Patrick Bade
Impressionism, Part 1

Patrick Bade - Impressionism, Part 1

- So this is Monet’s “Poppy Field at Argenteuil,” and I suppose it’s one of the most widely-loved pictures in the world. It’s a feel-good picture, so you often encounter it in dentists’ waiting rooms, hospital wards, ‘cause people think it’s going to calm people down. But that wasn’t always the case. I mean, it’s quite difficult to imagine why people reacted to these early Impressionist pictures with such hostility and outrage. It’s art that is, for us, very easy to enjoy. On the left, you’ve got a caricature published at the time of the second Impressionist show in which this picture hung, and it’s a policeman warning a pregnant woman not to go into the show in case she’s so outraged and so shocked that it brings about a premature birth. So, what was it? I think it’s that people- These pictures defied the expectations of the time. The Impressionists had broken with a traditional Renaissance perspective. They were used to pictures like the Poussin you see top right hand side, where you understand the recession into the space. If you wanted to, you could draw a map of the space in that picture. You can go for a walk in that picture along these zigzag paths that lead you into the distance, and there’s a very clearly defined sense of space. There’s none of that, of course, in the Monet. So, people would’ve found it very confusing, and people don’t like to be confused. So, the Impressionists in the 1870s, they found themselves excluded from the official Salons.

The jury rejected their pictures, and so they, as we shall see in a minute, they started to exhibit their work privately. And these exhibitions, as I said, caused outrage. On the left is a clever, clever idea of how to defeat an invading enemy. You run towards the invading army, holding up paintings by Monet and Renoir and the invaders will be so shocked that they’ll drop their weapons. And on the right hand side, an even more clever idea for sending people completely insane. And that is to combine Impressionist paintings with the music of Wagner. So, as I said, the Impressionists desperately needed to get their work out there. And the Salon was really the only way to do it in the early 1870s. So, it was a measure of desperation that they set up what is considered to be the first ever avant-garde group show. This is the first Impressionist show and it was in 1874. And they hired the premises of the famous photographer Nadar in the Rue L'Habilleur, close to the Opera in Paris. And it wasn’t initially billed. The first show was not billed as Impressionist. The label Impressionist didn’t exist. It came about because Edmund Renoir, the brother of Pierre-Auguste Renoir the painter, he was compiling the catalogue and the Impressionists were never interested in narrative or storytelling.

So he was asking for the titles. And one picture after another was titled “Landscape”, “Seascape”. And Edmund Renoir said “Oh, this is too boring, can’t you help me out? Give me another title, other than landscape or seascape.” And so Monet, who painted this picture on the left, said, well, why not call it “Impression, Sunrise”? And it was this particular picture that really outraged the critics. They could not get it at all. I think again, it defied expectations. The people expected an artist to work hard on finishing the picture. This did not look finished. And the public went so close to the pictures to inspect them that they couldn’t read them. All they could see were crazy marks and blobs and smears on the surface. So the outrage about this particular picture caused critics, critics, to invent the term Impressionist. And the artists liked that term and then they adopted it. And in the seven remaining group shows, they called themselves Impressionists. Now there there is a reason, of course, why this picture is how it is. They were very wedded to the idea of optical truth. That you just record the impression that the eye receives in a particular place, at a particular time.

So here is Monet who’s got up early in the morning to paint the harbour in Le Havre and the sun, great golden disc is coming out of the sea. Now that is something that happens rapidly. In fact, the colours change really from minute to minute. So he’s having to work extremely quickly to get down this impression before everything changes. So that’s why he paints in this very loose, sketchy way. Here’s another example of the river Seine at Argenteuil, outside of Paris. As we’ll see the Impressionists were very fascinated, well, they were fascinated by modernity. And a facet of modernity was the suburb. This was a new thing in the 19th century. Enormous growth of cities spreading out into the countryside. And this growth was of course enabled in part by developments in transport, particularly trains. I’ll get to that a bit later. So Monet was living out at Argenteuil on the River Seine. And this picture was probably painted in his little boat studio, which we shall see later. Here’s another picture famously painted in a very short space of time. This is painted in 1878 and it shows a public holiday being celebrated on the Rue Saint-Denis, very close to where I live in Paris. And all the trickle of French flags were flying off people’s balconies, and because it was a public holiday, the streets were full of people milling around. The Impressionists liked the challenge of painting things that nobody had ever attempted to paint before. Nobody had ever attempted to paint a scene like this before.

So Monet is walking down the street with his box of paints and he thinks, “Oh, I’ve got to paint this.” And he rings somebody’s doorbell and says, “Can I use your balcony?” So he’s sitting on a balcony, he’s probably had to paint this in a couple of hours. So he is really, really got to work quickly to get it done. So pictures like this shown in the Impressionist show, as I said, people went up close and they saw all these little dark licks of paint in the bottom part of the picture. And they thought, “Oh, that’s meant to- What’s that?” “Is that meant to represent a human being?” The Impressionists are the most weather-conscious artists that have ever been in the history of art. Course we’re all a bit weather conscious at the moment. After I finish this lecture, I’m going to go out into the cold and probably slide down the hill towards the public transport. But, so, the Impressionists relished all kinds of weather and weather conditions. And they also were fascinated by the change of the seasons. So this is a picture, this is by Pissarro of a village outside of Paris in the early spring with the blossom trees coming into bloom. And particularly in the early 1870s, I think, again, they relished the challenge of trying to paint weather conditions that nobody had attempted to paint before. So this is, again, Pissarro. You can see, 1870. Must be the very beginning of the year, before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war.

