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A Short-lived Movement
In the late 1860s, three artists -
Monet,
Renoir, and
Pissarro
- formed the habit of going to sit on the banks of the Seine
and Oise to paint the countryside. Of paramount interest to them was
the reflection of light on the river; it seemed to be constantly
moving and giving life to the water. The many colours revealed in
the reflections gave them the idea of painting light by applying
bands of opposing colours, without using dark tones for the shadows.
With this in mind, they brightened up their palettes and divided up
the different shades, unaware that they were applying the theory
of complementary colours. No particular date marks the birth of the
Impressionist movement, although the year 1869 was certainly
significant. It was then that
Monet and
Renoir both painted at La Grenouillere, the open-air cafe and bathing resort near Bougival.
Each completed works that are now viewed as landmarks of early
Impressionism. However, it was not until 1874, after a long and
arduous quest to master this new means of expression, that the
Impressionists exhibited their work in public for the first time. By
1880, just six years after that first show, the group had already
broken up. It is possible that the process of setting down an
"impression" of a scene in a spontaneous, clear, and objective way
required a naive and enthusiastic approach that was, by its very
nature, quickly lost. What is clear is that Impressionism occupies
an remarkably short period of time in the history of art. Yet
despite its brevity of life, the achievements of its artists in
these few years are of incalculable importance.
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Claude Monet
Impression,
Sunrise
Oil on canvas
1873
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Origins in the 19th century
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
Impressionism
The first steps toward a systematic Impressionist style were taken
in France in Monet's coast scenes from 1866 onward, notably the
“Terrace” (1866; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City), in
which he chose a subject that allowed use of a full palette of
primary colour. The decisive development took place in 1869, when
Monet and Renoir painted together at the resort of La Grenouillère
on the Seine River. The resulting pictures suggest that Monet
contributed the pattern of separate brushstrokes, the light
tonality, and the brilliance of colour; Renoir the overall
iridescence, feathery lightness of touch, and delight in the
recreation of ordinary people. Working at Louveciennes from 1869,
Pissarro evolved the drier and more flexible handling of crumbly
paint that was also to be a common feature of Impressionist
painting.
It was in the environs of Paris after the Franco-Prussian War that
there developed the fully formed landscape style that remains the
most popular achievement of modern painting. An exhibition held in
the studio of the photographer Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) in
1874 included Monet's picture “Impression: Sunrise” (Marmottan
Museum, Paris), and it was this work that, by being disparaged as
mere “impressionism,” gave a name to an entire movement. The
exhibition itself revealed three main trends. The Parisian circle
around Monet and Renoir had developed the evanescent and sketchlike
style the furthest. The vision of those working near Pissarro in
Pontoise and Auvers was in general more solid, being firmly rooted
in country scenes. A relatively urbane, genrelike trend was
detectable in Degas's picture of Paul Valpinçon and his family at
the races called “Carriage at the Races” (1870–73; Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston) and Berthe Morisot's “The Cradle” (1873; Louvre [see
]). Manet himself was absent, hoping for academic success; his “Gare
Saint-Lazare” (1873; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.),
influenced by the Impressionist palette, was accepted at the Salon.
Modeling himself on Pissarro, Cézanne sublimated the turbulent
emotions of his earlier work in pictures that were studied directly
and closelyfrom nature; he followed the method for the rest of his
life.
The experiment of an independent exhibition was repeated in 1876,
though with fewer participants. Monet now began to make studies of
the Gare Saint-Lazare. Renoir used effects of dappled light and
shadow to explore genre subjects such as “Le Moulin de la galette”
(1876; Louvre [see ]). In 1877 only 18 artists exhibited. The major
painters began to go their separate ways, particularly as there were
disputes about whether to continue with the independent exhibitions.
Cézanne, who did not exhibit with the Impressionists again, was
perhaps the first to realize that a critical stage had been reached.
