The Great Impressionists

The essay which follows attempts to characterize Impressionism, the most important art movement of the nineteenth century and the movement which is generally accepted as the foundation of all modern art; Post-Impressionism is also discussed and selected works are put forward to exemplify both tendencies. Inevitably, many great works of art in the exhibition are neither mentioned nor discussed, since it contains no less than 100 works.

How Impressionism began

In April 1874 an independent society of artists put on their first exhibition in rooms high above a boulevard in the centre of Paris. Among the paintings by Claude Monet there was one titled 'lmpression, Sunrise'. The same month, a journalist who saw the exhibition published a scathing review headed 'Exhibition of the Impressionists'. From that day the label stuck and the group had to accept it even though none of them liked the term and some, notably Degas, actively disliked it. They went on to exhibit seven more times as 'Impressionists'.

The idea of painting 'impressions' had been a topic of conversation in artists' cafes for years and young artists had been producing sketchy summaries of scenes from everyday life for some time. They rejected the historical and mythological subjects which were still being taught in the academies where art students had to study ancient legends as well as traditional techniques of drawing and painting.

Critics and teachers reacted sharply against the work of the young Impressionists which they stigmatized as unfinished, inept, unlearned and presumptuous. The academic view was that scenes of the countryside, of ordinary people at leisure or work, were not fit subjects for serious professional artists. As a result it was extremely difficult for Impressionist painters to get past the juries which selected works to be hung in the annual Paris Salon.

To appear in the Salon, well placed on the wall, seemed to be the only way for an artist to be noticed and thus become well enough known to sell pictures or secure commissions. The profession was so overcrowded that it was hard for any unknown artist to attract attention, let alone those whose work was not favoured by the academic painters who controlled the system. Despite these disadvantages, the Impressionists began to sell their work moderately well at respectable prices in the early 1870s. A small network of dealers and collectors supported their work and they also benefited from the surprising boom in the French economy which immediately followed the disastrous Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71. By 1874 they were ready to try for a wider public and decided to by-pass the annual Salon and organize their own exhibitions.

The name the group chose for themselves was 'Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs' (Anonymous society of artists, sculptors and printmakers). The founding members included Degas, Monet, Morisot, Pissarro and Renoir; later, they were joined by Paul Cézanne for the first exhibition (all are represented in the Courtauld Collection). The group was truly independent and businesslike. They acquired premises overlooking the Boulevard des Capucines with a broad stairway entrance from the street. (Degas wanted to call the group 'La Capucine', which means nasturtium, after the street-name but was voted down.) Thirty artists took part in the first exhibition, showing 165 works. A committee was formed to hang the exhibition but it was all left to Renoir, who displayed the paintings against a red-brown wallpaper.

The catalogue for the first exhibition was edited by Edmond Renoir, the artist's brother; he also appears in Renoir's famous painting La Loge, which was included in the exhibition. Edmond was partly responsible for the term 'Impressionism', for, as editor of the catalogue, he objected to the prosaic quality of Monet's titles and 'View of Le Havre' became 'Impression, Sunrise'. The catalogue sold for 50 centimes and there was a charge of 1 franc for admission. The exhibition was seen by 3500 people in the month that it was open, but many visitors came only to scoff and the Impressionists had to wait much longer for general acceptance. In the meantime their exhibition made a loss, partly because the French economy had gone steeply into recession just as quickly as it had so recently boomed.

Typical Impressionist pictures

It is not possible to define Impressionism satisfactorily because the term was invented thoughtlessly and covered work that were quite different in style. The novelist Edmond Duranty, a close friend of artists, wrote in 1876 that the new painting was ‘the junction of many different roads. The artists who come to it are not all of one mind, they are men fighting for their independence. They are not in search of a dogma; they want to set an example of freedom.’

