FOURTH CLASS - LANDSCAPE

I. INTRODUCTION

Does anyone remember what type of painting we looked at in our last class? Landscape

Which Impressionist artist did we focus on? Claude Monet

Today we are going to look at two more examples of landscape painting, one by a French Impressionist artist, Camille Pissarro, who was a friend of Monet's, and the other by another French artist, Georges Seurat, who is considered a Post-Impressionist.

Does anyone know what the word "post" means in the expression "Post-Impressionist?" Hint: what does P.M. stand for? P.M. stands for post-meridiem or after noon. "Post" here means "after."

The name Post-Impressionism is given to the period of art that followed Impressionism and was first coined in 1910. It is characterized by a variety of styles. Many Post- Impressionist artists, such as Seurat and Van Gogh, exhibited with the Impressionists and were influenced by them. Ultimately, however, the Post-Impressionists became interested in other aspects of art than Impressionism's desire to record visual sensations. (Heathcote School students saw the work of Post-Impressionist artists, Cézanne and Van Gogh, in their Learning to Look classes last year.)

II. EYE EXERCISES These exercises may be varied by adding neck rolls or stretches if the children seem particularly restless at the beginning of class.

III. IMPRESSIONIST LANDSCAPE PAINTING

A. The Boulevard Montmartre on a Winter Morning

Artist - Camille Pissarro - French (l830-l903)

Year Painted - l897

Medium - oil on canvas

Props - poster of the painting, paper and pencils, photos of Paris

Activity - Perspective Drawing

BACKGROUND INFORMATION (for the teacher)

Camille Pissarro was one of the oldest members of the Impressionist group and played an important role in spreading their ideas. He was born in the Virgin Islands in l830, the son of Jewish parents who had moved from Bordeaux to St Thomas in 1803. His father owned a general store and was wealthy enough to send his son to Paris for boarding school at age 12. Pissarro returned to work in his father's store, but his dream was to become an artist. After running away at age 23 to study with a Danish artist in Venezuela, Pissarro was able to go back to Paris to further his art training thanks to the support of his parents. Pissarro arrived in Paris at the age of twenty-five in 1855. He studied at the Academie Suisse and was influenced by the landscapes of Corot and Daubigny. Pissarro seems to have met Monet before l860 and by the mid-60s, Pissarro began painting many of his landscapes out-of-doors using a brighter palette. These early works also show the influence of Courbet in the use of a palette knife. In l870 during the Franco-Prusian War, Pissarro was in London at the same time as Monet and wrote of how both of them were particularly impressed by the paintings of Constable and Turner. Back in France, Pissarro helped arrange the first Impressionist exhibition in l874, and unlike Monet and Renoir, his works appeared in all eight shows.

An anarchist in politics, Pissarro felt a great affinity for the peasants and the working class. He envisioned the future as a harmonious, classless society based on rural communities. Many of his paintings show simple scenes of rural life. He was an extremely warm and generous man who served as friend and mentor to a number of artists, among them Gauguin, Cézanne, Van Gogh and Cassatt. In the l880s he even adopted Seurat's divisionist technique of covering the canvas with small dots of color. By the l890s, however, he returned to a freer, more Impressionist style as evidenced by the painting we are looking at today. Pissarro spent most of his career in poverty and had to do commercial work to support his family of 6 children. It was not until the l890s that his pictures became popular. Some of his greatest paintings were done during the last decade of his life. Cezanne said of him, "Perhaps we all come from Pissarro. As early as l865 he eliminated black, dark browns and ochres, this is a fact. Paint only with the three primary colours and their immediate derivatives, he told me." (Phoebe Pool, Impressionism, p.250)

DIALOGUE SUGGESTIONS (for classroom presentation)

Show the poster of The Boulevard Montmartre on a Winter Morning without revealing its name.

Where are we in this scene? A city street.

Can you guess what city this might be? Hint: in what city were the Impressionist exhibitions held? Paris!

Do you know what a boulevard is? An avenue or wide street.

This painting is entitled The Boulevard Montmartre on a Winter Morning and was painted by the French artist Camille Pissarro. Pissarro was an Impressionist painter and a good friend of Monet's. He also befriended and helped many other artists who were just starting out in their careers such as Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and even Mary Cassatt whose painting we looked at in the second class. Like his Impressionist friends, Pissarro found beauty in the everyday world.

