It is common to look at Impressionist pictures with a sense of awe at the seemingly massive leap these people made in painting. It’s true that over the previous four millennia no artistic movement attempted to do what they did, but even though they might seem to have been painting in a vacuum, they did not come out of nowhere. The assortment of late nineteenth-century French characters that make up the Impressionists were the natural heirs to a long line of artists who loved to work freely with thick oil paint. Titian, Tintoretto, El Greco, Rubens, Velázquez, Hals, Rembrandt and Goya are all forerunners. In the Impressionists’ own century Delacroix and Corot also pushed the frontiers of figurative painting further toward impressions of nature, as did Constable and Turner in England. The Impressionists could be seen as the logical culmination of these influences. But it wasn’t just freedom of paintwork that they saw to its conclusion. Painting, for the Realist Courbet, was ‘essentially a concrete art, and must be applied to real and existing things’. The Impressionists, though using radically different methods from his meticulous, near photographic painting, also brought Courbet’s Realism to another, different conclusion. What could be more ‘real and existing’ than the mental imprint of a casual scene quickly painted outdoors, rather than one highly worked slowly in a studio? The Impressionists, like the Realists before them, wanted to capture the instant of a transitory moment – as photography was beginning to do – rather than the unreal allegories and staged views of battles or classical stories that were praised by the old academy hierarchy. These painters were throwing out the hierarchical subject rankings and rules of the traditional system and replacing it with something that still looks as modern now as it did 130 years ago.
The immediate sense of action and freedom of composition in Impressionist painting had been perfected in another way by Hokusai, whose work had come out of the very different traditions of Japanese linear art. He was part of the Ukiyo-e school (meaning ‘floating world’) in Japan, which was dedicated to portraying casual and mundane views of life, everyday snapshots. Japanese printmakers had been mastering ingenious ways of portraying the world since the eighteenth century, but it wasn’t until Japan opened up to trade in the 1850s that Japanese prints started to flood into the port towns of France. When Monet bought his first one in 1856 he saw the inventive way they were composed as a revelation. He and the Impressionists were rethinking how to paint the world and they saw in Hokusai an originality of vision that seemed almost blocked by centuries of insular European art teaching.
By the time Monet and a few others gathered together for the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 they had absorbed all these traditions, and had gone beyond spontaneity of composition to find other ways to be even more immediate. The most fleeting moments could not possibly be painted in graphic details like before; the brilliance of light reflecting on a rippling pond was so transitory that a painter had to act fast to mirror it. Capturing an impression of the mind’s eye was much more real to them than trying to mimic something that could never be re-created by labouring with traditional painting. It was the search for what was needed to capture these moments that drew Monet, Manet, Pissarro, Degas and Renoir together. They looked for ways of painting a mental photograph of their psychological and emotional impressions of a scene. Exploring the effects of light and colour on the mind was the way to create this experience. In bright sunshine, colour, depth and detail can be blurred out, leaving only flashes of colour. The Impressionists painted these flashes, thickly pasted onto the canvas in a way that left little room for unnecessary details. By the way they painted, with palette-knives, fingers or anything that could push the paint around in the way they wanted, they also created a second aesthetic to their paintings – the texture and feeling of the paint itself became a subject of beauty.
At this time scientific investigations into optics, colour spectrums and perceptual psychology were raging, and there was a genuine optimism that finding truths about colour could deeply influence your perceptions of the outside world. No one took these scientific principles further than the Post-Impressionist Seurat. He rejected the Impressionists’ obsession with capturing the fleeting moment and the effects of light on colour. Instead he carried on with their informal snapshot compositions but painted them to a distinctly different theory. Seurat broke down the painting into dots of pure colour, never mixed on a palette. He applied them in tiny dots that look like vibrating living surfaces when seen from a distance. The result was more luminous than if the colours had been premixed and then painted on to the canvas.
Colour also drove the paintings of van Gogh and Gauguin, but in very different ways. Van Gogh carried on from the stylistic beginnings of the Impressionists but didn’t care much either about their preoccupations with momentary light effects. He expressed his deepest emotions in brilliant colour and in the way he applied that colour to the canvas. In visible swirls, patches and strokes he translated his powerful feelings into intensely vivid expressions with paint. He took real, simple things, such as his bedroom, a cafe, or his own face, and infused them with colours that prefigure the Expressionists in the next century. He attempted to start an art colony with Gauguin but though Gauguin believed in the same expressiveness of colour he didn’t have such a need to paint real things. His inner spiritual self could provide everything he needed. His search for untouched primitive emotions led him to the South Sea Islands, where he painted the inhabitants in fantasy compositions.
