The New Painting: Impressionism
“The Impressionist sees and renders nature as it is—that is, wholly in the vibration of color. No drawing, light, modeling, perspective, or chiaroscuro, none of those childish classifications…” —Jules Laforgue, art critic, 1883
Alfred Sisley (French, 1839-1899)
Apple Trees in Flower, 1880
Oil on canvas
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Va., Gift of Walter P. Chrysler Jr. (77.412)
Exhibited in Revolution in Paint
The new pigments supplied many new colors, expanding the painter’s palette. But it was how the impressionists used the new pigments, how the pigments allowed the impressionists to work, that changed the history of painting. The new pigments were the catalyst for painting that was physically and philosophically different from the art of the past.
The young impressionists were strongly influenced by a few previous nonconformist painters such as Eugène Delacroix, Jean-François Millet, and others. Some of these artists focused on landscape and contemporary images of their own day as subject matter. Some left the studio to paint outdoors almost exclusively. Others used strong color and expressive brushwork. Almost all of these artists used a more direct technique of paint application that depended less on the formulaic building of paint layers, but for the most part their palette was still dominated by traditional pigments, particularly brown. Rarely did they use the modern pigments that were being invented during their lifetime.
FIX The Impressionists felt that art should be of its own time. Academic themes of past military glories or ancient myth seemed unimportant in the face of contemporary changes, such as the newly invented steam-powered ships, trains, and factories. The new pigments allowed the impressionists to capture the present by creating a painting much more quickly. Most of the new pigments were quite opaque, or could be mixed with lead white and still retain a strong color. The impressionists mixed and applied the exact opaque color they needed, covering and correcting as they went. Traditional academic technique required complex layering of thin layers of paint that was laborious and slow. It was difficult to make changes, and all but eliminated artistic spontaneity. The impressionists could paint a scene in a matter of days or weeks, rather than months or years.
The new pigments also came with a new understanding of the nature of color and light, totally changing the painters’ thoughts of what they were representing on their canvas. At the beginning of the 19th century the industrial color chemists experimented and wrote extensively on the nature of light and color. Their explanations of complementary color and the prismatic nature of white light strongly influenced the impressionists, leading them to fundamentally change their approach to painting.
Traditional painters focused on the development of form in terms of light and dark, a technique called chiaroscuro. Through meticulous tonal modeling and the application of formal pictorial devices such as perspective, they were able to turn the inventions of their minds into an illusion of three-dimensional reality on canvas. Many progressive artists increasingly considered this old approach, born of the studio and its dependence on artificially controlled light, to be “false” and hopelessly mired in the past.
The impressionists sought the “truth” by working outside in natural light. They came to see the world as flickering light and color, a jumble of prismatic light reflected to our eye. The subject of their paintings became light itself. The pigments on their palette were not just colors; they were the ingredients of light. With new pigments filling the gaps in the old traditional palette, the impressionists abandoned the use of chiaroscuro, perspective, and other traditional devices, choosing instead to juxtapose color to distinguish forms.
“I never draw except with brush and paint.” —Claude Monet
The impressionists abandoned drawing and the hard-edged depiction of objects. They were no longer interested in the underlying structure of objects. Meticulous drawing simply took too long to record a moment of glittering light. Figures became mere blobs of paint. Clarity and finish were replaced with an intentional lack of detail. Patches of white ground were left exposed, becoming a functioning part of the imageunheard of in academic painting.
Working outdoors directly from nature, the impressionists used their new pigments and techniques to capture crisp, scintillating qualities of light rarely seen in painting before their time. But their paintings were nearly the antithesis of the popular painting of their day. The public and many critics, accustomed to the detail and polish of academic painting, simply couldn’t understand this drastic and sudden change. They criticized impressionism’s quick summary technique as nothing more than an “ébauche” (sketch), as if the impressionists had stopped halfway into creating their painting. To critics, impressionist paintings showed little more than a lack of skill and initiative to finish what was begun. They didn’t realize that the goals of the painter and painting itself had changed.
“The public . . . accustomed to the pitch-black sauces cooked up by the cabin crew of the schools and academies, their stomachs churn at the sight of bright painting.” —Félix Fénéon, art critic, 1887