Do you remember the name for a painting that shows a view of a city? A cityscape.

Around l896 Pissarro became interested in painting cityscapes. His fascination with city life may have been because he had grown up in the Virgin Islands and had not come to Paris until he was older. Show students any photographs of Paris you may have gathered.

What is our point of view in this painting? Are we on the street? No, we are above, a bird’s eye view. Actually the view is from Pissarro's room at the Grand Hotel de Russie.

Pissarro painted fourteen paintings of this particular view over a period of 2 months. How might each of them differ? They might differ according to the weather, time of day or season.

Do you remember another artist we have studied who painted the same scene under changing conditions of weather and light? Monet

Pissarro had admired Monet's series paintings of Haystacks and Poplars when he viewed them in l891 and l892 and may have gotten the idea for his series of the Boulevard Montmartre from them. Pissarro began working on these paintings in early l897. They all differ somewhat in their details and point of view.

What season is it in our painting? Winter (actually end of winter/ February-March) Did you notice the leafless trees?

What is the weather? It's snowy, overcast, misty The road and roofs of the carriages are whitish with snow.

What time of day is it? Morning We know this from the title of the painting.

This type of weather, season and time of day makes for what overall color tones? Whitish grey of the snow and wintery sky as well as the browns and blacks of the buildings, carriages and bare branches of the trees.

Can you find where the artist has signed his name and the date '97? In the lower left hand corner.

If you didn't know the date of this painting, what evidence from the painting itself would help you date it? There are no cars, but horse-drawn carriages instead. (Point them out) There are gaslights rather than electric lights. (Can the students find them?)

Where can you find repeated lines and shapes that create a pattern? The smoke stacks and windows of the buildings form tiny rectangles. The trees, gas lamps and people are strong verticals. The carriages appear as repeated squares.

Do all these repeated lines and shapes create a sense of movement? Yes. The blurring of the figures and carriages also indicate speed.

Have the children stand against the wall opposite from the painting and slowly walk towards it until they are only a small distance from the painting. What happens as they walk closer and closer? The objects become harder and harder to see as you get closer to the painting. Up very close, the objects appear as just strokes of paint. Most Impressionist paintings were meant to be seen from a distance.

Do you think this painting was painted slowly or quickly? Quickly with not much detail. It suggests a blurry, staccato rhythm. Pissarro painted 16 views of this street scene in two months and four days from February through early spring.

Notice how the artist has captured the hustle and bustle of a busy city street on a winter day. Pissarro wrote of his cityscapes: “I am delighted to be able to paint these Paris streets that some people have come to call ugly, but which are so silvery, so luminous and vital. This is completely modern.”

Let's look now at how Pissarro has created a sense of depth in this painting. What are some of the ways he convinces us that some objects in this picture are meant to be further away than others? Things meant to be farther away are painted less distinctly and fainter. Objects meant to be in the foreground are larger and placed at the bottom of the canvas. Objects meant to be in the background are painted smaller and are placed at the top of the canvas. This way of creating distance in a painting is called aerial perspective.

Another way to change a flat piece of canvas into a window on the world is to use linear perspective. Ask your students if they have ever noticed how when you look down a long road or railroad tracks, the edges of them seem to come together in the far distance. These edges of the road form perspective lines. (Ask students if they remember learning about linear perspective in last year’s landscape class, particularly with the painting by Turner of The Grand Canal, Venice?)

Can anyone find some lines in Pissarro's painting that seem to come together as they get further away from the foreground? (Have a student point these out with his or her finger.) The curbs of the road and the rooftops of the buildings all seem to come together in the background at a point known as the vanishing point. (Have another student identify the vanishing point.)

One way in which Pissarro's Impressionist paintings are different from Monet's is in their greater sense of construction and perspective.

ACTIVITY - PERSPECTIVE DRAWING

To familiarize themselves further with the technique of linear perspective, encourage students to experiment with perspective lines. Hand each child a piece of paper and a pencil. Instruct them to fold the paper in thirds the way they would to fit a business letter into an envelope. These thirds become the foreground, middle ground and background of their picture. Then instruct them to draw two lines starting far apart at the bottom of the paper and gradually coming closer together until they meet somewhere along the top fold of the paper. Do these lines seem to create a road that disappears in the distance the way Pissarro's does? Encourage children to add simple shapes (houses, trees, cars, etc.) along this road that begin larger and more distinct at the bottom of the page and gradually get smaller and less detailed as they reach the background. Encourage them to have fun with this activity and don't expect perfection. This is a hard task but one that really helps them understand the use of perspective in a work of art. Congratulate them on a job well done!