For the first time, a style had been based on the openly individual
character of a technique rather than on the form of a particular
subject or the way it was formulated. A style that admits to
painting as being only a matter of paint raises in a peculiarly
acute form the question of how far the qualities of art are
intrinsic. Impressionism in the 1870s was inseparable from
heightened visual experience of a sensuously satisfying world. But
the blocklike shapes in Cézanne's pictures, such as the portrait of
his patron Victor Chocquet (c. 1877; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio),
suggest that for him the relationship between the colour patches on
his canvas was equally important. In the years that followed,he
systematized his technique into patterns of parallel brushstrokes
that gave a new significance to the pictorial surface (see ). An
unassuming series of still lifes and self-portraits by Cézanne were
painted in 1879–80, and these, when they became known, profoundly
impressed the younger generation, who reckoned them to be as
monumental as the great art of the past, yet in a subtly different
way that was inherent in the actual manner of painting.
The style of the 1870s was formless from a traditional standpoint,
and at the beginning of the next decade Renoir decided that he had
gone to the limit with Impressionism and “did not know either how to
paint or draw.” Following a trip to Italy, he set about acquiring a
wiry, linear style that was the direct opposite of his relaxed,
freely brushed manner of earlier years.
The appearance of a new generation posed a fresh challenge. Georges
Seurat was moving away from the empirical standpoint of
Impressionism toward a technique (Pointillism) and a form that were
increasingly deliberately designed. Paul Gauguin, taking his
starting point from Cézanne's style of about 1880, passed from a
capricious personal type of Impressionism to a greater use of
symbols. He exhibited with the Impressionists from 1880 onward, but
it was soon evident that group shows could no longer accommodate the
growing diversity. In 1884, after the Salon jury had been
particularly harsh, the Société des Artistes Indépendants was
formed. The last Impressionist group show was held in 1886. Only
Monet and Armand Guillaumin, to whose efforts the group owed much of
its eventual recognition, were now in the strict sense
Impressionists. Monet, who had exhibited only once since 1879,
continued to build on the original foundation of the style, the
rendering of visual impression through colour in paintings that
studied a single motif in varying lights. For him the formlessness
and the homogeneity of Impressionism were its ultimate virtues. In
his last series of “Water Lilies,” painted between 1906 and 1926,
the shimmering of light eventually lost its last descriptive
content, and only the colour and curling movement of his brush
carried a general all-pervading reference to the visual world.
Renoir's later work was equally expansive; his sympathetic vision of
humanity revealed its own inherent breadth and grandeur.
Impressionism, in one aspect, continued the main directionof
19th-century painting, and after 1880 the movement was an
international one, taking on independent national characteristics.
Russia produced an exponent in Isaak Ilich Levitan, and Scotland one
in William MacTaggart. In Italy Telemarco Signorini and in the
United States such painters as Childe Hassam developed modified
forms of the style. In France, and to some extent in Germany with
Max Liebermann, Impressionism provided a basis for the styles that
followed.
Impressionism
French Impressionnisme a major movement, first in painting and later
inmusic, that developed chiefly in France during the late 19th and
early 20th centuries. Impressionist painting comprises the work
produced betweenabout 1867 and 1886 by a group of artists who shared
a set of related approaches and techniques. The most conspicuous
characteristic of Impressionism was an attempt to accurately and
objectively record visual reality in terms of transient effects of
light and colour. The principal Impressionist painters were Claude
Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley,
Berthe Morisot, Armand Guillaumin, and Frédéric Bazille, who worked
together, influenced each other,and exhibited together
independently. Edgar Degas and PaulCézanne also painted in an
Impressionist style for a time in the early 1870s. The established
painter Édouard Manet, whose work in the 1860s greatly influenced
Monet and others of the group, himself adopted the Impressionist
approach about 1873.
These artists became dissatisfied early in their careers with
academic teaching's emphasis on depicting a historical or
mythological subject matter with literary or anecdotal overtones.
They also rejected the conventional imaginative or idealizing
treatments of academic painting. By the late 1860s, Manet's art
reflected a new aesthetic—which was to be a guiding force in
Impressionist work—in which the importance of the traditional
subject matter was downgraded and attention was shifted to the
artist's manipulation of colour, tone, and texture as ends in
themselves. In Manet's painting the subject became a vehicle for the
artful composition of areas of flat colour, and perspectival depth
was minimized so that the viewer would look at the surface patterns
and relationships of the picture rather than into the illusory
three-dimensional space it created. About the same time, Monet was
influenced by the innovative painters Eugene Boudin and J.R.