Nevertheless, there are half a dozen paintings in the Courtauld Collection which are typical of the new French painting of the 1870s, the great decade of Impressionism. A particularly good example is The Seine at Argenteuil, Autumn, 1873, by Claude Monet (1840-1926). In the early 1870s Monet lived at Argenteuil, a village on the river Seine on the north-western outskirts of Paris. During the summer he was frequently visited there by Manet, Sisley and Renoir and together they all painted happy scenes of people yachting on the river. The Argenteuil pictures almost represented a group style; to catch the fleeting effects of light on water the Impressionists painted swiftly in dabs of bright colour; because of their interest in daylight they broke with the traditional technique of working over a dark ground and painted instead on canvases primed with white or near-white paint.

Monet's The Seine at Argenteuil, Autumn, is typically Impressionist in its informal and apparently uncontrived composition. The viewpoint seems to be arbitrary and neutral. The entire foreground, which in a traditional painting would be the arena for momentous events, is here made up of brushmarks which represent nothing more dramatic than ripples on a calm expanse of water. Autumnal trees on the left are represented by a mass of warm colours continuing below the line of the river bank, which is no more than hinted at. In the clump of trees on the right we can see the scratch marks left by Monet's brush handle where he has adjusted the density of the paint by this simple means. Architecture on the horizon is summarized with a few strokes of the brush. The small scale of the buildings conveys a sense of distance to us but Monet paints a line of his most intense blue just below them so that this passage of the picture surface is as active and legible to us as all other parts.

The insistence that every part of the picture surface should contribute equally to the overall effect is central to the Impressionists' revolutionary approach. They broke decisively with the academic tradition of chiaroscuro; this Italian term or its French equivalent claire-obscure was used to describe the technique of highlighting significant events or passages in the painting with light tones while leaving contrasting dark or murky tones in other areas. By the mid-nineteenth century chiaroscuro had become a formula on which academic practice insisted, despite the fact that contemporary mass-produced paints did not lend themselves well to the method and the techniques of the European old masters such as Rembrandt and Rubens had been lost. Traditionalists in the nineteenth century persisted with studios specially lit from one direction to produce cast shadows on all forms. The Impressionists, on the contrary, developed their own methods of swift execution, which were suited to the aim of representing outdoor life and also took advantage of the peculiar characteristics of modern oil paints.

The Old Masters used paints specially made up for each purpose. It was their custom, for example, to use thin, transparent dark tones for shadows and thick, cheesy opaques for highlights. In the nineteenth century, academics stuck to this convention even though modern paints, produced in collapsible metal tubes from the 1840s, no longer allowed the sort of fine differentiation at which Rubens, for example, had been a virtuoso. Tube paints had to be of uniform consistency, whatever the colour. Exploiting this characteristic, the Impressionists produced picture surfaces which were uniformly loaded with paint; they produced pictures with an even surface intensity. All this is true of Monet's The Seine at Argenteuil, Autumn. The even emphasis across the picture surface suggests to us a quality of ordinariness, of the unexceptional. One of the effects is to suggest, paradoxically, that there is no particular vantage point. We are not strongly aware of our viewing point, that is, Monet's. In all probability the artist was in the scene, so to speak, painting from a boat. At about this time Monet owned a studio-boat specially made to enable him to paint from anywhere he chose on the river. His practice of keeping painting boats continued to the end of his long life, proof, if ever we should need it, of the emphasis he always placed on the activity of painting out-of-doors and looking at and experiencing his subject matter directly.

Another painting of the river Seine in the Courtauld Collection also presents us with a typical example of Impressionist methods and techniques. Boats on the Seine, c.1877, by Alfred Sisley (1839–99), was not only painted out-of-doors but was almost certainly completed at a single sitting. In this little painting Sisley records a scene not of leisure but of busy activity. His rapid brush strokes convey both the sense of busy movement involved in loading a barge and the blustery, bracing weather which scurries the clouds and chops up the surface of the water. Sisley was able to sum up the atmosphere of his scene so accurately precisely because, like his Impressionist friends, he did not linger or fuss over detail. For example, he allows the pale ground to show through and thus removes the necessity to cover the whole surface during the act of painting. He achieves an overall effect which gives as much weight to an incident in the clouds as to the human activity below. Once again touches of the strongest colours are reserved for the distant horizon and no part of the painting is allowed to sink into the role of mere back-drop.

