians enjoying the countryside such as Bathing on the Seine (1869) and La Grenouillère (The Frogpond) (1868/69). In these early paintings, we can see the influence of Watteau’s playful quality of rococo art combined with Renoir’s pure joy of painting. There is no feeling of the financial challenges Renoir was facing during this time. At this early period in Renoir’s career he had already found his voice as a painter through these paintings of bustling Parisian leisure.

Left: “Dance at Moulin de la Galette,” 1876, oil on canvas; Right: Chevreul's color wheel

Color and Composition of Renoir's Early Masterpiece – Dance at Moulin de la Galette

Auguste Renoir - Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette - Musée d'Orsay

Let us take a look at one of Renoir’s most famous paintings, Dance at Moulin de la Galette (1876). This painting was first shown at the third impressionist exhibition. Renoir paints a merry scene of a crowded dance floor in an open outdoor space, with Renoir’s trademark display of Parisian fashion. If we look at the use of color in this painting we will note that about seventy percent of the entire painting is composed with cool colors – blues and greens. We also see flicks of red and yellow dancing throughout the piece. If we look closer we will see the dark blues are really a dark violet, which Renoir created with ultramarine blue and alizarin crimson. This dark violet was one of Renoir’s trademarks, but there is a little secret behind Renoir’s use of this color, as oil paint had just come out in porcelain tubes and the manufacturers were giving out ultramarine for free. Impressionist painters were all using the Chevreul color wheel to construct color in their paintings. In 1855 a French scientist, Michel Chevreul (1786-1889), designed a color wheel that was divided into seventy-two parts. This color wheel contains twelve sectors of color: the three primary colors (red, yellow and blue), three secondary mixtures (orange, green and violet), as well as six further secondary mixtures. These twelve sectors are each subdivided into five zones to accommodate different brightness levels. Chevreul’s chromatic diagram, as it is often called, greatly facilitated the study of complementary colors, which are two colors situated opposite from each other on the color wheel, such as red and green. In the painting, Dance at Moulin de la Galette, the color violet is the most dominate color. When we start at the color violet on Chevreul’s color wheel and we go around to all the adjacent colors until the first red without any blue in it, we will see all those colors this painting. If we take the deepest violet and go across the wheel to its complementary color we get the yellow that Renoir used in the hats, which is repeated on the floor where Renoir has mixed blue-violet and yellow together to create a muted yellow. Now if we find the complement of the warmest red color used we get blue-green, which Renoir used in the background areas. Red has been used as an accent color, very playfully and sparingly throughout the painting.

Building the Composition There is little architectural structure in Dance at Moulin de la Galette; instead, Renoir is using color and value to create atmospheric perspective. Also known as aerial perspective, atmospheric perspective refers to the effect the atmosphere has on the appearance of an object as it is viewed from a distance. As the distance between an object and the viewer increases, the contrast between the object and its background decreases. The colors of the object also become less saturated and start to blend with the background color, which is usually blue. If we look at all of Renoir’s outdoor scenes during the late 1860s through 1870s, from Bathing on the Seine (1869) to Dance at Moulin de la Galette (1876), they are all structured using atmospheric perspective with little formal use of traditional architectural perspective. [Diagram on the left] In the foreground outlined above in red, we see a group to the right with very little value contrast. In the front center area, we see the most value contrast with the chair and the women’s striped dress, which are both against very dark values. [Diagram in the middle] Once we isolate the foreground area, a horizontal line created by peoples’ heads in the background becomes very obvious. This line directs our eye across the painting to the group of dancers. [Diagram on the right] In the area outlined in blue-green above, we see very little value contrast, which makes this area fade away. The lady dancing in the foreground creates a diagonal line that leads our eye into the painting; leading us from couple one, to couple two, then to couple three. Finding Structure Renoir began exhibiting works at the Paris Salon in 1864, but went largely unnoticed for the next ten years, mostly in part due to the disorder caused by the Franco-Prussian War. He experienced his first artistic success in 1874, at the first impressionist exhibition, and later in London of the same year when two of his works were shown by Paul Durand-Ruel (1831- 1922). Also in 1874, Renoir’s ten-year friendship with Jules Le Cœur ended, and he lost the valuable support gained by the association, as well as the generous welcome to stay on their property near Fontainebleau. This loss of a favorite painting location marked a distinct change of subjects. By the early 1880s Renoir felt his work needed more structure and he wanted to incorporate more traditional techniques into his work. Renoir was the first impressionist painter to perceive the potential limitations of an art based primarily on optical sensations and atmospheric perspective. He recognized the necessity of composition and underlying structure to painting, so he started to study paintings of the Renaissance and the baroque periods. In 1881, Renoir traveled to Italy to see the works of the Renaissance and baroque masters. Next, he went to Algeria to follow in the footsteps of French master Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863). It was in Algeria where he encountered a serious bout with pneumonia, leaving him bed ridden for six weeks and permanently damaging his respiratory system. By 1883 Renoir was back in Paris, living and working in Montmartre.

Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880–1881) Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880–1881) was first exhibited at the seventh impressionist exhibition in 1882. It was considered the best painting in the show by three of the art critics who attended and was purchased from the artist by the art dealer- patron Paul Durand-Ruel. In 1923, Durand-Ruel’s son sold it to industrialist Duncan Phillips, who bought it for $125,000. Today it is part of The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.

Renoir often used friends to model for his paintings. Luncheon of the Boating Party includes youthful, idealized portraits of Renoir's friends and colleagues as they relaxed at the Maison Fournaise restaurant. In this painting, we have the following people: Renoir’s future wife, Aline Victorine Charigot (1859-1915) The children of the parents, who owned the restaurant: Alphonse Fournaise and Louise- Alphonsine Fournaise Actress Angèle Legault Italian journalist Antonio Maggiolo Actress Jeanne Samary (1857-90) Art patron, painter, and important figure in the impressionist circle, Gustave Caillebotte (1848-94), who was also an avid boatman [Diagram on the bottom] The structure of this painting is very important and marks a distinct change in the way Renoir constructs his work. The front table guides our eye into the painting and to the horizon line (green line), which is at Antonio’s tie. The vanishing lines of this hand rail also lead us to the horizon line. Portraits Early in his career, Renoir hoped to secure a livelihood by attracting portrait commissions. The degree of importance Renoir attached to portraiture was demonstrated by the fact that in the second impressionist exhibition of April 1876 amongst the fifteen works he exhibited, ten were commissioned portraits and none were landscapes.1 It was not until after his commissioned painting Mme Charpentier and her Children (1878) that Renoir finally became a successful and fashionable portrait painter.

The Sisleys (1868), oil on canvas The Sisleys (1868) Painted when Renoir was twenty-eight years old, it depicts his friends Alfred Sisley and his wife in a garden. He asked his friends, the Sisleys, to model for him because he could not afford to hire models. With this painting Renoir was influenced by Édouard Manet (1832- 1883). Here we see much more blending of the paint and smoother edges than appear in other paintings by Renoir. Today this painting is one of the most important paintings of the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, France.

Portrait of Rapha Maitre (1871), oil on canvas Portrait of Rapha Maitre (1871) One of Renoir’s most stunning early works, it is a formal portrait and one of his first important commissions that helped establish him in the front rank of the Parisian avant- garde. Few of his other commissioned work display the richness in rendering of the sitter’s dress, which is the latest fashion. The sitter in the present work is Camille, also known as Rapha, who was a mistress of Louis-Edmond Maître (1840-1898) for over thirty years. Maître was the son of a prosperous lawyer from Bordeaux, and his circle of friends included artists such as Renoir, Bazille and Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904), as well as the poets Baudelaire and Verlaine. Little is known, however, of his mistress Rapha, a girl of Belgian origin whom he met as a student, and who remained his companion until his death. After the death of Louis-Edmond Maître in May 1898, his estate was divided among his family members. Rapha received little of his possessions, apart from two of Renoir’s portraits of herself, including the present work, which she sold to Durand-Ruel that the same year.