It wasn’t colour, expression or lighting that drove Cézanne, the other great Post-Impressionist. Working in isolation in his country house he struggled with the problem of three-dimensionality and how to capture the real solidity of objects in his canvas. His newly solid forms seemed to take shape from more than one angle, inspiring Picasso’s Cubism and countless other twentieth-century artists.
THE PAINTING The paint is so thick in places that it casts its own shadows. Scraped on with knives, it has then been flicked and pushed along the canvas. Blues, greens and the reflections of shimmering light skip from one lily patch to another as they stretch out into the distance. This never-ending patchwork impression of water, plant and sunlight filled Monet’s mind for thirty years. This was the theme that the French prime minister asked him to paint as a gift to the nation in 1918. In 1890 Monet bought a country house in Giverny, and he revelled in the beauty of the natural landscape he created there. The garden was filled with exotic plants and flowers, and in the lake he grew these waterlilies. The series of waterlily paintings came out of his love of the colours, shifting shapes, reflections of sky and water and the ever-changing nature of the lake-top plants. He painted the same scene over and over again to catch different moods and lights, as he had done with Rouen Cathedral (which he painted twenty times in two years). Each lily painting is one version, one impression, of an ever-shifting subject.
THE ARTIST It was from Monet’s Impression: Sunrise that the term Impressionism was derisively coined in 1874. He was the leading member of the most radical and influential art movement since Titian. But his early career was a bohemian one of desperate poverty, being helped out by artist friends and sporadically by his family. His time in Paris was interrupted by a year of military service in Algeria. On his return he met Pissarro and Renoir, who became a lifelong friend. Within a few years he had a son with his lover Camille, partly lost sight in one eye due to stress, and escaped the 1870 Franco-Prussian War in Paris by going to London with Pissarro. There the paintings of Constable and Turner had a big influence, and his interest in Japanese prints began. By 1874 he was showing work in the first of eight annual Impressionist exhibitions. When the informal group broke up in the 1880s, it was Monet who carried on painting to the original principles, right up until his death. In later canvases his feelings were more visible in his brushwork than in his subjects, which had an influence on the Abstract Expressionists in New York.
b. Paris 1840; d. Giverny 1926
Les Nymphéas (The Waterlilies), 1906
Oil on canvas
89.5 × 93 cm (35¼ × 36½ in)
Private Collection
THE PAINTING In The Balcony Manet challenged the most basic things about western art teaching. It might look like nineteenth-century bourgeois prettiness, but only at first glance. The translucent white lace dresses stand out in front of a darkened room, where we can just make out a servant. This is Manet’s social world. The woman sitting down is his sister-in-law, the artist Berthe Morisot. Unlike the Impressionists he was associated with, Manet was solidly bourgeois. But he isn’t painting for established tastes. Influenced by Spanish art, the composition came from Goya, but Manet’s intention was very different. He wanted to paint this scene the way it would really look on a bright sunny day. There is no depth to his background. In daylight there wouldn’t be. The room would seem veiled off, not full of perspective. The faces seem almost two-dimensional. In bright daylight not everything is seen with the infinite gradations of light and shade that all western artists were trained to paint with. The thick streaky brushwork seems Impressionist, but it is just as much a reflection of Manet’s reverence for past masters such as Hals than for his friends’ work.
THE ARTIST Although Manet has been seen as a founder of Impressionism, he is actually more of a Realist. Rebelling against his establishment family, he started painting. From the beginning he wanted to free art from narrow-mindedness. When he complained that ‘We have been perverted by the recipes of painting . . . Who will deliver us from all this prissiness?’ he answered with his own work, blowing apart accepted views of Old Masters. The first outcry was caused by his Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, which showed dressed men and naked women picnicking together. It was an affront to morality. Actually it was a new take on Giorgione’s masterpiece that hung in the Louvre. Next he took Titian’s Venus, mimicking the clichéd pose. Where it had been interpreted as acceptable ‘classic’ nudity, Manet reinvigorated it. He brought back the shock of sex that the original would have had by making her a prostitute in a brothel, ready for business and looking us directly in the eye. He broke the shackles of moral, religious and historical allusions. It was as a visual rebel that the Impressionists saw him as a senior figure. He broke with the formulas of three-dimensionality in search of reality. Though the Impressionists and Manet mutually influenced each other, he never exhibited with them.