Snow at Louveciennes, 1974, also by Sisley, is another exemplary Impressionist painting. Louveciennes was another of the villages on the Seine near Paris much favoured by the Impressionists. In this painting Sisley studies the reflective surfaces of snow under a heavy but still luminous sky. In both Sisley’s landscapes and in Monet's scene at Argenteuil the central preoccupation is the play of daylight on luminous and reflective surfaces.

At least one of the Impressionists was more interested in artificial light effects, albeit those which ordinary people could observe at their leisure. This was Edgar Degas (1834-1917) who did not care for landscape and the out-of-doors; he preferred the special light effects of the theatre. His paintings are so different in subject matter from the landscapes of Monet that the term Impressionism has to be stretched to encompass them both. Two Dancers on the Stage, 1874, is a great example. Everything about this subject was new in the art of painting. The ballet was a relatively common form of evening entertainment, so there is nothing particularly important about the figures of the dancers, whose delicate humanity is a far cry from the goddesses and princesses of traditional academic painting, but Degas' viewpoint is novel. The dancers are seen as though from a theatre box overlooking the stage. The view is partial and restricted; two dancers occupy the upper right of the picture while a third is cut off by the left-hand edge. By this means, Degas suggests a view rather like that of a carelessly taken photograph.

Alone among the Impressionists, Degas was fascinated by specialized costume, by the odd effects of artificial lighting and the unusual movements performed by specially trained experts. Much as Degas disliked the term Impressionism and little as he liked landscapes, he nevertheless participated in seven out of the eight Impressionist exhibitions. Only Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) exceeded this by exhibiting in all of them. His Lordship Lane Station, Dulwich, 1871, is a typical early essay in Impressionist approach and method.

Edmund Manet (1832-1883) was the only other artist besides Degas to specialize in night-life subjects, such as cabaret entertainment or the cafe-concert as it was called. Such themes were later picked up and developed by the younger artist Toulouse-Lautrec, whose scenes of night-life with their strange light effects have become famous.

Among the original Impressionists, it was Renoir who was happy to paint either in or out of doors. People mattered most to him, especially young women. For La Loge, 1874, Renoir posed an artist's model as the young theatre-goer looking out of the box, with her escort peering through opera glasses at some other part of the auditorium. The apparently casual nature of the composition, like that of Degas' Two Dancers, is suggestive of a photograph, especially since the male figure is a little out of focus as well as awkwardly placed in the rectangle. Renoir’s paint technique is delicate, fresh and informal; there is no suggestion of a coloured-in-drawing. Delicacy of brushwork was a skill which Renoir had learned before becoming a full-time artist, in the days when he had to decorate porcelain for a living. Later he earned his livelihood painting fans with copies of eighteenth-century French masters such as Watteau.

Edouard Manet’s relationship with the Impressionists was curious. He had already achieved some notoriety as an artist; contrary to his inclinations he had been branded a revolutionary, and the Impressionists looked to him for leadership. Manet declined to assume that role and steadfastly refused to participate in their exhibitions. He preferred to make his way via the official salon system, even though he admired the courage of the Impressionists, their methods and their skill.

In the 1870s it was Manet who followed the Impressionist lead by painting open-air scenes with Monet at Argenteuil. The experience was sufficient to enable him to paint one of the greatest paintings of the era, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1881–82. At first glance the scene of a barmaid serving drinks looks authentic enough, but Manet staged it in his studio, using a real barmaid, Suzon, from the Folies-Bergère, one of the best-known Parisian night spots where Manet had already made sketches. Suzon posed for Manet behind a table laden with bottles and glasses while he painted slowly and carefully, his progress made painful by the degenerative condition from which he was to die in 1883. The bar-top with its stocks of drink is one of the best still-life passages of the age. Despite the convincing nature of the scene depicted, Manet rearranged his subject matter in ways calculated to puzzle the spectator. We are never quite sure where we stand, so to speak. The fact that most of the scene behind Suzon is reflected in a mirror adds to the complexity of the image and we scarcely notice oddities such as the feet of the trapeze artists at top left.