Jongkind, who depicted fleeting effects of sea and sky by means of
highly coloured and texturally varied methods of paint application.
The Impressionists also adopted Boudin's practice of painting
entirely out-of-doors while looking at the actual scene, instead of
finishing up his painting from sketches in the studio, as was the
conventional practice.
In the late 1860s Monet, Pisarro, Renoir, and others began painting
landscapes and river scenes in which they tried to dispassionately
record the colours and forms of objects as they appeared in natural
light at a given time. These artists abandoned the traditional
landscape palette of muted greens, browns, and grays and instead
painted in a lighter, sunnier, more brilliant key. They began by
painting the play of light upon water and the reflected colours of
its ripples, trying to reproduce the manifold and animated effects
of sunlight and shadow and of direct and reflected light that they
observed. In their efforts to reproduce immediate visualimpressions
as registered on the retina, they abandoned the use of grays and
blacks in shadows as inaccurate and used complementary colours
instead. More importantly, they learned to build up objects out of
discrete flecks and dabs of pure harmonizing or contrasting colour,
thus evoking the broken-hued brilliance and the variations of hue
produced bysunlight and its reflections. Forms in their pictures
lost their clear outlines and became dematerialized, shimmering and
vibrating in a re-creation of actual outdoor conditions. And
finally, traditional formal compositions were abandoned in favour of
a more casual and less contrived disposition of objects within the
picture frame. The Impressionists extended their new techniques to
depict landscapes, trees, houses, and even urban street scenes and
railroad stations.
In 1874 the group held its first show, independent of the official
Salon of the French Academy, which had consistentlyrejected most of
their works. Monet's painting “Impression: Sunrise” (1872; Musée
Marmottan, Paris) earned them the initially derisive name
“Impressionists” from the journalist Louis Leroy writing in the
satirical magazine Le Charivari in 1874. The artists themselves soon
adopted the name as descriptive of their intention to accurately
convey visual “impressions.” They held seven subsequent shows, the
last in 1886. During that time they continued to develop their own
personal and individual styles. All, however, affirmed in their work
the principles of freedom of technique, a personal rather than a
conventional approach to subject matter, and the truthful
reproduction of nature.
By the mid-1880s the Impressionist group had begun to dissolve as
each painter increasingly pursued his own aesthetic interests and
principles. In its short existence, however, it had accomplished a
revolution in the history of art, providing a technical starting
point for the Postimpressionist artists Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas,
Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Georges Seurat and freeing all
subsequent Western painting from traditional techniques and
approaches to subject matter.
In music, Claude Debussy has always been considered the principal
Impressionist. Even though Debussy was influenced by the general
aesthetic attitudes of Impressionist painters, he made no attempts
to compose with musical techniques that were closely analogous to
techniques of painting. Furthermore, the characteristics of
Debussy's music are so variable from the first through the last of
his compositions that even a general sense of Impressionism might
best be restricted to most of his music composed between about 1892
to 1903 and to certain specific later compositions strongly
resembling those works in style. Some of these Impressionist works
would be the opera Pelléas et Mélisande (first performed in 1902),
the orchestral piece “Nuages” (“Clouds,” from Nocturnes, completed
in 1899), and the piano piece “Voiles” (“Sails,” from Douze Préludes,
Book I, 1910). Other composers considered Impressionistic include
Maurice Ravel, Frederick Delius, Ottorino Respighi, Karol
Szymanowski, and Charles Griffes.
