Claude Monet. Volume 1. Nina Kalitina

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СКАЧАТЬ the hill of Montmartre, at the foot of the old church that carried the aerial telegraph tower, and there he began to paint what he saw before him: the monument, the cemetery, the trees, the walls, and terrain that rose up there. In a few days, he finished a solid detailed study with a very natural tonality. This was the sign of his vocation.”

      Rousseau began painting ‘what he saw before him’ in Normandy, in the mountains of the Auvergne, in Saint-Cloud, Sèvres, and Meudon. His first brush with fame was the Salon of 1833, well before the birth of the future Impressionists, when his View on the Outskirts of Granville caused a sensation due to its focus on a mediocre, rustic motif.

      A contemporary critic wrote that this landscape “is among the most realistic and warmest in tone of anything the French school has ever produced”. Rousseau had discovered a sleepy little village called Barbizon at the entrance of the forest of Fontainebleau. There he was joined by his friend Jules Dupré and the aforementioned Spanish painter Narcisse Díaz de la Peña.

      Another of Rousseau’s painter friends who often worked at Barbizon was Constant Troyon. In the late 1840s, Jean-François Millet, known for his paintings of the French peasantry, moved to Barbizon with his large family. Thus was born the group of landscape painters that came to be known as the Barbizon school. However, these landscape artists only executed studies in the forest and fields, from which they subsequently composed their paintings in the studio.

      Charles-François Daubigny, who also sometimes worked at Barbizon, took the idea further than the others. He established himself at Auvers on the banks of the Oise and built a studio-barge he called the Bottin. Then the painter sailed the river, stopping wherever he wished to paint the motif directly before him. This working method enabled him to give up traditional composition and to base his colour on the observation of nature. Daubigny would later support the future Impressionists when he was a jury member of the Salon.

      But Camille Corot was perhaps the closest to the Impressionists. He was living in the village of Ville d’Avray near Paris. With characteristic spontaneity, Corot painted the ponds near his house, the reflection of weeping willows in their water, and the shaded paths that led into the forest. Even if his landscapes evoked memories of Italy, Ville-d’Avray was recognisable.

      No one was more sensitive to nature than Corot. Within the range of a simple grey-green palette he produced the subtlest gradations of shadow and light. In Corot’s painting, colour played a minor role; its luminosity created a misty, atmospheric effect and a sad, lyrical mood. All these characteristics gave his landscapes the quality of visual reality and movement to which the Impressionists aspired.

      Jar of Peaches, c. 1866. Oil on canvas, 55.5 × 46 cm.

      Gemäldegalerie Neue Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Dresden.

      Train in the Snow, the Locomotive, 1875.

      Oil on canvas, 59 × 78 cm. Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris.

      Madame Louis Joachim Gaudibert, 1868.

      Oil on canvas, 216.5 × 138.5 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

      Among the eldest of the Impressionists’ contemporaries were two masters who played a fundamental role in the elaboration of their idea of painting. They were Eugène Delacroix and Gustave Courbet.

      Delacroix showed them that colour could be used to paint shadows, that a colour changed in relation to the colour next to it, and that white did not exist in nature, as it is always tinged with reflections. Of course, the future Impressionists could have observed all that in certain works by the old masters from whom Delacroix had learned, such as Titian, Veronese, and Rubens, but Delacroix was a part of their own world and his painting was still creating controversy. The great battle between the Romantics and the Neo-classicists was not over yet. At one point Monet and Bazille even rented a studio near Delacroix’s residence on Place Fürstenberg where they could see him in his garden.

      Delacroix taught them to see the richness of colour in nature. As Bazille wrote to his parents about Delacroix: “You will not believe how I am learning to see in his paintings; one of these sessions is worth a month of work.” The Impressionists also encountered the art of Gustave Courbet, the ‘Realist’ painting contemporary life and fighting the conventions of Neo-classicism. Courbet often used a palette knife instead of a paintbrush to lay thick strokes of paint on canvas, demonstrating a degree of freedom in paint handling that had never been seen before.

      Under all these influences, Impressionist painting was taking form, bit by bit. The future Impressionists believed they were making a clean break with academic painting when they left Gleyre’s studio.

      Eleven years later, they were developing a new concept of painting as they worked en plein-air (in the open air). The time had come to announce this concept, as well as their independence from official art, and to show their canvasses in the context of their own exhibition.

      But organising such an event was not as easy as one might think.

      Up until then, there was only one venue for exhibiting contemporary art in France: the Salon. Founded in the 17^th century during the reign of Louis XIV by his prime minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the exhibition was inaugurated in the Louvre’s Salon carré, hence its name.

      Beginning in 1747, the Salon was held biennially in different locations. By the time the future Impressionists appeared on the stage of art, the Salon boasted a two-hundred-year history.

      The Red Kerchief, c. 1868–1873. Oil on canvas, 99 × 79.8 cm.

      The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland.

      Still Life with Flowers and Fruit, 1869. Oil on canvas,

      100 × 80 cm. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

      Obviously every painter wanted to exhibit in the Salon, because it was the only way to become known and consequently, to be able to sell paintings. But it was hard to get admitted.

      A critical jury made up of teachers from the École des Beaux-Arts selected the works for the exhibition. The Académie des Beaux-Arts (one of the five Academies of the Institut de France) picked the teachers for the jury from among its own members. Furthermore, the teachers in charge of selecting the Salon’s paintings and sculptures would be choosing works made by the same artists they had as students. It was not unusual to see jury members haggling amongst themselves for the right to have the work of their own students admitted.

      The Salon’s precepts were extremely rigid and remained essentially unchanged throughout its entire existence.

      Traditional genres reigned and scenes taken from Greek mythology or the Bible were in accordance with the themes imposed on the Salon at its inception; only the individual scenes changed according to fashion. Portraiture retained its customary affected look and landscapes had to be ‘composed’, in other words, conceived from the artist’s imagination.

      Idealised nature, whether it concerned the female nude, portraiture, or landscape painting, was still a permanent condition of acceptance. The jury sought a high degree of professionalism in composition, drawing, anatomy, linear perspective, and pictorial technique.

      An irreproachably smooth surface, created with miniscule brushwork almost indiscernible to the eye, was the standard finish required for admission to the competition.

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