A Girl with a Watering Can (1876), oil on canvas A Girl with a Watering Can (1876) This painting is of Mademoiselle Leclere in her blue dress holding a watering can. It was painted in Monet's famous garden at Argenteuil and shows the grace and charm of the artist's work. This was not a commission, but something Renoir painted to add to his portrait portfolio.

Madame Charpentier and Her Children (1878), oil on canvas Madame Charpentier and Her Children (1878) In this commissioned portrait, Renoir gave expression to "the poetry of an elegant home and the beautiful dresses of our time." We see a Japanese-style sitting room of her Parisian townhouse where Marguerite Charpentier sits beside her son, Paul, age three. He is dressed identically to his sister Georgette, who is perched by the family dog. Marguerite was a well- connected publisher's wife, who hosted elite literary salons. She used her influence to ensure that this painting enjoyed a choice spot at the Paris Salon of 1879.

Boy with a Whip (1885), oil on canvas Boy with a Whip (1885) French doctor, Étienne Goujon (1839-1907), commissioned Renoir to paint his four children. Boy with a Whip is a portrait of his five-year-old son, with the same name as his father. The young boy is dressed in a feminine manner, which was usual for little boys during this time. This portrait represents Renoir’s “hard” style, and marks a distinct change in his painting style. During this period Renoir wanted to add more structure to his work, so he turned to the French neoclassical artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) for influence. This painting contains a contrast between the precise lines of the child’s face and the freely applied brushstrokes in the clothing and environment. […] Later years Around 1892, Renoir developed rheumatoid arthritis and by 1907, he was forced to move to a warmer climate close to the Mediterranean coast. Renoir painted during the last twenty years of his life, even when arthritis severely limited his movement, forcing him into a wheelchair. He developed progressive deformities in his hands and right shoulder, requiring him to adapt his painting technique. Before his death, in 1919, Renoir traveled to the Louvre Museum to see his paintings hanging in the museum alongside the masterpieces of the great masters. Renoir was a prolific artist, creating several thousand artworks in his lifetime, including some of the most well-known paintings in the art world.

Berthe Morisot, Reading, 1873, Cleveland Museum of Art

Arthur Streeton's 1889 landscape Golden Summer, Eaglemont, held at the National Gallery of Australia

Camille Mauclair: “What is Impressionism?” From The French Impressionists The Impressionist ideas may be summed up in the following manner:— In nature no colour exists by itself. The colouring of the objects is a pure illusion: the only creative source of colour is the sunlight which envelopes all things, and reveals them, according to the hours, with infinite modifications. The mystery of matter escapes us; we do not know the exact moment when reality separates itself from unreality. All we know is, that our vision has formed the habit of discerning in the universe two notions: form and colour; but these two notions are inseparable. Only artificially can we distinguish between outline and colour: in nature the distinction does not exist. Light reveals the forms, and, playing upon the different states of matter, the substance of leaves, the grain of stones, the fluidity of air in deep layers, gives them dissimilar colouring. If the light disappears, forms and colours vanish together. We only see colours; everything has a colour, and it is by the perception of the different colour surfaces striking our eyes, that we conceive the forms, i.e. the outlines of these colours. The idea of distance, of perspective, of volume is given us by darker or lighter colours: this idea is what is called in painting the sense of values. A value is the degree of dark or light intensity, which permits our eyes to comprehend that one object is further or nearer than another. And as painting is not and cannot be the imitation of nature, but merely her artificial interpretation, since it only has at its disposal two out of three dimensions, the values are the only means that remain for expressing depth on a flat surface. Colour is therefore the procreatrix of design. Or, colour being simply the irradiation of light, it follows that all colour is composed of the same elements as sunlight, namely the seven tones of the spectrum. It is known, that these seven tones appear different owing to the unequal speed of the waves of light. The tones of nature appear to us therefore different, like those of the spectrum, and for the same reason. The colours vary with the intensity of light. There is no colour peculiar to any object, but only more or less rapid vibration of light upon its surface. The speed depends, as is demonstrated by optics, on the degree of the inclination of the rays which, according to their vertical or oblique direction, give different light and colour.

