The Beginnings of Impressionism

The term Impressionism not only designates a trend in French art, but also a new stage in the development of European painting. It marked the end of the neo-classical period that had begun during the Renaissance. The Impressionists did not entirely break with the theories of Leonardo da Vinci and the rules according to which all European academies had conceived their paintings for over three centuries. All the Impressionists had more or less followed the lessons of their old-school professors, each of them having their preferred old masters. But for the Impressionists, their vision of the world and their concept of painting had changed. The Impressionists cast doubt on painting’s literary nature, the necessity of always having to base a painting on a story, and consequently, its link to historical and religious subjects. They chose the genre of landscape because it only referred to nature and nearly all the Impressionists started their artistic itinerary with the landscape. It was a genre that appealed to observation and observation alone, rather than to the imagination, and from observation came the artist’s new view of nature, the logical consequence of all his prior visual experience: it was more important to paint what one saw, rather than how one was taught – that was a fact! It was impossible to see the workings of nature within the confines of the studio, so the Impressionists took to the outdoors and set up their easels in fields and forests. The close observation of nature had a power which was, until then, undreamt of. If the natural landscape was incompatible with the traditional concept of composition and perspective, then artists had to reject academic rules and obey nature. If traditional pictorial technique stood in the way of conveying the truths artists discovered in nature, then this technique had to be changed. A new style-genre of painting that lacked traditional finish and often resembled a rapid oil sketch appeared in the works of the Impressionists. But the Impressionists still lacked a new aesthetic theory that could replace tradition. Their one firm conviction was that they could employ any means to arrive at truth in art. These daredevils assumed that the work of the artist could be done without professing or practising a religious respect of academic theories and professional practices, wrote one critic, three years after the First Impressionist Exhibition in 1877. To those who ask them to formulate a program, they cynically reply that they have none. They are happy to give the public the impressions of their hearts and minds, sincerely, naively, without retouching. (L. Venturi, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 330).

Painters born circa 1840 entered the field of art already armed with the notion that they could use subjects from everyday life, but in the early nineteenth century, France still had the most conservative attitude in Europe when it came to landscape painting. The classically composed landscape, although based on a study of details from nature, such as the observation of trees, leaves, and rocks, reigned over the annual Salon.

Man with a Boater Hat, 1857.

Pencil on paper, 24 x 16 cm.

Musée Marmottan, Paris.

The Painter with a Pointed Hat, 1857.

Pencil and gouache on paper.

Private collection, Paris.

The Dutch masters, however, had started painting the well-observed living nature of their country in the seventeenth century. In their small, modest canvases appeared various aspects of the real Holland: its vast sky, frozen canals, frost-covered trees, windmills, and charming little towns. They knew how to convey their country’s humid atmosphere through nuanced tonalities. Their compositions contained neither classical scenes nor theatrical compositions. A flat river typically ran parallel to the edge of the canvas, creating the impression of a direct view onto nature. Elsewhere, the Venetian landscape painters of the eighteenth century gave us the specific landscape genre of the veduta. The works of Francesco Guardi, Antonio Canaletto, and Bernardo Bellotto have a theatrical beauty built upon the rules of the neoclassical school, but they depict real scenes taken from life; indeed, they were so noted for such topographical detail that they have remained in the history of art for their documentary evidence of towns long since destroyed. Moreover, the vedute depicted a light veil of humid mist above the Venetian lagoons and the particularly pellucid quality of the air over the riverbanks of the island of Elba. The future Impressionists also had a keen interest in painters whose work had yet to find its way into museums, such as the sketching club founded in England in the late eighteenth century. Its members, who worked directly from nature and specialised in light landscape sketches, included Richard Parkes Bonington, who died in 1828 at the age of twenty-six. Bonnington’s watercolour landscapes had a novel limpidity and grace as well as the subtle sensation of the surrounding air. A large part of his life had been spent in France, where he studied with Antoine-Jean Gros and was close to Delacroix. Bonnington depicted the landscapes of Normandy and the Île-de-France: locations where all the Impressionists would later paint. The Impressionists were probably also familiar with the work of the English painter John Constable, from whom they may have learned how to appreciate the integrity of landscape and the expressive power of painterly brushwork. Constable’s finished paintings retain the characteristics of their sketches and the fresh colour of studies done after nature. And the Impressionists surely knew the work of Joseph Mallord William Turner, acknowledged leader of the English landscape school for sixty years until 1851. Turner depicted atmospheric effects; fog, the haze at sunset, steam billowing from a locomotive, or a simple cloud became motifs in and of themselves.

Black Woman Wearing a Headscarf, 1857.

Charcoal and watercolour on paper, 24 x 16 cm.

Musée Marmottan, Paris.

Towing a Boat, Honfleur, 1864.

Oil on canvas, 55.2 x 82.1 cm.

Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester,

Rochester.

His watercolour series entitled Rivers of France commenced a painterly ode to the Seine that the Impressionists would later take up. In addition to this, Turner painted a landscape with Rouen Cathedral, which was a predecessor of Monet’s own well-known Rouen Cathedral series. Professors at the École des Beaux-Arts in mid-nineteenth-century Paris were still teaching the historical landscape based on the ideal models created in seventeenth-century France by Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain. The Impressionists, however, were not the first to rebel against clichéd themes and to stand up for a realistic and personal style of painting. Pierre Auguste Renoir told his son of a strange encounter he had in 1863 in Fontainebleau forest. For whatever reason, a group of young ruffians did not like the look of Renoir, who was painting in the midst of nature dressed in his painter’s smock. With a single kick, one of them knocked the palette out of Renoir’s hands and caused him to fall to the ground. One of the girls struck him with a parasol (‘in my face, with the steel-tipped end; they could have put my eyes out!’), but suddenly, emerging from the bushes, a man appeared. He was about fifty years old, tall and strong, and he too was laden with painting paraphernalia. He also had a wooden leg and held a heavy cane in his hand. The newcomer dropped his things and rushed to the rescue of his young fellow painter. Swinging his cane and his wooden leg, he quickly scattered the attackers. Renoir was able to get up off the ground and join the fight and in no time the two painters had managed to successfully stand their ground, sending the troublemakers off. Oblivious to the thanks coming from the person he had just saved, the one-legged man picked up the fallen canvas and looked at it attentively. ‘Not bad at all. You are gifted, very gifted…’ The two men sat down on the grass, and Renoir spoke of his life and modest ambitions. Eventually the stranger introduced himself. It was Diaz. (J. Renoir, op. cit., pp. 82-83). Narcisse Virgilio Diaz de la Peña belonged to a group of landscape painters known as the Barbizon School. The Barbizon painters came from a generation of artists born between the first and second decades of the nineteenth century. Almost fifty years separated them from the Impressionists. The Barbizon painters had been the first to paint landscapes after nature. It was only fitting that Renoir met Diaz in Fontainebleau forest. The young painters of the Barbizon School were making traditional classic landscapes, but by the 1830s this activity no longer satisfied them. The Parisian Théodore Rousseau had fallen in love with landscape in his youth while travelling throughout France with his father. According to his biographer: "One day, on his own and without telling anyone, he purchased paints and brushes and went to the hill of Montmartre, at the foot of the old church that carried the aerial telegraph tower, and there he began to paint what he saw before him: the monument, the cemetery, the trees, the walls, and terrain that rose up there. In a