Musical Impressionism is often thought to refer to subtle fragility,
amorphous passivity, and vague mood music. A more accurate
characterization of Impressionist music wouldinclude restraint and
understatement, a static quality, and a provocatively colourful
effect resulting from composers' fascination with pure sound as a
beautiful and mysterious end in itself. Technically, these
characteristics often result from a static use of harmony, ambiguous
tonality, a lack of sharp formal contrasts and of onward rhythmic
drive, and a blurring of the distinction between melody and
accompaniment. Although Impressionism has been considered a movement
away from the excesses of Romanticism, the sources of many of its
characteristics may be found in the works of composers who are also
considered to be the Romantic precursors of Expressionism—e.g.,
Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, and Aleksandr Scriabin.
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The Pioneers of Impressionism
Among the leading Impressionists was
Camille Pissarro (1830-1903).
Born on the island of St Thomas in the West Indies to a Creole
mother and a Jewish father of Spanish origin, he always painted his
exotic canvases in strong and lively colours. He never attempted to
portray the lightness of air and water but remained attached to the
solidity of his subject matter. His preoccupations with the rules of
composition led him to depict three-dimensional space with minute,
separate dots, a technique that would form the heart of pointillism
and divisionism. Uncompromising, tenacious, and an anarchist, he was
the oldest of the Impressionists and therefore had some authority in
the eyes of the other artists -
Cezanne said of him:
"He is a man to consult; he is a bit like God."
A participant in all the Impressionist exhibitions,
Pissarro
promoted and defended the movement from the beginning, claiming:
"The Impressionists are in the right, supporting a solid art based
on sensations, and it is an honest viewpoint." Widely considered to
be the most consistent of the Impressionist group,
Alfred Sisley
(1839-99) was born in Paris of English parents. He devoted himself
almost exclusively to landscapes, mostly painting the countryside to
the west of Paris, where he lived. His work was dominated by images
of the River Seine, the floodwaters at Port-Marly, rows of poplars,
reflections on the snow, and the delicate mist that hung over the
fields. The sky was an important element in his work, and he
employed various techniques to create a sky that "would not be
simply a background." His canvases were not highly esteemed during
his lifetime and were less respected than those of the other
Impressionists. Little by little his paintings lost their vitality,
becoming less interesting and more simplistic.
Claude Monet
(1840-1926), the painter most faithful to his visual sensations, was
described by Cezanne as "Only an eye but my God, what an eye!" It
was Monet who encouraged the other members of the group to paint out
of doors. His canvas exhibited at the first Impressionist show in
1874 was called Impression, Sunrise, which prompted the journalist
Louis Leroy to label the whole group the "Impressionists". In
Monet's works, form is lost in the quest to depict light. The artist
took this to such extremes that he went beyond merely transcribing
what he saw: with vague shapes for subjects and colours broken up
into thousands of gradations, his paintings verged on the abstract.
Together with Monet and
Pissarro,
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)
was one of the first to spread the doctrine of Impressionism at the
end of the 1860s. He filled his canvases with a steady, diffused
light, bringing figures and landscapes together under one rhythmic
and constant source of illumination. In 1881, he visited Rome, where
he found "the wisdom of
Raphael'', who "like me, looks for the
impossible." Impressionism, the "impossible" undertaking that seemed
to challenge the very shape of nature, found in
Renoir's work a
unique, structural solidity in his depiction of young women. These
figures became increasingly more imposing but were graceful and
softly lit: "I believe I have been able to achieve
the grandeur of
Antiquity," he declared. A friend of Renoir,
Monet, and
Sisley,
Frederic Bazille (1841-70) was never a fully committed
Impressionist. "I wish to give each subject its own weight and
volume and not paint only outward appearances," he said. Tragically,
Bazille's career was cut short when he was killed in action during
the Franco-Prussian war.
Armand Guillaumin (1841-1927) displayed works at all the
Impressionist exhibitions except those of 1876 and 1879. His palette
became increasingly brilliant and unnatural. The vivid colours were
arranged in sharp contrasts, similar to those found in the work of
Paul Gauguin.