Mary Cassatt, Mère et enfant (Reine Lefebre and Margot before a Window), c. 1902

The colours of the spectrum are thus recomposed in everything we see. It is their relative proportion which makes new tones out of the seven spectral tones. This leads immediately to some practical conclusions, the first of which is, that what has formerly been called local colour is an error: a leaf is not green, a tree-trunk is not brown, and, according to the time of day, i.e. according to the greater or smaller inclination of the rays (scientifically called the angle of incidence), the green of the leaf and the brown of the tree are modified. What has to be studied therefore in these objects, if one wishes to recall their colour to the beholder of a picture, is the composition of the atmosphere which separates them from the eye. This atmosphere is the real subject of the picture, and whatever is represented upon it only exists through its medium. A second consequence of this analysis of light is, that shadow is not absence of light, but light of a different quality and of different value. Shadow is not a part of the landscape, where light ceases, but where it is subordinated to a light which appears to us more intense. In the shadow the rays of the spectrum vibrate with different speed. Painting should therefore try to discover here, as in the light parts, the play of the atoms of solar light, instead of representing shadows with ready-made tones composed of bitumen and black. The third conclusion resulting from this: the colours in the shadow are modified by refraction. That means, f.i. in a picture representing an interior, the source of light (window) may not be indicated: the light circling round the picture will then be composed of the reflections of rays whose source is invisible, and all the objects, acting as mirrors for these reflections, will consequently influence each other. Their colours will affect each other, even if the surfaces be dull. A red vase placed upon a blue carpet will lead to a very subtle, but mathematically exact, interchange between this blue and this red, and this exchange of luminous waves will create between the two colours a tone of reflections composed of both. These composite reflections will form a scale of tones complementary of the two principal colours. The science of optics can work out these complementary colours with mathematical exactness. If f.i. a head receives the orange rays of daylight from one side and the bluish light of an interior from the other, green reflections will necessarily appear on the nose and in the middle region of the face. The painter Besnard, who has specially devoted himself to this minute study of complementary colours, has given us some famous examples of it.