And we can see that the trees are just beginning to come into leaf, but there’s still the remnants of snow on the ground. And this! This wonder, this magical, magical painting by Pissarro, which is in the Musée D'Orsay in Paris. Again, it’s spring, early spring, trees just coming into leaf and frost. I don’t think that any artist before Pissarro and Monet had ever attempted to capture the appearance of frost. And how about this? This is Sisley. This is another painting in the Orsay in Paris. Magical, magical, poetic picture of a woman gathering vegetables in a cabbage patch on a foggy day. So what an extraordinary, daring subject. I mean, even today, if I was ringing my friend Ron in San Francisco and advising him to buy a picture that’s coming up for sale and he doesn’t know what it looks like. And I said, “Well, it’s a lovely picture of a cabbage patch in the fog.” And he’d probably say, “Oh, really? No thanks.” if he hadn’t seen it. Of course, if you see it, it’s a different matter. And how about this? Rain. It’s often said that nobody in Europe had attempted to paint rain before the Impressionists and also before the introduction of Japanese woodcut prints, which often show rain. Yes, there are paintings of storms. There are wonderful paintings of storms by Turner and other artists, even going back to the 16th century, but ordinary, everyday, boring drizzle, who wanted to paint that?

I think Pissarro is the great master of creating magic and poetry out of banality. And snow. And when I step out tonight, I’ll be walking into the snow, course, it’s dark so I won’t see the colours. This is a very early Monet, right at the beginning of Impressionism. And artists had certainly painted snow. Think of Bruegel in the 16th century. Lots of Dutch artists in the 17th century painted snow, but they painted the shadows as brown and Monet with this new objectivity, this new detachment and devotion to the sensations received by the eye. He looked at the snow and he thought, no, it’s not white and brown, snow is actually full of colour. And you can see that the shadows here are tinted with blue and violet. Here’s a later one. This is presumably an afternoon picture. The day is dying. So on a clear day. So you you have not just blue in the snow, you also have pink and orange from the setting sun. This, very unusually, this is one of only two snowscapes known to have been painted by Renoir. He was the one member of the Impressionist group who really didn’t like snow, didn’t like cold weather, used to say snow is the leprosy of nature. Nevertheless, this is a beautiful, sunny, snowy day. And he’s once again achieved magic out of a very ordinary subject. So the Impressionists liked the world when it’s somehow transformed and where solid objects and defined contours are actually dissolved by nature, by light, by air. So the Renoir on the left hand side, “La balançoire,” the swing. Another very famous, popular, much-loved picture.

But when that was shown, the critics really couldn’t make head or tail of it because nobody before had ever attempted to paint broken sunlight filtering through the leaves of trees and breaking in patches on figures beneath them. And on the right hand side is a detail of a painting by Monet of the Gare Saint-Lazar. In this case it’s steam that is dissolving the solid forms and the contours. So I often say there are two technical developments in the 19th century that enabled Impressionism and one of them is the railway, steam travel, and the other is the collapsible metal tube. I’ll get to that in a minute. So this is a map of the Île-de-France of the Paris area. And I’m always, when I’m travelling around Paris and I see these maps inside trains, I’m always absolutely transfixed by them because every name here conjures up wonderful images of beautiful paintings. It must be one of the most painted areas in the whole world. So you, you can see, up towards the top, Argenteuil, where Monet was living in the 1870s, visited by many of his friends who also painted there. Courbevoie, of course painted by Serrat, what else can I see? Chatou, wonderful paintings by Renoir. Bougival, also Renoir. So all these places, Ville-d'Avray, course that’s where Corot painted a lot of very beautiful pictures. So artists were able to get to these places by the railway system that was developed in the middle of the 19th century.

So you could say, maybe any English people will understand what I mean here, when I say Impressionism is an away day style. Away day is when you buy a ticket to go and come back on the same day. So they could get their ticket at Saint-Lazare. You see that here. Station of Saint-Lazare in the north of Paris. And you go off and you set up your easel somewhere in the countryside and you bring back your finished painting in the evening. So the Impressionists, they loved railways for all sorts of reasons, one is that they, as I said, they’re committed to modernity, to modern life. And the railways, of course, they transformed the world in the 19th century, rather as the internet has transformed the world in our own time, they shrunk the world and they’re a symbol of progress and modernity. And another reason I think that they’re fascinated by railways is that, in these two pictures, it’s a Renoir on the left and Monet on the right, you see a train steaming away in the background. And this tells you that what you are getting is a snapshot of time. 'Cause a minute ago that train wasn’t there and in another minute it won’t be there again 'cause it will have moved on outside the picture. So this is telling you, you are just getting an instant in this picture. And there was the added attraction, of course, of the steam itself, which changes and dissolves appearances. Now, the collapsible metal tube, like a toothpaste tube, that was invented in the 1840s and that encouraged artists to paint in the open air. So this is a big thing from the middle of the 19th century, plein air painting.