Berthe Morisot (1841-95), the daughter of wealthy
parents and a descendant of the
painter
Fragonard, exhibited regularly at the official Salon before
opting enthusiastically to join the Impressionists. She took part in
all but one of their shows and, in 1868, met
Edouard Manet, who
became her teacher and close friend. She later married his brother
Eugene. The two artists influenced each other greatly, and it was
Morisot who persuaded
Manet to experiment with the "rainbow palette"
of the Impressionists. In her own work, she never used the group's
trademark short, broken brushstrokes but retained her own delicate,
feathery technique. Morisot's women - reading, cooking, and tending
to children - are solid forms with great presence, not figures swept
away by the passing moment. Edouard Manet (1832-83) was in many ways
separate from the Impressionists. The son of a Paris magistrate, he
was a
fashionable, urbane gentleman painte and friend of the poets
Mallarme and Baudelaire. He sought the approval of the most
influential critics and recognition from the official Salon and
found their constant rejection very upsetting. In terms of
influence, Manet owed his masterly handling of pigment, known as
peinture claire, to Courbet and
Velazquez. Later, Japanese art had a
deep impact on his work, and his subjects, often finished in the
studio, became more unreal and flattened. The colour was spread
directly over the white canvas, with none of the half-tones of the
academic painter. His first one-man exhibition, held in 1863 at the
Galerie Marinet, was an important event for the Impressionists, who
in the same year exhibited at the Salon des Refuses. In the 1870s,
Manet, influenced by
Morisot, had more contact with the group.
Leaving his studio to paint outdoors, his work became lighter and
more spontaneous, capturing with immediacy the farewells at a port
in Departure of the Folkestone Boat (1868-71) and catching the
sparkle of the water in The Seine at Argenteuil (1874). Although a
regular participant in their exhibitions,
Edgar Degas (1834-1917)
never considered himself a true Impressionist, claiming, "There is
nothing less spontaneous than my art." The son of a wealthy banker
and a Creole woman, he found early inspiration in the work of the
Renaissance masters. He preferred painting in his studio to out of
doors and favoured artificial light over sunlight - he found it
highlighted the movements of his famous ballerinas.
Mary Cassatt
(1844-1926), from an American banking family with French ancestors,
shared with her friend Degas a special love for drawing. She
exhibited with the Impressionists for the first time in 1879. Her
linear style and talent for combining separate elements led her to
the creation of the coloured lithographs and engravings that are
among her most successful works.
Giuseppe de Nittis (1846-84), a
friend of Degas,
Manet,
Caillebotte, and
Toulouse-Lautrec,
participated in the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874 with five
paintings. His scenes depicting the elegant society of Parisian life
and his impressions of London were a great success. In 1878 he was
awarded the Legion of Honour.
Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) exhibited
with the Impressionists in 1874 and 1877 but, like
Degas, never
identified himself with the group or wholly embraced their ideas.
With the exception of Pissarro, with whom he shared a long and
productive friendship, they did not completely understand him. When
Cezanne started painting, his art was romantic, heroic, and erotic.
Initially, he used thick, dark paint, but after meeting some of the
group, his palette became lighter. Rather than catching fleeting
impressions and the transient effects of light, he preferred to
contemplate his subject in order to produce more structured,
balanced, and geometric compositions. He gave up his brush for a
palette knife, which was better suited to reproducing the mass and
volume of his subjects, and forgot about painting atmospheres.
Towards the end of his life, he returned to his home town,
Aix-en-Provence, to paint nature "in the sphere, the cone, and the
cylinder." He concentrated on landscapes, particularly views of Mont
Sainte-Victoire, and claimed: "One must learn to paint from these
simple forms; one will then be able to do whatever one wishes." Also
difficult to classify as true Impressionists are the French artist
and collector Gustave Caillebotte (1848-94), who painted
contemporary life in a classical style, and
Henri de
Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), whose subjects reveal a genuine sense
of tragedy.
