DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.67683#0542
37°
FRANCE
of his life in a battle for the recognition of the right to paint
real life as he saw it. His subject matter shocked the Academi-
cians, for it was taken, as we have said, from the living world —
a bull-fight, a girl tending the bar, a horse race, a group on a
balcony, a man in a boat, everyday people in everyday clothes.
Manet’s method was as revolutionary as his subject matter. He
used vigorous planes with sharp transitions, and bright colors
with but few intermediate tones.
Manet’s struggle against the traditional art of the Academy
made him the leader of a group of men who shared his con-
victions. Most important of these were Claude Monet (1840- ),
Camille Pissarro (1831-1903 a.d.), Alfred Sisley (1839-1889 a.d.),
and Firmin Auguste Renoir (1841-1919 a.d.). Primarily they
were landscape painters, working in the open directly from
nature, and particularly interested in reproducing light and color
as they saw it in nature. The fundamental principles upon which
all these men worked were very much the same. We may there-
fore take Monet as typical of them all.
Monet knew very well that light, and therefore the appearance
of nature, changed every moment as the light shifted. So, in
his insatiable desire to understand thoroughly the appearance
of an object under varying lights and atmospheric conditions,
he used to paint the same subject from the same point of view
a great many times, going out at sunrise with twenty canvases
so as to be able to catch quickly the elusive changes. And the
results are astonishingly different. Each is a realistic rendering
of a fleeting impression. Hence the term “Impressionist” 2 well
suggests the character of the work of these painters.
This kind of fleeting impression is what we see in Monet’s
Westminster (Pl. 149 b). On the farther side of the Thames River
the buildings only half emerge from the mists. But the canvas
vibrates with an effect of living light and air that envelop them
and blur their outlines. We do not get a sense of structure or a
feeling of design, that is, of the ordering of the elements of
formal composition into a harmonious unit, so characteristic of
Italian painting. There is nothing permanent, monumental, or
imaginative in the picture. It is frankly a momentary impres-
sion of Westminster at a time when the buildings were half
hidden in a mist; or, more specifically, it is a painting of vibrating
light itself as it envelops the buildings.
2 This term was not invented by the Impressionists themselves. In 1874 Monet exhibited
a sunrise scene to which he gave the title, “Impression: soleil levant.” As this title seemed quite
expressive of the methods of the group, the term soon became current but was used at first in
a sense of reproach and scorn for the painters who were the “ignorant and extravagant iconoclasts
of established principles.”
FRANCE
of his life in a battle for the recognition of the right to paint
real life as he saw it. His subject matter shocked the Academi-
cians, for it was taken, as we have said, from the living world —
a bull-fight, a girl tending the bar, a horse race, a group on a
balcony, a man in a boat, everyday people in everyday clothes.
Manet’s method was as revolutionary as his subject matter. He
used vigorous planes with sharp transitions, and bright colors
with but few intermediate tones.
Manet’s struggle against the traditional art of the Academy
made him the leader of a group of men who shared his con-
victions. Most important of these were Claude Monet (1840- ),
Camille Pissarro (1831-1903 a.d.), Alfred Sisley (1839-1889 a.d.),
and Firmin Auguste Renoir (1841-1919 a.d.). Primarily they
were landscape painters, working in the open directly from
nature, and particularly interested in reproducing light and color
as they saw it in nature. The fundamental principles upon which
all these men worked were very much the same. We may there-
fore take Monet as typical of them all.
Monet knew very well that light, and therefore the appearance
of nature, changed every moment as the light shifted. So, in
his insatiable desire to understand thoroughly the appearance
of an object under varying lights and atmospheric conditions,
he used to paint the same subject from the same point of view
a great many times, going out at sunrise with twenty canvases
so as to be able to catch quickly the elusive changes. And the
results are astonishingly different. Each is a realistic rendering
of a fleeting impression. Hence the term “Impressionist” 2 well
suggests the character of the work of these painters.
This kind of fleeting impression is what we see in Monet’s
Westminster (Pl. 149 b). On the farther side of the Thames River
the buildings only half emerge from the mists. But the canvas
vibrates with an effect of living light and air that envelop them
and blur their outlines. We do not get a sense of structure or a
feeling of design, that is, of the ordering of the elements of
formal composition into a harmonious unit, so characteristic of
Italian painting. There is nothing permanent, monumental, or
imaginative in the picture. It is frankly a momentary impres-
sion of Westminster at a time when the buildings were half
hidden in a mist; or, more specifically, it is a painting of vibrating
light itself as it envelops the buildings.
2 This term was not invented by the Impressionists themselves. In 1874 Monet exhibited
a sunrise scene to which he gave the title, “Impression: soleil levant.” As this title seemed quite
expressive of the methods of the group, the term soon became current but was used at first in
a sense of reproach and scorn for the painters who were the “ignorant and extravagant iconoclasts
of established principles.”