There are examples before, of course, Constable had done it at the beginning of the century and even earlier in the 18th and 17th century, very, very occasionally, artists had painted out of doors. But the normal practise though, you might make sketches out of doors, pencil sketches, or even watercolour, and then take them back to your studio and then you repainted in the studio. But the Impressionists, of course, are committed to painting directly from reality and having all your paints pre-mixed with a wide variety of hues and colours in these little tubes, it’s very convenient. You could take the box with you and you could use oils to paint directly out of doors. So on the left is a display that’s in the Petit Palais in Paris and it shows you all the kit that you need to paint an Impressionist picture. You need a collapsible easel, you need a collapsible stool, you need a box of paints in tubes and probably also need a sunshade to protect yourself on a sunny day. And all that, you could, yeah, a lusty young man, as the Impressionists were in the 1870s, they could carry all that kit with them and set it up in the countryside. So here is Monet, I’m going to start with him because he’s really the king of the Impressionists. Any definition you have of Impressionism really has to revolve around him. So photograph in his garden on the left. And a portrait of Monet by Renoir on the right. So he was born into a comfortably off middle class family in La Havre on the coast of Normandy.

And he first showed artistic talent at school making caricatures of his teachers, like the one you see on the right hand side. Surprising really 'cause caricature is usually, as in this case, I think, a linear art form that, you know, depends upon drawing upon line. And Monet is the least linear of artists. But when he was a teenager, he exhibited some of his drawings in the shop window of an art supply shop. And an older local artist called Eugene Boudin came into the shop and he saw these drawings and he thought, this boy has talent. And he was introduced to the very young Monet and he said, “No, but you are wasting your time with these caricatures. Come with me and we will paint nature in the open air.” Boudin, before the Impressionists, was already completely committed to painting nature directly in the open air. This a ravishing little painting on the bottom here, on bottom right hand side, that he made on the beach at Trouville, also in Normandy of the Empress Eugenie and her ladies all carrying sunshades to prevent getting freckles or a suntan, wearing their wonderful crinolines, going for a walk on the beach at Trouville. So certainly Boudin, and Monet just said, “Oh, that was a revelation.” He really felt his eyes had been opened and it set him on a course that he used to follow for the rest of his life. And there were other older artists who opened up the way for Monet and Impressionism. This is a Dutch artist called Jongkind. And this is a painting, you can see the date on it. It’s 1868. So it’s actually the year before the first fully Impressionist pictures.

But he’d been doing this sort of thing throughout the 1860s. And it anticipates Impressionism in several ways. First of all, it’s clearly painted out of doors. It’s completely painted from reality. It’s a transcription of something that he’s actually seen. It’s not something that’s invented. You’ve got that loose, broken brush work that anticipates the Impressionists and also the deliberate banality of the subject matter. There is a demolition of a house in a suburb, a very ordinary, everyday subject. And amongst the older landscape artists, the Impressionists were also, in their early days, very keen on Corot, who had been painting sketches in the open air, as early as the late 1820s. So he was still alive in the 1870s, but he was an old man by that point. But for Corot, as for Constable, the small, sketchy landscapes, which are the things we love best by him today, these were not pictures that were considered finished pictures to be exhibited at the Salon. He had much more elaborate pictures that he’d finished off in the studio that he actually sent to the Salon. So it’s Corot top left and Monet bottom right and very similar of course. In both these pictures you’ve still got rather traditional perspective with the path or the road leading your eye off into the distance. And this very cool, lovely, silvery tonality that’s typical of Corot, Monet is following that as well. Another important artist for the Impressionists, I think probably more in his philosophy and his attitude than the actual work is Gustav Courbet.

Cause Courbet, he’s the great realist with the capital R and he’s committed to reality, not prettifying things, not making things more beautiful, painting things as they are. Somebody once said to Courbet, why do you always paint such ugly people? Why can’t you paint an angel? And he said, “Fine, I’ll paint an angel, just bring one to my studio and I’ll do it.” But so Courbet painted a lot of pictures on the Norman Coast with these natural rock arches and Monet would certainly have been very aware of those pictures by Courbet. So it’s Courbet on the left and Monet on the right hand side. And actually I think this particular comparison underlines a very big difference. The Courbet’s much more interested in three dimensionality and solid form than Monet is. Course the leader of the pack in the 1860s was Édouard Manet and his notorious picture, “Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe” that was rejected from the official Salon of 1863. And then it was shown at the Salon Des Refusés of that same year that was set up by the emperor. And that date is often taken as a symbolic date for the start of modern art. When I did my MA degree at the Courtauld Institute, the period that I studied, it began in 1863 with that event. So it was a tremendously important and influential picture.