With The Bar Manet was going beyond Impressionism. The painting is enigmatic and poses questions somewhat removed from the direct play of light on reflective surfaces which had preoccupied Cézanne, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir and Sisley during the 1870s. That period was over, and for all of the Impressionists except Sisley the straightforward depiction of ordinary scenes was no longer a satisfying aim. A crisis developed in their work which each artist was to resolve in an individual way. Never again would they work in what had at times seemed like a group style. Moreover, in the 1880s, a new generation of artists was to find Impressionism inadequate even though all of them grounded themselves in Impressionist methods. The fact that such different artists as Gaugin, Seurat and Van Gogh trained themselves through Impressionism justifies our use of the term Post-Impressionists for them.

Post-Impressionism

The term Post-Impressionism was not used by these artists during their lifetime. Gauguin, Seurat and Van Gogh were all dead some years before the term was invented. It is also as well to remember that although the names of these artists are famous now, in their own day they were scarcely known. Van Gogh would not have rated a mention in contemporary histories of art and Seurat and Gauguin would have been considered by the majority of art commentators to be artists of no consequence.

It was in 1910, in London, that the English critic Roger Fry invented the term Post-Impressionism for the exhibition of modern French painting he assembled at the Grafton Galleries. The full title was ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists' and Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère was a prominent exhibit. Two years later, Fry arranged a sequel called the second Post-Impressionist Exhibition.

As neologisms go, Post-Impressionism proved more durable than Roger Fry could have known or intended. It serves to describe the work of a generation of artists working in the 1880s, 1890s and beyond, who found Impressionism shallow but whose methods were based on Impressionist techniques. The Post-Impressionists were dissatisfied with simple naturalism. 'Impressionism commits you to nothing' wrote Vincent Van Gogh in August 1888.

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) had worked with and exhibited with the Impressionists, had collected their paintings and studied their methods. But his Haymaking, 1889, only superficially resembles a naturalistic scene of farm work. The picture is influenced by what Gauguin knew of Japanese prints as much as by nature. Japanese woodblock colour prints, popular in Paris since the 1860s, were characterized by broad areas of flat colour and the absence of western-style single-point perspective. In Gauguin's Haymaking the scene is similarly constructed in flat areas with rhyming shapes and contours. The effect is to make a poetic and philosophic statement about the interrelationship between people and their surroundings, rather than a simple statement about surface appearances. The relationship which Gauguin sees is truly symbiotic so the landscape is far from passive. The shapes of the distant tree, the cottage roof and the haystack itself are all as animated as the figures of the people and the oxen. It is as though every part of the picture is living, animated by the same energy that flows throughout.

Gauguin's later paintings show a much more extreme move away from naturalism. Nevermore and Te Rerioa were both painted in Tahiti in 1897. The nude woman looks real enough but she is surrounded by synthetic patterns and harmonious rhythms. Long before this, Gauguin had insisted on the primacy of the imagination in painting and here, as he said, he wanted to conjure up 'a certain long-lost barbarian luxury'. His colours are not naturalistic but evocative and poetic; he described them as 'deliberately sombre and sad'. According to Gauguin, Te Rerioa meant daydreaming. Here again, rhythms of lines and shapes run through the whole picture suggesting deep connections between the people and the imagery, the landscape and the animals. The landscape view outside is painted so flat as to look like a piece of tapestry. 'Everything about this picture is dreamlike,' said Gauguin.

Like Gauguin, Georges Seurat (1859-91) also exhibited with the Impressionists. Several of his paintings were included in the last Impressionist group exhibition of 1886. Through his contact with the group, Seurat had been able to adopt their method of making rapid and accurate studies of outdoor scenes. Man Painting a Boat, 1883, is a good example. But Seurat treated the outdoor sketch rather as preliminary research and his finished paintings are the result of painstaking method and calculation. The stippled and dotted brush marks of The Bridge at Courbevoie, 1886, carry the dabs and dashes of Impressionism to an extreme and the result is an effect less of realism than of artifice. The ironic play of realism versus artificiality was one of Seurat's principal themes, as we see in A Young Woman Powdering Herself, 1888-90. The artifice of the woman's makeup and elaborate hair-style contrast with the real and ample form of her body. The fussy little dressing table makes her look even more plump and ungainly but Seurat's wit is expressed in abstract rhythms as well as imagery. The lines of the table rhyme with those of the hair and there are echoing movements in all parts of the picture.