b. Paris 1832; d. Paris 1883
The Balcony, 1868–69
Oil on canvas
170 × 124.5 cm (67 × 48 in)
Musée d’Orsay, Paris
THE PAINTING Pissarro’s Impressionism was always more formalized than that of the others in the group. This warm, rain-soaked boulevard combines Pissarro’s traditional, structured landscape with his fervently avant-garde techniques. The street has all the melting dabs of colour, pushed and pulled into place on the canvas, that were the glory of the movement. But his early influence had been Corot, and the formal elements of that generation stayed with him. It comes through in this choice of an angular boulevard receding with strict perspective into the distance. What is most typical of Pissarro is the way he handles the effects of nature with the solidity of the man-made world. Through his hotel room window, with failing eyesight, he has brought harmony between the two. Haziness after a shower, combined with the movement of an active sky over twiggy autumn trees, seem completely at home in one of Paris’ busiest streets. It is an almost religious harmony between the working man in his built environment and nature, like Cuyp had done 200 years earlier. Pissarro had moved through blurry ‘romantic’ Impressionism into the ‘scientific’ neo-Impressionism of Seurat’s Pointillism. Calculated points of colour marked out these two movements, but Pissarro combined the two techniques in this fluid, individual, spot-dash brushwork.
THE ARTIST Pissarro was seen as the father of Impressionism and was the teacher of the Post-Impressionists Gauguin and Cézanne. After leaving his family grocery business in the Caribbean he settled in Paris aged twenty-five. Following the style of Corot and the left-wing views of Courbet, he focused on working peasants rather than leisured gentry in his country landscapes. When the Germans took Paris in 1870 he fled to London, like Monet, and like him was influenced by Turner and Constable. Unlike Courbet he didn’t get involved in the violence of the resulting Paris Commune. With seven children and a lover driven to a suicide attempt through poverty, the anarchist was too poor for activism. His finances became even worse when he returned from London to find the occupying Germans had destroyed the hundreds of canvases he had left behind. Part of Impressionism from the beginning, with Monet, he was already aged forty-four by the first Impressionist exhibition and is the only member of the group to have shown work at all eight exhibitions, He also diversified into neo-Impressionism when he exhibited Pointillist paintings with Seurat. Despite all of this, he spent his life in poverty.
b. Charlotte Amalie, St Thomas,
Danish Virgin Islands 1830; d. Paris 1903
Le Boulevard Montmartre, Temps de Pluie,
Après-Midi, 1897
Oil on canvas
52.5 × 66 cm (20¾ × 26 in)
Private Collection
THE PAINTING This is probably the most famous image of the sacred Mount Fuji, yet the most powerful Japanese symbol is hardly visible in Hokusai’s inventive view. The picture is part of his famous work, Thirty-six views of Mount Fuji. Though this is a print made from a drawing rather than being a painting, it is included here because Hokusai was the most popular figure in late Japanese art. He changed the visual arts of the East, and with Japan opening up to trade in 1854 he changed those of the West too, especially influencing the Impressionists. This vision of the much-venerated Mount Fuji comes straight from his imagination. A small, snow-capped triangle in the distance, the same colour as the pounding waves, it has become incidental to the action. This sort of eccentric visualization showed Manet, Van Gogh, Whistler and others just how far they had to go if they wanted to shed themselves of the clichés of western art. Hokusai’s boats are at the mercy of the sea. Waves grab at them with white crests, like Asian dragon claws. His outlines are totally original; the bold curving forms and colours prove his position as the most dynamic and individual Japanese artist.
THE ARTIST Hokusai became the most gifted member of the Ukiyo-e, the ‘floating world’ school of Japanese art which reflected commonplace things, people going about their normal lives, without any idealization. Hokusai made an incredible 30,000 drawings, mostly printed as book illustrations. Not all of them were printed under his assumed name of Hokusai. He used different personas for each of the varied classes of drawings – Actors, Birds, Calendars, Women, Erotic, Landscape. He was a famous eccentric and a cunning self-publicist. Once setting out 600 square feet of paper, he ran around it with a broom dripping with ink, making a vast painting spectacle. Infamously, during a drawing competition, he dipped a chicken’s feet in red paint and set it to trot around a piece of blue paper. He titled the resulting image Maple Leaves on a River. He said that he drew nothing of any value before he was seventy, and that when he reached a hundred and ten ‘each line shall surely possess a life of its own’. He died before he could see that happen, at the age of eighty-nine. He left a huge school of followers.
b. Edo (now Tokyo) 1760; d. Edo 1849
The Well of the Great Wave of Kanagawa, c. 1823–29
Polychrome woodblock print
25.5 cm × 37.5 cm (10 × 14¾ in)
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
THE PAINTING This was painted ten years before the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris, 1874. Whistler painted it when he was drawing London’s River Thames for a series of etchings. The title says everything that Whistler wanted with this painting. It is totally uncluttered, in composition, colour and in association with anything other than the frozen river. It was dramatically reduced to its most basic elements, impressionistically, long before the term had been thought up. But Whistler’s pared-down clarity came from further afield than France. Its Japanese influence runs right through this painting. Hokusai and the Japanese were influencing the Impressionists, but Whistler was one of the few artists to understand Japanese painting fully, and to imitate it. In some of his pictures he adds Japanese fans or vases, which was just a fashion for Japonisme at the time. But in Harmony in Grey the gentle lines of eastern painting and printmaking are running across his river and the formless rolling horizon. Without the steamboat in the distance it could almost seem like meaningless wishes of colour. It is an abstract grouping of icy greys, with only one smeared blob of yellow allowing colour into its world.
