Instituting Impressionism
During a normally peaceful and quiet coffee with my dad this morning, he starts sharing with me what he’s learned about the Impressionists. Pardon? Somehow, my no-nonesense bio-analytical chemistry professor father started lecturing me about art.
AND I LOVED IT! So proud of him.
So today, I’m going to tell you about the beginnings of the Impressionists and why this was significant in the art world.
Think about being an artist back in the day (1600s). You’re bound to a studio mixing paint. A wealthy client comes in to sit for you - you attempt as many sketches to try to commit them to memory, and if you’re able to, use a camera obscura to trace the upside down image. Vermeer may have used this device, Da Vinci drew over 280 diagrams for it.
First published illustration of camera obscura in Gemma Frisius' book “De Radio Astronomica et Geometrica,” 1545
Your memory cannot hold the light and colours unique to this client. This portrait may take months or years. Unfortunately, you cannot set up a Shopify account to sell your prints or make some sidecash on OnlyFans. It’s tough. Referrals only. Limited scalability.
In 1648, King Louis XIV gave his approval for the first Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture (“Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture”) to serve as Paris’ premier annual art exhibition. This first “marketplace” allowed artists to display their artworks to gain more clients. However, it had a profound effect on European art as a whole, as it enabled an elite organization to dictate the definition of art.
François Joseph Heim, “Charles V Distributing Awards to the Artists at the Close of the Salon of 1827,” 1824
The Academy's traditional taste was overwhelmingly accepted for the next 200 years, when an increasing number of European artists began embracing the avant-garde. Pieces that did not adhere to the academy's traditional tastes were rejected, forcing forward-thinking artists to exhibit independently. This led to the decline of the Paris Salon in the 1880s.
At that same time, several technological inflections emerged:
First portable paint tube
New “flat brushes” (stiffer boar-bristle brushes allowing thick application of paint)
Trains to allow for public travel
Increasing global trade bringing Asian and African art to Europe
All these tools broadened perceptions and sparked new ways of seeing the world.
One of my favourite fun facts - if you look at the Van Gogh’s last portrait, on his back wall he has taped up Asian woodblock prints. Gustav Klimt’s works also featured Asian motives. Picasso was also heavily influenced by angular African masks.
In 1863, the Salon jury refused two thirds of the paintings presented, including those of Courbet, Manet, and Pissarro - the OG Impressionists. The rejected artists and their friends protested to Emperor Napoleon III (naturally). The Emperor's tastes in art were traditional but he was also sensitive to public opinion. He approved exhibiting these rejected works in another part of the Palace; the Salon des Refusés was created.
While many viewers came only to laugh, the Salon des Refusés drew attention to the existence of new art and attracted more visitors than the regular Salon. More than a thousand people visited the Salon des Refuses - daily. According to art historian Albert Boime, the legacy of this new venue was that it “introduced the democratic concept of a multi-style system subject to the review of the general jury of the public."
Now, when your date asks you what the Impressionists were known for, you say: sponataineity, light and colour. By painting en plein air, they portrayed visual light effects (instead of details) and used short, “broken” brushstrokes of pure and unmixed colour. By forgoing customary blending and shading, an effect of intense colour vibration was achieved.
What I also find fascinating, is that our participating brain actually fills in all the gaps when you stand farther away from the painting - when you look up close, the brush strokes are sparing to depict trees, water, faces, etc. Also, this quick method of painting was much more scalable.
An art dealer named Paul Durand-Ruel paid attention early on. FYI, he is my personal art hero after Joseph Duveen and deserves his own article. He becomes the first dealer to support them exhibit independently outside of the Salons. A critic comments that one of Monet’s sunset works looks like an “impression” and the name sticks. He now represents the Impressionists. However, no one is still interested in buying the works.
Paul Durand-Ruel
Having purchased hundreds of their artworks, Durand-Ruel begins to feel a liiiittle financially distressed. No one is buying the works.
So, he goes to America.
As we had said before in my another article, “Europe had a lot of art and America had plenty of money”. Durand-Ruel exhibits these avant-garde European works - that absolutely did not sell back home - and the Americans eat it up.
"The American public does not laugh. It buys!" Durand-Ruel said. "Without America, I would have been lost, ruined, after having bought so many Monets and Renoirs. The two exhibitions there in 1886 saved me. The American public bought moderately… but thanks to that public, Monet and Renoir were enabled to live and after that the French public followed suit.”
Through organizing international exhibitions and curating an active public discourse around his art, Durand-Ruel's investment proved immensely profitable, and helped finance his later support for Impressionist artists. In addition to friendship, and financial and moral support, the dealer gave the painters his trust. He was a visionary, an art lover, and a canny businessman.
"He bought over 1,000 Monets, 1,500 Renoirs, 800 Pissarros, 400 Sisleys, 400 Cassatts, and about 200 Manets," says Philadelphia Museum of Art curator Jennifer Thompson. To put this into perspective, the most expensive Monet sold for $111mm in 2019 at Sotheby’s (above). Or Renoir’s Bal du Moulin de la Galette sold for $78mm in 1990 ($184mm today).
With the demand from the US spreading internationally, prices skyrocket for the Impressionist paintings. Artists descended on Monet’s residence in droves to learn from him.
In 1920, at the age of 89, Durand-Ruel declared: "At last the Impressionist masters triumphed. My madness had been wisdom. To think that, had I passed away at sixty, I would have died debt-ridden and bankrupt, surrounded by a wealth of underrated treasures." He passed away in 1922.
Paul Durand-Ruel painted by Renoir
So, dear readers, that is the story of the Impressionists, painted as loosely as their brush strokes.
Katya
PS: You should know that if Manet bridged the gap between Realism and Impressionism, then Paul Cézanne bridged the gap between Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. He broke down objects into their basic geometric shapes as essential building blocks, rather than focusing on the brushstrokes. He is widely considered the “godfather of modern art”, inspiring the development of Cubism by Picasso and Georges Braque.