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Various Kinds of Impressionism
The key protagonists of Impressionism did not work according to any
programme or plan, nor did they have any preconceived ideas. In
fact, they felt liberated and free: Renoir boasted that he did not
know from one day to the next what he was going to paint, while
Monet claimed he painted just like a bird sings. Although the
Impressionists remained a harmonious group, all the artists
connected with the movement spent a significant amount of time
working independently, resolving any problems they came up against
each according to his or her own instincts. Even the writer Zola, a
friend of Cezanne and great supporter of
Manet and Impressionism,
could not quite grasp what it was that unified the group. In his
articles in L'Evenement he tried in vain to find the right
definition. There was certainly much discussion about their work
among the Parisian painters at the Cafe Taranne and Cafe Guerbois,
but this almost always proved sterile. "Don't ask me whether a
painting should be objective or subjective. I couldn't care less,"
Renoir would say, uninterested in confronting the stylistic problems
that obsessed Cezanne or
Seurat.
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CAMILLE PISSARRO
The Creole of the Impressionists,
Pissarro started drawing as a
child in Venezuela. In France, he pursued an active, artistic life,
preferring Rouen, Dieppe, and other towns to the capital that so
inspired the other artists. His career followed a course of
continuous artistic experimentation, which placed him closest to
Seurat among the Impressionists. He produced mainly
plein air
paintings of rural landscapes and urban views.
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Camille Pissarro
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
born July 10, 1830, St. Thomas, Danish West Indies
died Nov. 13, 1903, Paris
French Impressionist painter, who endured prolonged financial
hardship inkeeping faith with the aims of Impressionism. Despite
acute eye trouble, his later years were his most prolific. The
Parisianand provincial scenes of this period include “Place du
Théâtre Française” (1898) and “Bridge at Bruges” (1903).
Pissarro was the son of a prosperous Jewish merchant, Abraham
Gabriel Pissarro, and Rachel Manzano-Pomié. At the age of 12 he left
home for studies in Paris, where he showed an early interest in art.
Returning to the West Indies after five years to work in his
father's store, he began makingsketches of the exotic island and its
people. Because he was unable to obtain his father's permission to
study art, he ran away to Caracas in 1853 and remained there for two
years with the Danish painter Fritz Melbye. Finally, Pissarro's
father relented, and in 1855 he returned to France. His earliest
canvases, dating from this period, are figure paintings and
landscapes of the tropics and of the French countryside; although
broadly painted, they show the carefulobservation of nature that was
to remain a characteristic of his art throughout his life.
The uninspired academic teaching at the École des Beaux-Arts, where
he was enrolled, led Pissarro to seek outthe painter Camille Corot,
who permitted Pissarro to call himself Corot's “pupil” at a Salon
exhibition in 1864. At this time Pissarro was also attracted to the
rural, sentimental paintings of the Barbizon artist Jean-François
Millet and to the works of Gustave Courbet, the leading proponent of
everyday Realism. During the 1860s Pissarro participated in the
famous Parisian Café Guerbois discussions, in which artists and
writers exchanged ideas, and worked with the younger painters
Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet. To escape the Franco-German War, in
1870 Pissarro fled to England; there he and Monet, who had also fled
France, visited the museums, where they viewed British landscape
paintings. It was in London that Pissarro married Julie Vellay,
formerly his mother's maid, who had already borne him two of their
seven children.
When Pissarro returned to France in 1871, he found his house in
Louveciennes looted and a great number of his paintings destroyed.
Soon he was to look for another house in Pontoise. (Because it was
costly to live in Paris, Pissarro, like several of his painter
friends, lived in villages not far from the city.) His surroundings
formed the theme of his art for some 30 years and were always
carefully chosen: “I require a spot that has beauty!” At Pontoise he
was joined by Paul Cézanne in 1872, and the two of them painted
out-of-doors, even in the middle of winter.
Pissarro's paintings are never dramatic; on the contrary, his
leading motifs during the 1870s and 1880s are simply houses,
factories, trees, haystacks, fields, labouring peasants, and river
scenes. Forms do not dissolve but remainfirm, and colours are
strong; during the latter part of the 1870s his comma-like
brushstrokes frequently recorded the sparkling scintillation of
light, as in “Orchard with Flowering Fruit Trees, Springtime,
Pontoise” (1877). Although his paintings were sold by the dealer
Paul Durand-Ruel, who represented several of the Impressionists,
Pissarro continued to experience financial hardships, which he
described in letters to his eldest son, Lucien; this
remarkablecorrespondence began in 1883 and lasted for 20 years.