The year of the last Impressionist group exhibition, 1886, was also the year in which the Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh (1853-90) arrived in Paris. Following the example of the Impressionists he was able to lighten his palette and he learned to analyse his subjects in terms of small dabs of bright colour.

After two years in Paris, Van Gogh became irritated with big city life and longed for the peace of the countryside. He travelled south to the town of Arles in Provence, where the rural scenery reminded him at once of his native Holland and the calm and placid scenes he had grown to love in Japanese prints. Peach Blossom in the Crau, 1889, is a perfect example of his reponse to the surroundings. Before long he was able to write to his brother ‘What I learned in Paris is leaving me, and I am returning to the ideas I had at home before I knew the impressionists.’ Nevertheless, in many ways Van Gogh remained closer to the attitudes of the Impressionists than any other artist of his generation. He hated to paint without looking directly at his motif and he retained the technique of painting in his small descriptive dabs of bright colour. But for him this was only his method, a basis for his own individual researches. He regarded Impressionism as a kind of basic course of study, rather like a foundation course, for all artists. In August 1888 he wrote from Arles: ‘it is as necessary to have a regular course in impressionism now as it was formerly to have a course in a Parisian studio.’ Thus it was that Van Gogh used Impressionist methods to describe his profound concepts of nature and of society. In this picture, the road, the fence, the small patches of cultivated land, the cart and the houses are all crucial evidence for Van Gogh of the harmonious collaboration between human society and the workings of nature. He identified with the peasants in the fields. ‘I plough my canvases,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘as they plough their fields.’

Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), was a participant in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. Through the 1870s he perfected his Impressionist method principally under the guidance of his friend Camille Pissarro. During the 1880s, however, Cézanne distanced himself from the Impressionists, seeking to produce an art which would make a profound commentary on the world of natural phenomena rather than merely copy external appearances. He said that he wanted ‘to make of Impressionism something solid and durable, like the art of the Museums’. In a landscape such as Le Lac d’Annecy, 1896, we can see what he meant. Though subject elements of the painting, water, mountains, trees and buildings, are the same as those of the Impressionist movement of the 1870s, this landscape is sonorous; it has the feeling of a special place, mysterious and majestic. Cézanne defined spatial relationships through small planes of precise colour but his attitude to subject matter was informed by great art of the past. He regularly made copies in art museums and he was always aware of the peculiar nature of the activity of representing things in paintings.

We can see the complexity of Cézanne's thought well in the painting Still Life with Plaster Cast, c. 1895. In the foreground is a representation of a plaster cast of a Cupid which the artist owned (it still exists in his studio, now a museum). The cast stands on a table laden with fruit and vegetables. To the left a still life painting stands on the studio floor. Miraculously an onion on the foreground table exists also in the still life. The same is true of a draped blue cloth and there are other peculiarities of representation. An apple on the floor in the background is the same size as foreground apples. We accept it from our sense of context but its position high on the canvas makes it about as big as a soccer ball according to the traditional rules of perspective. Cézanne understood those rules very well indeed and his reversals of meaning, his representational puzzles, have intrigued artists ever since.

An analysis of Still Life with Plaster Cast shows that edges and contours do not marry up as we would expect and we realize that Cézanne approached his subject matter from several slightly different viewpoints. In this and other ways he called into question laws of representation which had held good for centuries in Europe. This is not to say that Cézanne was merely a designer of tricks and puzzles, on the contrary, his mind and his art were so profound as to provide ample scope for continued speculation in our own day. Of all his generation of artists Cézanne was perhaps the most deeply and best educated man.

Today, art historians have come to agree that the term Post-Impressionism can apply usefully and with meaning to the later work of some of the great Impressionists themselves, for example, Degas and Monet.