THE ARTIST Whistler’s early life in America and Russia was followed by a disastrous attempt to follow his parents’ wishes and enter West Point Military Academy. By the age of nineteen he had moved to Paris to be an artist. He fell in with Courbet’s Realism and borrowed an idea from the poet Baudelaire that stayed with him all his life: ‘Painting is an evocation, a magical operation...’ With his fellow wit and dandy Oscar Wilde, Whistler became one of the most vocal believers in art for art’s sake – aestheticism – where art is unconnected with morals, religion, historicism or anything else. Manet was trying to shake up these associations, but Whistler was trying to ban them. He called his paintings ‘arrangements’ and ‘harmonies’ to point out that they should be seen in the same way that music is heard, ‘independent of all claptrap’. In an infamous libel case where the critic Ruskin attacked him for charging 200 guineas for two days of painting. Whistler came up with the most memorable defence of modern art. He said he didn’t expect payment for the time it took to paint, but for the lifetime of knowledge it took to paint it. The courtroom stood in applause.
b. Lowell, Massachusetts 1834; d. London 1903
Harmony in Grey – Chelsea in Ice, 1864
Oil on canvas
45 × 61 cm (17¾ × 24 in)
Private Collection
THE PAINTING The Star is Degas’ strongest and most virtuoso pastel painting. Pastel was a medium that he could use in a totally different way from wet, slow-drying oil paints. A difficult medium to use, as you only get one chance at getting it right, it is made of dry, brilliantly coloured chalk powder that is very fine. It hadn’t been much used since the eighteenth century because of its extreme delicacy. But when Degas turned his attention to this ballerina in 1876, it was the perfect choice. The ballerina is clearly the star here. She is floating just off centre stage, a luminous flying girl in a vaporous tutu. Her dazzling pinks and whites glow against the dark floor. The contrasting stage is an open expanse, covering most of the picture surface. We feel she is about to spin toward us, into the void. The bright up-lighting from the stage spotlight catches her neck and chin, creating more than a small sense of darkness. In the mysterious background of amazingly free and bold smears of colour, there is a partially revealed man. It may be the voyeur artist himself, in the half-hidden pose he would often take up to paint his 600 different ballerinas.
THE ARTIST Degas was one of the founders of Impressionism, but like the only other upper middle-class member of the group, Manet, he kept aloof from the others. The most commercial of the artists, he didn’t need the money, unlike the rest. After studying the Old Masters in Italy he came back and carried on copying them in the Louvre, which is where he met Manet. He showed work in seven of the eight Impressionist exhibitions but was never really in full sympathy with their aims. They wanted to capture the effects of changing light and paint outdoors, whereas Degas, influenced by Ingres, cared about draughtsmanship and line most of all. But like the Impressionists and Hokusai, he painted commonplace scenes. His eyesight began to fail during his service in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. His impaired vision resulted in his painting resembling more closely the ideals of the Impressionists. He turned to the less visual, more tactile form of sculpting ballerinas, leaving 150 behind. His subjects were frequently female – laundresses, prostitutes, women washing, ballerinas, all painted with affection and character. He never had a relationship, dying a virgin bachelor.
b. Paris 1834; d. Paris 1917
The Star, c. 1876–77
Paste on paper
60 × 44 cm (23½ × 17¼ in)
Musée d’Orsay, Paris
THE PAINTING Renoir said. ‘I never think I have finished a nude until I think I can pinch it’. Pinchable or not this nude is one of Renoir’s most developed, and captures all the interests of his long career. Earlier he had suffered a crisis of confidence: ‘I had travelled as far as Impressionism could take me and I realized the fact that I could neither paint nor draw’. He reacted by experimenting with a much tighter, outline style inspired by draughtsmen like Raphael and Ingres. Life-drawing led him to this next obsession, the young female nude. This bather’s modest but formal pose is from the ancient Venus Pudica sculpture that Botticelli had used. The curvaceous girl’s pearly, opalescent skin provides a cool and human contrast to the rainbow of colours around her. With this painting Renoir came back to the Impressionist focus on the effects of light on the eye. The water ripples out from her, catching the colours of the bank-side plants and the blue sky. Typically for Renoir, he used bright colours because he liked their descriptive emotional effect – there’s no natural reason for this vividness.