In some of the letters to his son, Pissarro expressed
dissatisfaction with his own work. Preoccupied by problems of style
and technique, he eagerly embraced the Neo-Impressionist theories of
Georges Seurat, whom he met in 1885 through the painter Paul Signac.
Seurat's technique, consisting of meticulously painted small dots of
juxtaposed colours, was adopted by Pissarro; for about five years he
painted in this “divisionist” manner, a style which made his works
unpopular with dealers, collectors, and even his old fellow artists.
Overwhelmingly discouraged by their continuing state of poverty,
Madame Pissarro considered drowning herself and their two youngest
children. Finally, Pissarro abandoned the style, not, however,
because of theopposition he met but because “it was impossible to be
true to my sensations and consequently to render life and movement,
impossible to be faithful to the effects, so random and so
admirable, of nature . . . .” At about this time, also, there was an
estrangement from Paul Gauguin, who hadformerly worked at his side
but now was involved with the new Symbolist movement.
A large and successful retrospective exhibition of Pissarro's
paintings was held by Durand-Ruel in 1892, giving the artist greater
financial stability, although by this time he was troubled by a
chronic eye infection that frequently made it impossible for him to
work out-of-doors. Both in 1893 and 1897 he took hotel rooms in
Paris from which he painted 24 canvases of the city's streets by day
and by night, in sun, rain, and fog. During the 1890s he also did a
series of river scenes in Rouen, likewise depicting the various
effects of nature. From 1900 until his death three years later,
Pissarro continued working, mainly in Paris, Éragny, Dieppe, and Le
Havre, with freshness of vision and increasing freedom in his
technique. More than 1,600 works, consisting of oils, gouaches,
temperas, pastels—and even paintings on fans and on porcelain—as
well as nearly 200 fine prints, give testimony to the high quality
of Pissarro's half century of work.
Pissarro was the only Impressionist painter who participated in all
eight of the group's exhibitions. His kindness, warmth, wisdom, and
encouraging words cast him in a fatherly role to struggling younger
artists—Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, and Gauguin—who were exploring new
means of personal expression. Despite financial burdens that
continued until he reached his 60s, Pissarro never lost faith in the
new art, believing that “one must be sure of success to the very
end, for without that there is no hope!”
Michele Vishny
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THE BOULEVARDS
Towards the middle of the 19th century, Paris underwent a massive
rebuilding programme to turn into a quintessentially modern city. In
the heart of the city, whole districts were demolished to make way
for wide, tree-lined boulevards. In literature, Balzac and, later,
Baudelaire evoked the daily activities of the ostentatious Parisian
life of these great avenues. In art,
Pissarro,
Monet,
Renoir,
Sisley,
Caillebotte, and
Manet produced luminous and airy paintings to
document the innovations of the town-planner Baron Haussmann. At the
Impressionist exhibition of 1877, the critic Jacques is said to have
commented: "So, four Impressionists have given themselves the
mission of reproducing Paris, M.
Caillebotte has chosen the street;
M. Renoir the ball; M.
Degas the theatre and the cafe-concert; Mlle.
Berthe Morisot the boudoir. Besides this, of course, there are some
excursions to the country, but still rendered by Parisian brushes."
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Claude Monet
Boulevard Montmarte
1897
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Claude Monet
La calle Saint-Honoré después del mediodía. Efecto de lluvia
1897
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Claude Monet
Avenue de l'Opera, Place du Theatre Francais: Misty Weather
1898
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Claude Monet
Avenue de l'Opera: Morning Sunshine
1898
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Claude Monet
Boulevard Montmartre: Morning,
Grey Weather
1897
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Claude Monet
Boulevard Montmartre: Night
1897
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Claude Monet
Boulevard Montmartre: Rainy Weather, Afternoon
1897
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Claude Monet
Manana de invierno en el boulevard Montmartre
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Claude Monet
Carnival at the Boulevard des Capucines
1873
Pushkin Museum, Moscow
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Claude Monet
Boulevard des Capucines
1873
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see collection:
Camille Pissarro
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