Mary Cassatt, Lilacs in a Window (1879) The last consequence of these propositions is that the blending of the spectral tones is accomplished by a parallel and distinct projection of the colours. They are artificially reunited on the crystalline: a lens interposed between the light and the eye, and opposing the crystalline, which is a living lens, dissociates again these united rays, and shows us again the seven distinct colours of the atmosphere. It is no less artificial if a painter mixes upon his palette different colours to compose a tone; it is again artificial that paints have been invented which represent some of the combinations of the spectrum, just to save the artist the trouble of constantly mixing the seven solar tones. Such mixtures are false, and they have the disadvantage of creating heavy tonalities, since the coarse mixture of powders and oils cannot accomplish the action of light which reunites the luminous waves into an intense white of unimpaired transparency. The colours mixed on the palette compose a dirty grey. What, then, is the painter to do, who is anxious to approach, as near as our poor human means will allow, that divine fairyland of nature? Here we touch upon the very foundations of Impressionism. The painter will have to paint with only the seven colours of the spectrum, and discard all the others: that is what Claude Monet has done boldly, adding to them only white and black. He will, furthermore, instead of composing mixtures on his palette, place upon his canvas touches of none but the seven colours juxtaposed, and leave the individual rays of each of these colours to blend at a certain distance, so as to act like sunlight itself upon the eye of the beholder. This, then, is the theory of the dissociation of tones, which is the main point of Impressionist technique. It has the immense advantage of suppressing all mixtures, of leaving to each colour its proper strength, and consequently its freshness and brilliancy. At the same time the difficulties are extreme. The painter's eye must be admirably subtle. Light becomes the sole subject of the picture; the interest of the object upon which it plays is secondary. Painting thus conceived becomes a purely optic art, a search for harmonies, a sort of natural poem, quite distinct from expression, style and design, which were the principal aims of former painting. It is almost necessary to invent another name for this special art which, clearly pictorial though it be, comes as near to music, as it gets far away from literature and psychology. It is only natural that, fascinated by this study, the Impressionists have almost remained strangers to the painting of expression, and altogether hostile to historical and symbolist painting. It is therefore principally in landscape painting that they have achieved the greatness that is theirs. […] A landscape thus conceived becomes a kind of symphony, starting from one theme (the most luminous point, f.i.), and developing all over the canvas the variations of this theme. This investigation is added to the habitual preoccupations of the landscapist study of the character peculiar to the scene, style of the trees or houses, accentuation of the decorative side—and to the habitual preoccupations of the figure painter in the portrait. The canvases of Monet, Renoir and Pissarro have, in consequence of this research, an absolutely original aspect: their shadows are striped with blue, rose-madder and green; nothing is opaque or sooty; a light vibration strikes the eye. Finally, blue and orange predominate, simply because in these studies—which are more often than not full sunlight effects—blue is the complementary colour of the orange light of the sun, and is profusely distributed in the shadows. In these canvases can be found a vast amount of exact grades of tone, which seem to have been entirely ignored by the older painters, whose principal concern was style, and who reduced a landscape to three or four broad tones, endeavouring only to explain the sentiment inspired by it. And now I shall have to pass on to the Impressionists' ideas on the style itself of painting, on Realism. From the outset it must not be forgotten that Impressionism has been propagated by men who had all been Realists; that means by a reactionary movement against classic and romantic painting. [Romanticism] protested against every literary, psychologic or symbolical element in painting[....] It caused the young painters to turn resolutely towards the aspects of contemporary life, and to draw style and emotion from their own epoch; and this intention was right. An artistic tradition is not continued by imitating the style of the past, but by extracting the immediate impression of each epoch. That is what the really great masters have done, and it is the succession of their sincere and profound observations which constitutes the style of the races. […] The Impressionists, whilst occupying themselves with cleansing the palette of the bitumen of which the Academy made exaggerated use, whilst also observing nature with a greater love of light, made it their object to escape in the representation of human beings the laws of beauty, such as were taught by the School. […] The longing for truth, the horror of emphasis and of false idealism which paralysed the novelist as well as the painter, led the Impressionists to substitute for beauty a novel notion, that of character. To search for, and to express, the true character of a being or of a site, seemed to them more significant, more moving, than to search for an exclusive beauty, based upon rules, and inspired by the Greco-Latin ideal. Like the Flemings, the Germans, the Spaniards, and in opposition to the Italians whose influence had conquered all the European academies, the French Realist-Impressionists, relying upon the qualities of lightness, sincerity and expressive clearness which are the real merits of their race, detached themselves from the oppressive and narrow preoccupation with the beautiful and with all the metaphysics and abstractions following in its train.

Mary Cassatt, In the Box (1879) This fact of the substitution of character for beauty is the essential feature of the movement. What is called Impressionism is—let it not be forgotten—a technique which can be applied to any subject. Whether the subject be a virgin, or a labourer, it can be painted with divided tones, and certain living artists, like the symbolist Henri Martin, who has almost the ideas of a Pre-Raphaelite, have proved it by employing this technique for the rendering of religious or philosophic subjects. But one can only understand the effort and the faults of the painters grouped around Manet, by constantly recalling to one's mind their predeliction for character. Before Manet a distinction was made between noble subjects, and others which were relegated to the domain of genre in which no great artist was admitted to exist by the School, the familiarity of their subjects barring from them this rank. By the suppression of the nobleness inherent to the treated subject, the painter's technical merit is one of the first things to be considered in giving him rank. The Realist-Impressionists painted scenes in the ball-room, on the river, in the field, the street, the foundry, modern interiors, and found in the life of the humble immense scope for studying the gestures, the costumes, the expressions of the nineteenth century. Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker: “How the Impressionists Got Their Name” From smARThistory (2015)