Now let's look at another artist who uses perspective in his paintings, but who creates pictures that are new and different from the Impressionists.

B. Study for A Sunday on La Grande Jatte

Artist - Georges Seurat - French (l859-l891)

Year Painted – 1884-1885

Medium - oil on canvas

Props - poster of the painting; red magic marker and two sheets of white paper for each child; different hats, umbrellas, skirts, stuffed animals, toy sailboats for posing the painting: one plain white 3”x5” index card for each child; felt-tip markers or poster paints for each child; one 11”x17” color xerox of Sunday Afternoon on the Grande Jatte cut up into enough pieces so that each child receives one

Activity - Optical illusion with color; posing; make your own “Dot” painting

BACKGROUND INFORMATION (for the teacher)

Georges Seurat's career as an artist lasted for little more than a decade. He died of diphtheria at the age of 3l. Yet the six major canvases, 200 and paintings and 700 drawings that he completed in that short time shocked and intrigued his contemporaries and have continued to command for him a seat of honor in the pantheon of artistic innovators. Seurat was born to middle class parents in Paris in l859. His family came from a craftsmen background, but his father had made money in real estate speculation and maintained the family in bourgeois comfort. Georges displayed a precocious talent for art, and at age fifteen, his parents paid for art lessons for him. His father, however, was an aloof and largely absent figure in the artist’s life. Seurat entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, but left its conservative, traditional training after only l8 months to fulfill his military service. Thereafter, Seurat was on his own. Inspired by Ingres for his purity of line, but also Delacroix for his color and Millet for the dignity he invested in scenes from every day life, Seurat sought to create canvases that would establish a moral ordering of experience. At first influenced by the Impressionists, Seurat was temperamentally unsuited to the spontaneity of their art and their stress on capturing the ephemeral effects of light and atmosphere. His art is characterized by a sense of monumentality, order, permanence, and an Egyptian-like stillness.

His painting, Une Baignade, Asnieres, which he exhibited at the Salon des Independants in the spring of l884 at the age of twenty-three, established him as an artist of great importance. Shortly thereafter, Seurat began work on the painting that we are studying here. Ours is a final oil sketch for the finished version of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte that was exhibited in the last Impressionist exhibition of 1886 and now hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago. The objects in the finished painting are much easier to distinguish than those in our oil sketch (in the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and include several things such as a top-hatted man and another dog in the foreground that are not in the sketch. Our oil sketch helps reveal the artist's true intentions as far as his use of color because the finished painting was done in unstable pigments (e.g. zinc yellow) that have changed color. For example, the dark spots on the grass in the final version were originally painted orange but have darkened to brown. A major difference between the two, apart from the larger size of the finished picture (l0' high x 6' wide), is that the latter is painted in the style known as Pointillism that made Seurat famous. (Seurat himself used the term “divisionism” to describe his technique.) Seurat sought to modernize art with the aid of science. He was fascinated by the color theories of M.E. Chevreul and O.N. Rood. These described the optical phenomenon that when two colors placed side by side on a canvas are seen from a distance, they seem to form a single hue that is stronger than if the artist had blended the two colors beforehand on a palette. Seurat applied his colors in the final painting in small, dot-like dabs of paint. Yet, Seurat was always more than the "man with a dot," and he never slavishly adhered to scientific theory at the expense of creativity, as did some of his followers. He sold only a few paintings during his brief lifetime.

The greatest revelation of the spectacular l99l retrospective of Seurat's works on the centenary of his death was not his pointillist technique, but rather his genius as a draftsman. This was apparent in his hundreds of seamless, moving black and white drawings done with conté crayon on heavily-textured white paper. Most of Seurat's work has an air of melancholy or isolation about it. While the meanings of his greatest paintings continue to be debated, it seems clear that each generation reads into them a reflection of its own time and concerns.

DIALOGUE SUGGESTIONS (for classroom presentation)

Show students the poster of Study for A Sunday on La Grande Jatte without revealing its name.