But again, if you make the comparison, so that’s 1863 and just four years later, Monet paints his version of “Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe”, with the same title. And so it’s certainly in some ways I would say a homage to Manet. But in other ways it’s in direct reaction against Manet. It’s a very different picture. The Manet is clearly painted in a studio. It’s studio light, it’s not open air light. The whole thing is very carefully composed with a composition based on Raphael or Renaissance painting. Whereas, in fact, the painting you see on the right hand side, Monet never finished it. And what you see is actually a fragment. It was eventually cut up because he’d set himself an impossible task, really, of painting this. It was a huge, huge picture that he, no doubt, intended to send to the Salon and he painted it out of doors. But painting a picture on this scale out of doors, of course in Northern Europe is very problematic, because, you know, changes of weather and so on. This is the same year, 1867. This was completed. It’s another huge, huge canvas. It’s called “Women in the Garden.” And again, he’s committed to painting the whole thing out of doors. He actually dug a trench in the garden and he had a pulley so that he could raise and lower the canvas. And he was mocked by some of his friends, including Gustav Courbet because he would only, he wouldn’t touch the picture, when the sun went behind a cloud, he wanted to paint directly from reality and it’s his long-suffering wife Camille who, despite the difference in the colour of the hair, she posed for of all the figures in this picture. Now the big, big breakthrough, this comes in the summer of 1869.

I can’t really think of another art movement, maybe Art Nouveau, you could say, that starts precisely at a point in time. These are the first fully Impressionist pictures ever painted. It’s Monet on the left hand side and it’s Renoir on the right hand side. So what you had to do in the 19th century, if you wanted success as an artist, you needed to make a splash, if that’s not a pun, considering the subject matter, at the Salon, you needed to paint something that was going to grab the attention of critics and the public that was going to be novel and maybe a little bit controversial. So, you know, they wanted to avoid all the tired old subjects of mythology and the bible and mediaeval history and all that kind of thing. They wanted something that was modern and novel. And something that was quite new in the middle of 19th century was public bathing and upstream from Paris, before all the sewage went into the river, there was a bathing resort called La Grenouillère. And so Monet and Renoir spent a summer at La Grenouillère, painting scenes of people bathing and boating in the river. They were sitting side by side, it’s very possible they were using the same paint box. And initially, they were intending to do what artists had been doing for a long time. That was to paint a lot of sketches from reality and then to return to their studios, models, so that you could have more accurate painting of the figures and to finish it to a level that was considered acceptable by the public and the critics in the 19th century and send it to the Salon. But these were starving, impoverished young artists.

There are really sad letters from them that they wrote to their wealthy friend Bazille, begging, saying, “Oh, we’re terribly sorry, we don’t have the money to put a stamp on this letter, but can you please send us brushes and paints and materials cause we’ve completely run out. We haven’t got the money to pay for them.” So there was actually no question, they just simply couldn’t invest in the studios, the models, the materials to paint these pictures big at the end of the summer for the following Salon. But at the end of the summer there was the great moment of revelation. They looked at these sketches and they thought, this is it. The sketch is the finished work. We don’t need to repaint these pictures. In fact, if we do repaint them, we’ll lose that sense of truth and freshness. So this is really, it was not really something I think that was in any way premeditated or thought through. It’s something that happened. And so the Impressionists always very fascinated, as I said, by the momentary and the transient in nature. So one of the things that they really loved was the surface, of the shimmering reflections in the surface of the water. So we’ve got Renoir here on the left and Monet on the right. And so I’m going to let you test yourselves. Obviously I can’t test you. So before I tell you, I want you to guess which one of these is by Monet and which one is by Renoir?

And I’ll tell you that Monet’s technique is somewhat bolder than Renoir. To create a boat, he uses far less strokes of the brush. Renoir’s technique is lighter, more delicate, more feathery brushwork. And he also uses somewhat a slightly warmer palette of colour. So I think it may be exaggerated here in the images I have on the screen. So that should tell you of course that it is Monet on the left and Renoir on the right. I think I’ve told this story once before, on lockdown, but it was an exhibition of Renoir landscapes at the National Gallery, oh, 10, 15 years ago. And my least favourite critic, Waldemar Januszczak, he really panned it. He really put the boot into Renoir, I think very unfairly actually. And he said, “I went into a room and on the other side of the room I saw a landscape and I thought, oh, that one’s rather good. And then I crossed the room and I was able to read the label and it was by Monet and not by Renoir.” So I actually, I wrote him a note and I said, at “The Sunday Times” and I said, “Dear Mr. Januszczak, If one of my students couldn’t tell the difference between a Monet and a Renoir from the other side of the room, I would tell them to choose another profession.” So here is this Monet, “La Grenouillère” this is as good as you’ll get, I think, on a computer screen as a reproduction. Marvellous picture. It’s in the National Gallery in London. It was acquired in the 1970s and I was teaching a group of adults, adult education. We were looking at Dutch painting, but at the end of the day I said, “Oh, there’s this new Monet. Do you want to go and see it?”