The First Impressionist Exhibition, 1874 Although the idea originated with Claude Monet, Degas is largely responsible for organizing the very first Impressionist exhibition. After much debate, the artists—including Degas, Monet, Renoir, Morisot, Pissarro, Sisley, Boudin, and even the young Cézanne—along with many other lesser-known figures, chose to call themselves the Société Anonyme des Artistes. This group included painters, sculptors, printmakers, and others. The exhibition opened in Paris on April 15, 1874. It was held at 35 Boulevard des Capucines, on the top floor and former studio of the photographer, Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, better known as Nadar. He was a friend of several of the artists and well- known for his portraits of the Parisian literati. Serious criticism or tongue-in-cheek? Although the first Impressionist exhibition was well attended, the critics were merciless. Trained to expect the polished illusions of the Salon painters, they were shocked by the raw, unblended, ill-defined paint used by Degas, Renoir, Monet and company. The satirical magazine, Le Charivari published an account of a visit with Joseph Vincent, an accomplished and conservative painter: Upon entering the first room, Joseph Vincent received an initial shock in front of the Dancer by M. Renoir. ‘What a pity,’ he said to me, ‘that the painter, who has a certain understanding of color, doesn’t draw better; his dancer’s legs are as cottony as the gauze of her skirts.’…

Unfortunately, I was imprudent enough to leave him [Joseph Vincent] in front of the “Boulevard des Capucines,” by [Monet]. ‘Ah-ha! he sneered…. Is that brilliant enough, now!’ ‘There’s impression, or I don’t know what it means.’ ‘Only be so good as to tell me what those innumerable black tongue-lickings in the lower part of the picture represent?’ ‘Why, those are people walking along,’ I replied. ‘Then do I look like that when I’m walking along the Boulevard Capucines?’ ‘Blood and Thunder!’ ‘So you’re making fun of me!’ ‘…What does that painting depict?’ ‘Look at the Catalogue.’ ‘Impression Sunrise.’ ‘Impression–I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it…and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape!'”¹ And on it goes, ever more sarcastically. The article was titled, “Exhibition of the Impressionists,” and the term stuck. From then on, these artists were called Impressionists.

Claude Monet - Photograph The Royal Academy: “Inside the Artist’s Garden” Follow this link to watch a video of Monet’s famous garden, on which he based so many of his most famous nature studies. Link to Video https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/video-inside-the-artists-gardens

Google Arts and Culture: “Monet Was Here” From the National Gallery, London

This is a fabulous online museum of the works of Monet – you can view in picture-tours of his paintings, take a guided walk of the world on Google Earth to see the locations Monet visited and painted, generally explore the beautiful work of this impressionist master. Head on over, and view/read what strikes your fancy. Just don’t spend three minutes and run – take a little time, though you certainly do not need to look through all of it.

Link to the exhibits: https://artsandculture.google.com/project/monetwashere

Joseph Pearce: “The Radical Skepticism of Impressionism” From “Intellectual Takeout” (2017)

Impressionism … is another name for that final skepticism which can find no floor to the universe. – G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who was Thursday

The great writer G. K. Chesterton delighted in paradoxes, those apparent contradictions that point to a deeper truth. Sometimes, however, the paradoxes are so shocking to our senses or our sensibilities that we believe them to be mere nonsense. Such might seem to be the case with Chesterton’s equating of the warm, fuzzy paintings of Monet with the nihilism which denies the existence of meaning itself. Surely, in this case, Chesterton has gone too far.

