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.