They all said, “Yes, yes, we’d love to go and see it.” So we stood in front of it and everybody was going, “Ooh, ah, it’s so beautiful, it’s so gorgeous.” And there was just one woman who was frowning. And I said, “Well, don’t you like it?” And she said, “If my daughter came home from school with that, I’d tell her to go upstairs and finish it off.” And I found that a very interesting reaction 'cause that’s exactly the reaction that a French person would’ve had to the picture in 1870. So again, I think you know who painted this, this is Monet, this is Renoir, you are now all experts and presumably more capable of appreciating these pictures than Waldemar Januszczak. Renoir. Monet. So, 1869. So they didn’t actually initially have very much time to exploit this great revelation. 'Cause the Franco-Prussian war broke out the following summer in 1870. This is a painting by Monet that’s again in the National Gallery in London. So it’s a painting I spent a lot of time in front of, again with students. And it’s painted on the beach at Trouville, the same beach we saw earlier, in the summer of 1870, just before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war. And we know exactly what kind of weather it is. It’s a sunny day, but breezy with a few clouds scudding across the sky in the background. And these ladies, they’re not carrying umbrellas, of course, you can see any respectable lady would not want the sun to touch her hands or her face in the 19th century.

So you can see the one on the left is wearing a net veil. And they’ve both got their sunshades to protect their face. And the fascinating thing about this painting is when you’d stand in front of it in the National Gallery, you can see that it was a windy day because, particularly in the black dress and the black sunshade, you can see little grains of sand from the beach in Trouville, that have been blown up and have been caught in the wet paint. So the Franco-Prussian war breaks out, an absolute disaster. I’m sure William’s told you a lot about that. And in a way you can say it was the thing that set the chain reaction of horror that after the Franco-Prussian war and the French defeat, inevitably events moved onto the First World War and the Second World War and all the horrors associated with that. Monet was too smart to sacrifice himself for such a stupid and pointless war. So he evaded the draught and he fled to London and he spent the winter of 1870 to 71, in London. That happened to be the foggiest winter of the 19th century. Of course, those famous London fogs, they used to call 'em the peas soupers 'cause it was like walking around in a pea soup and you couldn’t, if you stretch out your hand, but sometimes you couldn’t even see your fingers, so thick. This was smog. And it was because London was a coal-fired, coal-heated city. But it was something that fascinated Monet.

And we shall see on Sunday how later in life he came back to London specifically for the smog season in November and December. The other great revelation, apart from London smog was going to the National Gallery and seeing this picture by Turner, “Rain, steam and speed” dating from around 1840 and often said to be the first great painting of the railway age. And so this was a painting we know that they enormously admired for years and years afterwards. Pissarro, in his letters was advising his son, “You must go to the National Gallery and see that amazing painting of a train by Turner.” So I think that the series that Monet painted of the Gare Saint-Lazare were in a way a kind of homage and a tribute to the Turner “Rain, steam and speed.” There’s a famous story, these are painted in the mid-seventies, Monet still very poor, still struggling. But he put on his best frilly shirt and he went down to the station, he spoke to the station master and he said, “I am the painter, Claude Monet.”“ and the station master was impressed, and apparently arranged for a train to stand still, steaming away for a while so that Monet could paint this picture. But before going back to Paris, of course he couldn’t go back immediately because he could have faced criminal charges for evading the draught. So he took a long route back to Paris via Holland, painted this picture on the way back.

And then he settles in the 1870s in Argenteuil, which has been declared a World Heritage Site, simply, really, because of his paintings, it’s not a particularly interesting place otherwise. You can see even in his day, from the painting at the bottom on the right hand side, it was an industrial suburb of Paris with smoky chimneys along the River Seine. Now the painting bottom right is actually not by Monet, it’s of Monet and it’s by Manet. I know, this is terribly confusing for lots of people. These two artists whose names are identical, apart from one letter, Monet, Manet. Manet is older and his most innovatory work in the sixties is not Impressionist at all. So you cannot describe "Déjeuner sur l'herbe” as an Impressionist picture or the “Olympia.” But confusingly, in the 1870s, he comes under the influence of the younger Monet and he goes to visit him in Argenteuil. And this is his portrait of Monet on his boat, his floating studio, painting a picture that could be the one you see top left. And so all the other members of the Impressionist group went out to visit Monet. So in the mid seventies, Monet is definitely the leader of the pack. And this is a painting by Renoir painted, actually, in Monet’s Garden in the 1870s.

This, I find such a poignant picture, really a moving picture. I mean, you don’t necessarily think of Impressionist paintings as being poignant or moving. They’re delightful and life-enhancing. But my guess is that Monet probably had a cold or flu or was ill, so had to stay inside, the day he painted this. So his long-suffering wife Camille had to pose out in the snow, in the cold, outside the window, looking rather sadly in at her husband. Bridges. Bridges, railway bridges are a great subject of the Impressionists. I’ve already talked about the importance of railways, but the subject of the bridge was important to them because they were so fascinated by Japanese woodcut prints that had been flooding into the West since the 1860s. And particularly the images of Hiroshige who did great many images of bridges in a totally different way. Of course, you can find bridges in Western art in a Canaletto or whatever, lots of 17th, 18th century paintings of bridges. But you would never, in Europe, find an image of a bridge, like this one of Hiroshige or the one by Monet on the right hand side, where both ends, you’ve got a slice of bridge, like you might have a slice of sausage. It would’ve been very, very, very confusing.