How can a movement in art as safe and bourgeois as Impressionism be considered as radical as Chesterton claims?

The answer lies in the philosophy that impressionism reflects.

Chesterton saw impressionism as a manifestation of relativism because of its abandonment of definition. It was for this reason that it was once considered daring and radical but is now the height of bourgeois respectability. The joke is that the avant garde soon becomes bourgeois and acceptable. Sassoon wrote a wonderful satirical poem, “Concert- Interpretation”, about Stravinsky's Sacre de Printemps to illustrate how it had caused a riot at its premiere but was thoroughly bourgeois within a few short years. In similar fashion, abstract expressionism, once the enfent terrible of punkish artistic non-conformity is now ubiquitous as kitsch in hotel rooms. Ironically it is selected because its non-figurative colors are considered completely inoffensive! Pretty colors devoid of meaning are vacuous enough to be respectable. The art might not delight the hotel customer but it is unlikely to cause him to register a complaint.

These observations might prompt us to ask ourselves whether tradition-oriented people (I don't like using the word “conservative”!) can be comfortable embracing new ideas in art. The answer lies in another paradox: It depends on how traditional the novelty actually is. Most people doing so-called new things in art have borrowed enormously from the past. The neo-classicists were "new" because they borrowed from classical Greece and Rome; the neo-mediaevalists were "new" because they scandalized the Enlightenment by borrowing from the Middle Ages. Gerard Manley Hopkins was avant garde because he resurrected Gaelic and Old English verse rhythms and scholastic philosophy, old things that had been forgotten and were therefore “new”.

T. S. Eliot is another case in point. Eliot was avant garde because he rejected modernity in modernity's own language while peppering it with spices harvested from the canon of western civilization. The question is not whether something is traditional or avant garde, not least because the traditional is always avant garde in the same way that Christ is always radical; the question is whether something is good (virtuous in inspiration and expression), true (conforming with right reason, i.e. reason objectively apprehended and not merely subjectively “felt”) and beautiful (reflecting the order of Creation).

Am I serious? Can I really be saying that good art needs to be virtuous, or that reason is dependent on objectivity, or that beauty reflects the order of the Cosmos? In all seriousness, and I am indeed in earnest, these ideas of virtue, objectivity and order are the basis of all that is genuinely new in art, as they were the basis of all that is old and has endured. Perhaps we should remember that the word “radical” is rooted etymologically in the Latin word for “root” itself (radix). All that is radical has to be rooted. The new receives its sustenance from the old and decays in the absence of the creative sap that the roots of tradition provide. All that is good, new and beautiful has its source in the old, the borrowed and the true. Now that’s a paradox worthy of Chesterton himself!

Asian Art Museum: “Looking east: how Japan inspired Monet, Van Gogh and other Western artists” (2016)

Claude Monet, La Japonaise, 1876

Follow this link for an informative video on how Japanese art played a role in shaping the work of the Impressionists and their successors! Link to Video: https://smarthistory.org/looking-east-how-japan-inspired-monet-van-gogh-and-other- western-artists/

Harriet Baker: “The story behind John Singer Sargent RA’s ‘Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose’” From The Royal Academy of Arts (2015)

With an exhibition of paintings by John Singer Sargent at the National Portrait Gallery, we take a look at one of this Royal Academician’s most famous works. In 1884, a scandal forced the painter John Singer Sargent to leave Paris, but a painting exhibited at the Royal Academy three years later helped to revive his career. Sargent’s portrait of Amélie Gautreau[…] was first exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1884 and was met with outrage, permanently damaging his reputation as an artist. He had painted his subject with wantonly exposed shoulders and deathly pale skin, much to the disapproval of the critics. Seeking restoration, Sargent moved to England and spent summer seasons in an artist’s colony in Broadway, Worcestershire. It was here that Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose was completed. Sargent’s first inspiration for the painting came from an evening boating trip along the Thames at Pangbourne in 1885, when he saw Chinese lanterns hanging in the trees. He began Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose while staying at the home of the artist Francis David Millet, although the models for the two little girls, Polly and her sister Dorothy, were actually the daughters of the artist Frederick Barnard. In this painting, Sargent reveals his cosmopolitan influences, giving in to English pre- Raphaelite impulses while holding on to the Impressionist en plein air technique he learned from his friend Monet in Paris. He painted entirely outside during the late summers of 1885 and 1886, catching the delicate twilight glow before the light faded into evening.