This painting was painted by a French artist named Georges Seurat. He knew the Impressionists, but wanted to create a different sort of art. He sought to attain something monumental, classic, permanent and lasting in his art, not the fleeting visual sensations of Impressionist painting. For this reason he is called a Post-Impressionist. He died at the age of 3l and left only six major, large canvases. The one we are looking at here is a final oil sketch for his huge masterpiece that is now in the Art Institute of Chicago.

Where do you think we are in this painting? What is its setting? In a park. Along the bank of a river.

This painting is called Study for A Sunday on La Grande Jatte and was painted from l884 to 1885. It shows people relaxing on their day off, Sunday, on an island in the middle of the Seine River near Paris known as La Grande Jatte (“The Big Jetty”). (Have students identify Paris and the Seine River on a map of France if possible.)

What are some of the people doing in this scene? (Help the students locate and identify the following figures.) A man playing the French horn. A lady fishing A nurse with an elderly patient (hint: nurse wears a red hat that hangs down her back and is seated near a tree.) A mother walking with her child. A fashionable couple out for a stroll with a monkey A dog sniffing the grass. Two soldiers in uniform (behind the man with the French horn, wearing red pants) Men rowing on the river.

Are the people having fun? The answer to this question varies from viewer to viewer, but many children think the people look bored, tired or even sad.

Which figures do you think mark the center of the canvas? The mother and child in the white dress. White is the lightest color and draws our eye to the center.

What is the weather in this picture? Sunny, windy Look at how filled with wind the sailboats' sails are.

Why are some of the ladies carrying what looks like umbrellas? They are parasols, to protect their skin from getting burned by the sun.

Do you know why the lady fishing and the lady in the right foreground have such enlarged backs to their skirts? They are wearing something called a bustle that made their skirts stick out in the back. It was considered fashionable to wear bustles one hundred years ago.

What time of day do you think it is? Probably afternoon. The shadows are long. This painting is sometimes called A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte, but during Seurat's lifetime it was only known by its shorter name.

How would you divide this painting? There are many ways. One is along the diagonal of the shadowy area of the foreground versus the sun-dappled middle ground, and then the darker background of the leaves of the trees. (Point out to the students how the foliage at the top of the painting repeats the darker green of the foreground.)

Where else do you find diagonals? The shadows of many of the figures. The riverbank, the sails, the ladies' bustles, the dog's back, the reclining man in the left foreground.

What other types of lines are important? The verticals of the tree trunks and many of the figures. (Identify some of these vertical figures; e.g., the lady fishing, the mother and child, the backs of some of the seated figures.)

Can you find any horizontals? Some of the parasols. Some of the shadows, especially in the background. The laps of the seated figures. The horizontal of the distant bank of the river.

All these clear horizontals, verticals and diagonals create a very orderly, geometric and balanced composition. This sense of order is characteristic of Seurat's art.

How did Seurat create a sense of depth in his painting? Does he use some of the same techniques that Pissarro used? Yes. He makes the figures in the background smaller and blurrier than those in the foreground. c He also uses linear perspective.

Can you find two lines that seem to meet in the distance and that carry your eye into deep space? The two lines formed by the two banks of the river.

How are most of the figures posed, in profile or in full front? In profile.

Have the children look at each other in profile and then facing squarely front. Can you read a person's expressions as easily in profile as in full front? Because you can't see both eyes and the entire mouth in profile, it is harder to convey emotions when painting a person in from the side.

Can we learn very much about the personalities in Seurat's canvas from the way he has painted them? No. Seurat shows many of them in profile and doesn't paint all the details of facial expression that tells us about what people are feeling. The people are presented more as types than as individuals. Even when figures are shown together in groups, they don't seem to be relating to one another. They appear isolated.

Do these figures appear lifelike? No. They seem posed and stiff, more like statues than like real people. They seem frozen, monumental and statuesque. The park seems like a stage on which the figures are posed. In fact, the painting inspired Stephen Sondheim to create a Broadway musical, Sunday in the Park with George, one hundred years after the painting was painted.

What mood does this painting convey to you? Despite its bright colors and relaxed setting, most people find this painting somewhat melancholy because the people seem isolated and lonely. Scholars dispute whether Seurat was making a comment on the isolation of modern life in this work.

Let's look now at how this painting was painted. One of the unusual aspects of this picture is the way in which Seurat applied the paint. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's study that we are looking at is medium-sized final oil sketch for the finished picture in Chicago.

Can you see the brushstrokes in our painting? Yes.