It was confusing to people looking at these pictures in the 19th century, to see a picture of a bridge where you couldn’t work out how you got onto the bridge or off it. So Japan is a huge influence on all the Impressionists, but particularly Monet. Here is Monet, later in life, in the dining room of his house at Giverny. I imagine many of you have been there. It’s great tourist attraction. And apart from his own paintings, the only things on the wall were his collection of Japanese woodcut prints, which are still there, of course, This is an example of what has been dubbed Japonaiserie. I have done a talk sometime ago about the influence of Japanese prints and it takes two forms. There’s Japonaiserie and Japonisme. Japonisme, this is Japonisme on the right hand side, nothing Japanese about the subject matter. It’s the way of seeing that is Japanese. Monet painted this picture on the left and sent it to the Salon. He was kind of desperate. It was a low point. And this painting was a slightly cynical calculation on his part to paint a picture he thought would go down well at the Salon, it’s his wife with a blonde wig and a kimono. He later described this picture as a piece of . Now Renoir, I’ve given the lion’s share of attention to Monet, but I’m going to race through the others. Renoir of course, is very important. He and Monet together were the creators of Impressionism.

This is his self-portrait as a young man. Like Monet and the other painters of the group in the late 1860s, he’s already committed to painting out of doors. And here are two paintings that he made of his mistress of the time, a girl called Lise. And you see she’s placed in the garden, but at this point he’s not going to risk painting broken light. So, in both cases, her face anyway, is in the shade and you don’t have patches of light and shade. So, we know that, we’ve seen in 1869, the summer he painted those fully impressionist pictures, but I don’t think he or maybe any of them realised the momentous innovation that they had just made. 'Cause these pictures, these two pictures by Renoir are painted after those Grenouillère pictures, these both date from early in 1870. And they’re very fine pictures. But I think you can see he, like a lot of very young artists, he hasn’t really found himself. He hasn’t really found a route that he wants to follow. So they’re very different from one another. The one on the left is obviously very influenced by Delacroix, particularly Delacroix “Women of Algiers” Not just in the subject matter, but also the technique, with this weave of different colours and quite a lot of broken brush work. The one on the right, I think he’s with this, it’s the same woman actually, very solid, very sculptural and rather much more earthy in its colour, range of colours, earth colours, is very influenced by Courbet. So I think he’s not quite sure, at this point, what he’s going to do.

But, he survives the Franco-Prussian war. I mean, only just, because he became actually very ill. I suppose the illness might have saved him from death on the battlefield. But so he returns to Paris after the war. He’s the only one of the major Impressionists who’s living in Paris in the 1870s. He was actually living in Montmartre. But you can see that he’s descended from Montmartre to the Grand Boulevard. This is one of those Haussmann boulevards. And it’s that, to me, a ravishing image of Paris on a summer’s day. Course the Haussmann buildings still new, in this very pale limestone that is characteristic of Paris. And on a day like, you have a real glare of sunlight and light, incredible luminosity that is characteristic of Paris. And here he is on a visit, presumably to Monet. This is a bridge at Argenteuil, and this kind of subject matter that’s so typical of the Impressionists, that’s in between town and country. And he paints some ravishing landscapes. I mean, again, the heat haze is palpable in this picture. And though you have a diagonal, but nevertheless there is no really conventional linear perspective to lead you into this picture. The other Impressionists had all completely abandoned the nude. The nude which is the central subject, really, of pictures that were sent to the Salon. But throughout his life, Renoir was fascinated by the female nude. This is once again his girlfriend Lise. And she posed for this in the garden of his studio in Montmartre. That garden still exists and you can visit it. I dunno what the neighbours thought while this was going on. This was another painting that absolutely outraged the critics 'cause nobody had ever painted anything like this before. That naked human flesh with dappled sunlight on it.

So lots of bluish marks. So lots of critics made very sarcastic comments that she must have been beaten up by her lover. And these are bruises or other critics saying she looked like a decomposing corpse 'cause of all these strange patches of colour on the flesh. And he paints modern life subjects. Interior subjects, the theatre, the opera, as you can see in these two pictures. And in that, of course, he’s closer to Manet and Degas. This is a Degas on the left hand side. But if I had time, it would be very interesting to spend 10 minutes or so just comparing these two pictures. 'Cause there are fascinating differences of approach between Degas on the left and Renoir on the right and the Degas, of course, we’re in the box and looking over the woman’s head and her fan, down onto the stage. Whereas, I dunno where we are actually, we’re probably hanging from a chandelier or maybe looking through binoculars from the other side of the theatre to see what Renoir can see on the right hand side. Here is the garden in Montmartre where Renoir painted his girlfriend in the nude and this wonderful picture of the swing. And I’ve got some really high quality details.

