Impression Sunrise from the 1874 Impressionist Show

Pre-Raphaelites

• The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (also known as the Pre-Raphaelites) was a group of English painters, poets and critics, founded in 1848 by John Everret Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt.

• Against the what they perceived as the mechanistic approach to art from the Mannerists on. Felt raphael’s classical influence to be bad.

• Often considered the first avant-garde movement in art

• The Brotherhood's early doctrines were expressed in four declarations:

1. To have genuine ideas to express; 2. To study Nature attentively, so as

to know how to express them; 3. To sympathise with what is direct

and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parading and learned by rote;

4. And, most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures

and statues.

Christ In the House of His Parents, John Everett Millais, 1850

The Barbizon School

• Name derived from a village in Northern France

• Rejected Classical Landscape style and insisted on Direct Observation

• Inspired by Constable (Salon of 1824)

• Closely allied with Realists, pre-cursors to the Impressionists

• Artists included Millet and Courbet as well as Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Theodore Rousseau

Ville d’Avray, 1867

Impressionism Timeline

• 1863 – Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe & the Salon des Refuses (50 women artists, 13%)

• 100 or more women at the official salon yearly

• 1865 – Olympia accepted and jeered. American Civil War ends

• 1866- Baudelaire dies, Monet at the Salon

• 1867 - Maximillian is executed. “Salon of Newcomers” (Renoir, Monet, Pissaro, Degas)

• 1870 – Franco-Prussian War

• 1871 – France defeated

Napolean III unseated, Adolphe Theirs becomes President of the Third Republic

Kaiser Wilhelm crowned Emperor of Germany at Versailles

• 1874 – The First “Impressionist Exhibtion”

Impressionist Artists of Note

• Eduoard Manet• Claude Monet• Berthe Morisot• Auguste Renoir• Camille Pissaro• Edgar Degas• James McNeil Whistler• Mary Cassatt• August Rodin

Eduoard Manet

• 1832 – 1883• Considered the Godfather of the Impressionists• Never Showed in an Impressionist Exhibition• Well educated, close friends with Baudelaire and Zola• Achieved both Notoriety and some recognition through

the official Salon• Became Friends with Monet and painted some “au

plein air”• Influenced other Impressionists through his unique

technique

Realism

Manet, Luncheon on the Grass• A modern response to Giorgione and Raphael• Rejected by the official salon and exhibited in the Salon of the Refuses• Models are obviously posing, no unity of figures and landscape• She is undressed rather than nude• Two men dressed in contemporary clothes contrasts with the nudity of

the foreground female• Nude figure directly engages us• Still life very unrealistic• Sketchy broad brushstrokes• Triangular composition• Flattening of perspective

Realism

Manet, Bar at the Folies-Bergere

• Melancholy and absent gaze at customer ordering a drink

• Mirrors reflect the world around her

• Artificiality of perspective

• Strong verticals down center

• Impressionist brushwork

• Fruit and flowers defined by a few brushstrokes

• Is the woman in the back a reflection of the main figure in a mirror?

Influence of Japanese prints

1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris introduced Japanese culture to Europe. European artists were inspired by the following characteristics of Japanese woodblock prints:

• 1 Flat quality that lacked perspective• 2 Flat areas of color• 3 Odd angles of composition• 4 Curving lines• 5 Charm, without sentimentality• 6 Lack of shadow

Hokusai is generally more appreciated in the West than in Japan. His prints, as well as those by other Japanese printmakers, were imported to Paris in the mid-19th century. They were enthusiastically collected, especially by such impressionist artists as Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, whose work was profoundly influenced by them

Claude Monet

• 1840 - 1926

• The archetypal Impressionist

• Interested in in the transient nature of light and effects of color

• Spent time in England with Pissar during Franco-Prussian War and studied Constable and Turner

Monet, Impression: Sunrise

•Painting inadvertently founded the name of Impressionism

•Form and substance vanish

•Light transforms objects and surfaces into atmospheric spaces

•Color was not the property of an object, but the light controls color intensity

•Color affected by time or day and movement of the sun

•Monet worked outdoors, plein-air

Impression Sunrise from the 1874 Impressionist Show

Monet, Rouen Cathedral

•One of Monet’s paintings in a series

•Cf. Muybridge

•Fixed composition and view in most of the series

•Subtle gradations of tone and color

•Limited palette, subtle handling of paint

•Gothic cathedral, religious and cultural significance

•Stone work of cathedral dissolves in light

Berthe Morisot

• 1841-1895

• First Woman to Join the Impressionist Painters

• Friend and Model for Manet who influenced her highly

Morisot, Villa at the Seaside

•Shaded verandah at a summer resort

•Figures are informally grouped

•Private balcony

•Discreetly fashionably dressed women

•Woman sits elegantly covered to avoid a tan

•Brisk broad brushstrokes

•Women neither spectacles nor on parade

•Plein-air

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

• 1841-1919

• One of the best loved Impressionist, largely due to subject matter – children, pretty women and flowers

Renoir, Le Moulin de la Galette

•Energetic dancing by the middle class in Paris

•Dappling of light and shade

•Artfully blurred figures in the picture

•Casual and unposed natural placement of figures

•Suggested space goes beyond the boundaries of the painting

•People go about their business, don’t pose

•Influence of candid photography in the casualness of groupings and the cut off figures at the edges

Camille Pissaro

• 1830 –1903

• Big Proponet of Plein Air painting

• Mentor to Cezanne

• Only Painter to show in ALL Impressionist exhibitions (8 in total)

The Stage Coach at Louveciennes 1870

Edgar Degas

• 1834-1917

• Master of drawing the Human Figure in Motion

• Known for use of pastels

• Ballet Dancers and Horses

Degas, Ballet Rehearsal

•Enjoyed depicting ballet movements

•Composition inspired by Japanese prints: center of painting empty, spiral staircase at left cut off, ballerina being dressed at right cut off

•Strong diagonals unify composition

•Light feathery brushstrokes define dresses

•Effect of light from window on the floor and on shapes

•Faces in darkness or cut off

James Abbot McNeil Whistler

• 1834-1903

• American (New England), moved to Russia at age 9 then back to CT (Pomfret) then to Paris then to England

• Friend of Rossetti (pre-Raphaelites) and Oscar Wilde

1875

Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket

•Reaches to the limit of abstraction

•Fireworks in London over the Thames River

•Clouds of black and dark blue represent the smoke of the rockets

•Left: large tree looms in darkness

•Art critic called the painting “a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Whistler sued for libel

•Signed the painting with a Japanese anagram

•Color effects decorate the painting

Mary Cassatt

• 1844-1926• Friend of Degas, showed with

Impressioinists in 1879, 1880, 1881 and 1886

• Born American but lived in Paris most of her adult life

• Contributed to the Interest of American Impressionism

La Toilette c. 1891

Cassatt, The Bath

•Not like other Impressionists, not a landscape or still life painter

•Figures are never actors, nor do they appear to be models posing

•Mother and child theme her specialty

•Has a tenderness foreign to Impressionism

•Figures seen from unusual angles as in Japanese prints

•Flatness of background forms

•Solidity of main figures

•Japanese decorative details in background

Auguste Rodin

• 1840 –1917

• Stunning Strength and realism

• Confronts distress and moral weakness as well as noble themes

• Emphasis on Hands and feet in his works

• A turn away from the smooth neo-classical styling common in sculpture

The Burghers of Calais 1884-86