A late work of Degas, such as After the Bath, Woman Drying Her Chest, 1889-90, is an enquiry into the nature of the human condition more than an account of a scene. The work is enigmatic, for the woman is pictured as if she were entirely alone; we feel no awareness of the presence of the artist. She is seen grooming and tending herself in a way which draws our sympathy. We are not told if she is rich or poor, educated or ignorant, married or single. We are simply shown a human being engaged in the elemental activity of keeping clean. Thus the work is strong psychologically. It is also strong as an abstract design or pattern. Degas has used pastels to cover the surface of his picture quickly. His crayon strokes energize the whole surface and this enables us to recognize more surely that we are not looking at a work of art merely as a representation of something else. The independent status of the work is reinforced by the artist’s viewpoint: we are looking downwards on to the subject so that shapes obtain an existence independent of their usual meaning. It was pictures of this kind, going beyond Impressionism, which paved the way for abstract painting in the twentieth century.

Monet’s art took a new departure in the 1880s. The change is apparent in Antibes, 1888, in which we see a more unified system of brushmarks. The corresponding unity is evident both in the colour and in the shapes and rhythms. It is as if Monet were looking not only at natural appearances but beyond and through them to perceive some deeper laws of nature. He was also keeping in mind ideas he liked in Japanese prints, of which he assembled a large collection. The bold and decorative line of the pine tree cutting right across the canvas is derived from Japanese compositional methods. The two paintings by Monet in the permanent collection of the Australian National Gallery can also be seen as Post-Impressionist. Haystacks at noon, 1890, is one of a series of paintings on the same subject which Monet painted in a field not far from his house in Giverny. The densely encrusted painting of this picture, say, on the haystack, resembles the thick dry paint Monet used on the trees in The Seine at Argenteuil, Autumn. But now that Monet was accepted as a successful and accomplished artist, with the triumph of Impressionism behind him, he looked harder and harder at surface appearances. His concentration was by now so intense that his perceptions were acutely individual, wholly depending on his own eyes and mind. He believed that by paying the closest possible attention to surfaces one could discover the deeper philosophical or spiritual truths that lay behind them.

He attempted to explain this position in a letter to his friend Clemenceau, which became Prime Minister of France in 1917: ‘When one is on a level of harmonious appearances, one cannot be too far from reality, or at least what we are allowed to know of it’ (Quand on est dans le plan des apparences concordantes on ne peut pas etre bein loin de la réalité, ou tout au moins de ce que nous en pouvons connaitre.). Monet also wrote, ‘As long as one searches philosophically for the world in itself … I simply aim my efforts at as large a range as possible of surface appearances which are precisely related to unknown truths’ (réalités inconnus). What this means in relation to Impressionism is the Monet carried the style of the 1870s through to an extreme and acute level twenty years on.

With Waterlilies, 1910-20, also in the Australian National Gallery, we are aware of a further emphasis. Here Monet paints subject matter which is not merely natural or given; he now paints a scene which he has himself helped to shape and determine. With the help of a team of gardeners, Monet developed his large lilypond over a period of some two decades, painting it over and over again through the seasons and through the stages of its evolution. Just as in the old days on the river Seine, he kept boats on his pond so as to be able to paint from any viewpoint. It is as though through his painting and through his garden Monet wanted to penetrate appearances and join forces with the creative energies of nature herself.

Impressionism was the simple most important new direction in painting in the nineteenth century. Many art historians see it as the real beginning of modern art and Post-Impressionism survived into the twentieth century. The Australian National Gallery has a small but forceful painting by André Derain (1880-1954), Self-portrait in the studio, c.1904. The paint handling is direct and vigorous and is left frankly for us to see; the figure is summarized quickly and accurately in a few strokes. The palette in the artist’s left hand is covered with two vivid colours, blue and orange, offering us the key to Derain’s colour structure for the whole painting. All these qualities of vigour, frankness and high colour are characteristic both of Impressionist discoveries and of a great deal of twentieth-century painting which followed.

Terence Measham
Senior Curator, Education