I hope they come across well to show you this technique of broken touches of paint, everything dissolved really into light and atmosphere and the patches of sunlight on the ground, a rapid, nervous, febrile technique. And his great masterpiece of the Impressionist period is the “moulin de la Galette” which was a beer hall in Montmartre, it’s quite a large picture. So he needed a friend, the painter Gervex, to help him carry the canvas. And it was painted over several days in this beer garden. And he got people to pose for him by buying them rounds of drinks. And it’s, of course, an absolutely joyous, joyous painting. Now Pissarro, he’s kind of a father figure to the group. He’s older than the others by nearly a decade. He’s born in 1831. And most of his portraits date from later in his life. And he had this very patriarchal air. I think you could, I don’t think there’s any doubt he’s the greatest Jewish painter of the 19th century, Jewish in origin. He was not religious at all. He was actually an anarchist. He’s the only artist who took part in, oh this, looking like a wise old owl in these portraits in his old age. An incredibly sympathetic man. And I strongly recommend reading his collected letters.

You have a wonderful picture of a very warm and very generous and very intelligent and very perceptive human being. So he is born in the West Indies on the island of St. Thomas, which was a Danish possession. So, in fact, he never had French nationality. He kept his Danish passport throughout his life. And this is a picture he painted in a rather, I would say, German or even Danish Romantic style while he was still living in the Caribbean. And then he comes to Paris in 1855 and he falls under the spell of Corot and Courbet. And he’s living at Pontoise, outside of Paris. And these, these are quite large pictures, couldn’t really say they’re Impressionist, it’s a much more limited and earthy palette of colours and much more solidly-painted than an Impressionist picture. These are realist pictures with a capital R and cabbages, cabbages. It was a sort of, really almost an article of faith with the Impressionists that a cabbage is as beautiful as a rose and that you can find beauty in the humblest of subjects. These are marvellous, marvellous pictures.

They’re almost, for me, the most wonderful pictures that he ever painted. With, as I said, a relatively limited palette of greens and earth colours. Sadly not many of them survive because in the Franco-Prussian war, he fled from the Prussians, they took over his house and up to 200 canvases were destroyed by the Prussian occupying troops 'Cause they couldn’t see any artistic merit in them. And they put them down on the muddy paths outside the house to walk across them to protect their boots. Here, I think, there’s more of a Corot, more silvery, Corot quality. That little touch of red, with all the cool, silvery colours that’s very Corot. He comes to London and paints, he lived south of the river and he paints these London suburbs south of the river, Sydenham and Crystal Palace. And so these are marvellous pictures. And, as I said, he’s the great master of finding a very, one would think boring, unappealing subject. The South London suburbs are certainly not the most picturesque suburbs in the world. And he makes magic. This is the Crystal Palace in Sydenham. And how about this?

Again, I mean, if you just describe this over the phone, a really, dreary Victorian suburb of South London with a little train chugging towards you down the railway tracks on a rather grey, dull day. And yet, what poetry, what magic he managed to extract from it. I think I’m going to have to, I’m just going to mention two other artists I want to at least mention. I know I’m not doing them justice. Sisley, Alfred Sisley who was, actually he had a British passport, but it would be a bit much, a bit chauvinistic to claim him for the British. He’s a totally French artist and for a time, I would say, it’s quite a short time, really, from 1870 to 1876, '77, he can paint ravishingly delicate, evocative landscape pictures, again very banal subjects, cabbage patches and so on. This is the River Thames. And I’ll finish by just mentioning the most important woman Impressionist. I know that some people are probably going to say, what about Mary Cassatt? Well, I love Mary Cassatt. And she did exhibit in a couple of Impressionist shows, but I don’t really consider her an Impressionist. I’m taking a very narrow definition of Impressionism. She’s much too concerned with contour and drawing.

But this is Berthe Morisot who came from a rather grand, wealthy, bourgeois family. She mixed in the same social circles as Manet and Degas, who also came from very grand families. And this is a picture she sent into the Salon of 1870, on the right hand side, of her sister and her mother. She made the terrible mistake of inviting Manet into her studio to criticise it. And he said, “Yes, yes, it’s very good, but you know, it could be improved.” And he just picked up her brushes and he started repainting it in front of her eyes. Course she was absolutely horrified. But as a well-brought up bourgeois woman, she just had to bite her lip and let him get away with it. But in fact, I think the influence is from her to him. She was already painting in an Impressionist way and she was friendly with the Impressionists and it’s she who really introduced Manet to the Impressionists. Of course, being a woman, her range of subject matter is necessarily different because a bourgeois woman couldn’t go out on her own. She had to be chaperoned. So she’s restricted to gardens and domestic life rather than painting the street life or the suburbs that the Impressionists. Very tender paintings. I mean, her daughter Julie, she married the brother of, she married Eugène Manet, the brother of Eduoard Manet. And her daughter became one of the main subjects of her subject matter. And these, again, she’s an artist, I feel was at her best in the 1870s and declined somewhat after 1880. But when she’s at her best, she is second to none. She’s the most ravishing artist. And that’s it. So let’s see what the questions and comments are.