How would you describe them? They are short, hatched strokes of paint

Look at the skirt of the lady with the parasol in the right foreground. What two colors do you find in her skirt? Red and blue

Now stand further away from the painting. What color does her skirt appear to be? Most students will say purple or violet. This is because Seurat based his painting on the color theory that two colors placed next to one another (e.g. red and blue) will optically mix in the eye to create a third hue (e.g., violet) that is even brighter than if the two original colors had been mixed together beforehand.

Can you find any place on this canvas where Seurat has used tiny, dot-like brushstrokes instead of short hatches? Around the border.

Seurat painted the finished version of this painting entirely in small dots of color. This technique is called pointillism (Seurat preferred the term divisionism), and is one of the reasons why Seurat's works appeared so new and unusual to his contemporaries.

Can you think of any technology that we all use today that is based on tiny dots called pixels? The images on televisions and computer screens are composed of tiny dots called pixels. The tinier the dot, the sharper the resolution or clarity of the image.

Seurat was friends with the Impressionists and exhibited this painting in the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition. Yet, his work was in many ways different from theirs. To summarize, let's see how many ways Seurat's painting is like the Impressionists, and how it differs from theirs.

First, what in Seurat's picture reminds you of the Impressionists? The bright colors The scene of Parisians enjoying themselves The relaxed, out-door, middle class setting

Not let's talk about how it is fundamentally different from the Impressionists.

Does anyone remember how quickly the Impressionists painted? Usually very quickly in order to convey the spontaneous quality of life and to capture the changing light and atmospheric conditions.

Do you think Seurat painted this work quickly or slowly? Slowly

Seurat worked almost two years on the Grande Jatte. Unlike the Impressionists, he sketched out-of-doors, but painted his larger canvases in the studio. Twenty-seven drawings, twenty-seven oil sketches on wooden cigar-box lids, and three paintings exist that relate to the composition of La Grande Jatte. Seurat's technique of applying the paint in small dots or dabs of pure color, as well as his attention to geometric, orderly composition, create an art that was fundamentally different from Impressionism and that has a classic sense of monumentality and permanence. The critics of the time, however, described the painting as “a scandal,” and “bedlam.”

ACTIVITY - OPTICAL ILLUSIONS

One easy optical illusion with color that students can experience themselves involves the concept of an afterimage. Give each student two pieces each of white paper and a bright red magic marker. Have them draw a red square on one of the white pieces of paper. Direct them to stare steadily at the red square for thirty seconds and then, continuing to look at the same spot, replace the paper with the square with the blank piece of white paper. Many students will see a green square on the white paper where the red one was. Green is the complement of red. When you stare at one color for a long time, your eyes tire of it. Thus when you switch to the white paper, your eyes see an afterimage of the square but in its complementary color. This shows the role the brain and eyes play in perceiving color. (Eric Carle’s book, Hello, Red Fox, cleverly illustrates optical mixing for children.)

ACTIVITY - POSING

Seurat's painting is an ideal one to pose because of its motionless, statue-like figures and theatrical setting. Gather as many hats, umbrellas, long skirts, and other props that duplicate those in the painting. Stuffed animals (monkey and dog) can also be added. Have the students first identify and study who they are in the painting. Then direct them to take their places and pose. Tell them that this painting was the inspiration for a musical on Broadway in New York City in which the figures in the painting came to life. If extra class time can be spared, have students write a short paragraph about the figure that they posed. What are they doing? Thinking? Wearing? Have fun!

ACTIVITY: MAKE YOUR OWN “DOT” PAINTING

Rather than mixing colors together on his palette, Seurat wanted the colors to mix in your eye when you look at the picture from far away. Thus he put dots of different colors side by side. Children love to attempt to paint in pointillist fashion like Seurat. There are a number of variations on this activity. If children have written about the character they have posed, they can create a frame for their composition out of cardboard or construction paper and decorate it with dots of contrasting color using magic markers.

Or help children re-create Seurat’s masterwork as a group project. Give each child a 3”x5” plain white index card and markers. Before class, make a large (11”x17”) color xerox of The Grande Jatte (either the Met’s version or the final version in the Chicago Art Institute) and cut it up into sections so that each child receives a piece. Instruct students to use their section of the painting as a guide to creating their own “dot” painting. Encourage them to work carefully, placing dots of color next to each other in imitation of Seurat. When all the images are complete, reassemble the cards onto a bulletin board or large sheet of brown paper.