John Singer Sargent,Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, 1885–6.© Tate, London, 2015. As the curator of the exhibition, Richard Ormond, explains: “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose was painted entirely out of doors at this magical twilight time of day and it’s wonderfully complicated. It’s a kind of Garden of Eden, an invented garden dense with flowers and foliage. It combines the en plein air technique with pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic impulses. With the two little girls lighting the lanterns, it’s an image of childhood innocence.” Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose was first exhibited in the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition of 1887, to a fiercely divided critical reception. A review of the exhibition in The Art Journal notes that “Mr. Sargent is certainly the most discussed artist of the year… as artists almost come to blows over this picture.” The Pall Mall Gazette (a paper widely read by the middle classes) featured Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose in the category “Pictures You Would Least Like to Live With”, as voted by the readers. However, in a write-up of the show in the Magazine of Art, the painting was praised as an “extremely original and daring essay in decoration.” Sargent was once again on everybody’s lips and his reputation restored. That same year, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose was bought by the Royal Academy for the British public through the Chantrey Bequest, a special trust fund received by the RA in the will of Sir Francis Chantrey in 1875. Royal Academy President, Lord Leighton, supported the acquisition, along with other Royal Academicians including Sir Lawrence Alma- Tadema and William Quiller Orchardson. Originally housed at the South Kensington Gallery (now the V&A), it was permanently placed in the newly created National Gallery for British Art, now called Tate Britain, where it is now one of the gallery’s most loved paintings. Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker: “Edgar Degas, The Dance Class” From smARThistory (2015)

Desgas is particularly known for his images of ballet dancers – follow this link to a video about his well-known piece, “The Dance Class.”

Link to video: https://smarthistory.org/edgar-degas-the-dance-class/

Edgar Degas: “Dancer with a Bouquet of Flowers (Star of the Ballet)” (also with ballerina Rosita Mauri), 1878

Before the Race, 1882–1884, oil on panel, The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Edgar Degas: Waiting, pastel on paper, 1880–1882

Edgar Degas: The Millinery Shop, 1885, The Art Institute of Chicago Dr. Charles Kramer and Dr. Kim Grant: “Impressionist Pictorial Space” smARThistory (2018) Follow this link to a brief article about the Impressionist use of pictorial space: https://smarthistory.org/impressionist-pictorial-space/

ATTRIBUTIONS p. 2, Dr. Charles Cramer and Dr. Kim Grant, "Impressionism: painting modern life," in Smarthistory, April 14, 2019, accessed October 2, 2020, https://smarthistory.org/painting-modern-life/. p. 7, Cathy Locke: “Pierre Renoir: Finding Structure” from “Musings on Art,” accessed October 14, 2020, https://musings-on-art.org/renoir-pierre-finding-structure p. 28, Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, "How the Impressionists got their name," in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed October 14, 2020, https://smarthistory.org/how-the-impressionists-got-their-name/. p. 31, Joseph Pearce, “The Radical Skepticism of Impressionism,” From “Intellectual Takeout” Published Jan. 19, 2017, Accessed October 14, 2020, https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/radical-skepticism-impressionism-0/ p. 33, Harriet Baker, “The story behind John Singer Sargent RA’s ‘Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose’”, February 13, 2015, From The Royal Academy of Arts Website, Accessed Oct. 14, 2020, https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/john-singer-sargent-carnation- lily-lily-rose

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