Q&A and Comments:

“Did not like imagination.” No, it’s not really imagine, I think in a way, you could say the opposite, they wanted something more imaginative. I think the banality of the Impressionists and the fact that it’s so actually fixated on reality and so truthful. That’s really what bothered them. Thank you, Cynthia.

This is Margaret, who stayed at Chatou and you made that journey to Saint-Lazare every day. Yeah. Let’s see what we’ve got here. Constable did paint out of doors, his best, of the works that we like today, if you’d go to the Victoria and Albert Museum and they have the works that were donated by his niece, these little sketches, which, course, he didn’t exhibit publicly. But for Constable, those paintings out of doors were just the material from which he created the pictures that he sent to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

Q: “With the Impressionists, do any prepare?”

A: Not usually. No. There are very few examples of the Impressionists making preparatory sketches. I think they, there was a sort of badge of honour with them to paint directly onto the campus from reality.

Yes, I have been to the Eugène Boudin museum in Honfleur, definitely worth a visit.

Q: “Why don’t I like him?”

A: Because I can’t stand, he’s so arrogant. I shouldn’t say this on a public thing. And, he parades his ignorance, it’s in a kind of, I find that really an unattractive characteristic in a critic. I expect a critic to know something and not parade their ignorance in a kind of blokey kind of way.

No, he never responded, unsurprisingly. Yes, tastes, and you know, it is extraordinary how the artists get, I mean the artists who were the big stars at the Salon, they’re not totally forgotten, but they’ve passed out of fashion, of course. Renoir was certainly antisemitic. He was, indeed. I’m not sure if he was quite as bad as Degas, but there are some very nasty comments about Jews, about his Jewish patrons actually, in his letters.

No, I don’t think you can. Manet wasn’t the first, even though there are paintings by Manet that could be described as Impressionist, they don’t come 'til the 1870s.

Yes, my comment about the Japanese print was that you get a slice of bridge. It’s not explained to you how you get on the bridge or off the bridge, they don’t show you either end of the bridge.

Q: “What is your opinion of the story that Monet painted small, rough self-portraits in the corners of his larger paintings?”

A: I don’t know about that. I’d have to investigate that.

If you didn’t catch the artist’s names, all you need to do is, the link that you were sent this morning, scroll down and you will have a list of all the names. I spend a lot of time every week doing those. So I would appreciate it if people do that.

“Marriage of Opposites” by Alice Hoffman is a novel based on the life and art of Pissarro.“ I don’t know about it. But yeah.

Q: "Who entered the Ponti art?”

A: I don’t know what you mean by that.

Q: “What was Cezanne’s role?”

A: Well, Cezanne is, I will talk about him in the context of Post-Impressionism. Although he did exhibit in a couple of the Impressionist shows, he’s not really an Impressionist. Thank you, Barbara.

Yes, of course. The great masterpiece. It’s a transitional work. Actually, that “Boatman’s Luncheon”, I’ll talk about it next time. It’s really as Renoir is moving on from Impressionism. Well, they probably didn’t. No, I mean the fact that, what I mean is, when I said he had a Danish passport, he had Danish nationality. I don’t know if he had a physical passport. Yes, cabbages are, I’ve sometimes bought cabbages. The only problem is with them after a while as they begin to stink. So they may be as beautiful as a rose, but they don’t smell as nice as a rose. Berthe Morisot was married to Manet’s brother and Caillebotte, I’ve done a lecture on Caillebotte for lockdown and a wonderful artist, but his best pictures are not Impressionist. Later on he became under the influence of Monet and it wasn’t such a good thing for him, I think.

“Sisley also did lovely snow scenes.” That’s true. What was that? Derain is a Fauve artist, 20th century, lot later. “Subjective reality.” Yeah, it’s a big philosophical discussion. And actually, I will return to that in the next lecture as how objective those paintings really were. And, even I think Monet, came to realise that there was no such thing as objectivity in the end.

Q: “Did Rembrandt?”

A: Rembrandt made wonderful drawings out of doors and even, you know, he made etchings out of doors, he didn’t paint out of doors as far as we know. Thank you Catherine.

I think, probably, the main reason that Americans collected Impressionists, that’s very much down to Mary Cassatt, who was, of course very, very well-connected in America. So the Americans were very quick off the mark to buy Impressionist paintings, much quicker than the Brits for example. Right. I didn’t see the Pissarro show at Oxford this year. I’m sorry. I actually reviewed two Pissarro shows in Paris, must be about five or six years ago. The two major shows.

The last name Mary Cassatt, C-A-S-S-A-T-T. I didn’t talk about her today, 'cause as I said, I don’t really, though I admire her. I think she’s a fantastic painter. I don’t really regard her as an Impressionist.

Well, thank you all very, very much and I’ll continue with Impressionism Part Two on Sunday.