THE ARTIST Renoir was a leader of the Impressionists, but was the first to turn his back on it. From a poor family, he started painting porcelain in a factory aged thirteen (rather than going to art school). Years later he had saved enough to paint full time, and met Monet. In these early years of studying paintings in the Louvre, he was attracted to the voluptuous and colourful figures in the Rococo art of Watteau, Boucher and Fragonard. Their influence stayed with him. By the 1870s he had started to make money by painting society portraits, and gradually turned away from the subjective uncertainties of the Impressionists, refusing to exhibit with them for a while. He called it his ‘sour manner’. His fluorescent colours and fluid wetness dried up, but his new harsh outlines weren’t liked by anyone. Finally he agreed with his critics and returned to Impressionism, but with a more formal structure. Young Girl Bathing is from this new productive and successful phase. At the end of his life, crippled with rheumatism, he painted with brushes tied to his arms and directed assistants to be his ‘hands’ sculpting. Summing up his art he said, ‘Why shouldn’t art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world.’
b. Limoges 1841; d. Cagnes-sur-Mer 1919
Young Girl Bathing, 1888
Oil on canvas
81 × 65.4 cm (32 × 25¾ in)
Private Collection
b. Paris 1859; d. Paris 1891
Les Poseuses, 1886–88
Oil on canvas
200 × 250 cm (78¾ × 98½ in)
Barnes Foundation, Pennsylvania
THE PAINTING Three nude models undress in different poses in Seurat’s studio. Behind them, in what looks like a window, is Seurat’s famous park painting La Grande Jatte (the second to use his new dot technique called Pointillism). The contrast between the two paintings gives an edgy, unexplained commentary on public and private life. ‘Outside’ the woman stands on a shadowy circle; the white rug beneath one of the nude models mirrors it. Horizontal lines for Seurat created calmness. Here there are none, just the happiness and sadness of his verticals and diagonals. Using points of pure colour instead of brushstrokes, he created an optical illusion where you need to pull back to focus on the painting. The vibrating but stiff effect of his ‘scientific’ Impressionism is completely different from the painterly ‘romantic’ Impressionists.
THE ARTIST In his reaction against the Impressionists, Seurat led those looking for more than a solution to capturing a fleeting impression. From Ingres he took classical form, from Delacroix colour, and from the Impressionists their interest in pure unmixed colour and the problems of perception. To this he added his own interest in science. The result was Pointillism. He broke colours down into dots, before the viewer had a chance to do this automatically in the brain. Pure colours were placed together on the canvas; it was thought that the result would be vibrant and luminous. He died aged thirty-one, from ‘overwork’. He was so private that his friends didn’t know he had a lover and son.
b. Albi 1864; d. Château de Malromé,
nr Langon, Gironde 1901
Dressage des Nouvelles, par Valentin le Désossé, 1890
Oil on canvas
116 × 150 cm (45¾ × 59 in)
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania
THE PANTING The dubious world of the Moulin Rouge was Lautrec’s favourite haunt. The famous dancehall in Paris’ Montmartre district was a regular for nineteenth-century gentlemen like the Prince of Wales. They openly lived the French brothel lifestyle, dancing and drinking absinthe with prostitutes. A spindly man – Valentin (the boneless wonder) de Désossé, quiet lawyer by day and jigging-fool by night – is dancing with an equally rubber lady in a tipsy, heated dance. They don’t care who’s there, and the crowd doesn’t care to look at them. In the seedy world that Lautrec paints, everyone seems to scuttle about guiltily, pale, cold and intoxicated. Only the bright dress of an unusually refined lady breaks the suffocating atmosphere.
THE ARTIST Lautrec is one of the most interesting characters in late nineteenth-century Paris. Influenced by Degas and Japanese prints, his paintings, posters and lithographs defined the bohemianism of the times. An aristocrat deformed by inherited illness and riding accidents, it was his deformity that made him to feel at home with society’s outcasts. His friends were the prostitutes, dancers, actors and generally unorthodox characters that gathered in gaslit Paris nightlife. Living in brothels for weeks at a time, where he would come across his eccentric father the Count, he would paint the girls without sentimentality or moralization, but with the melancholy of the dejected. Detached disillusionment fills his shadowy world, dark but always human. He died of alcoholism and syphilis aged thirty-six.
THE PAINTING Dr Gachet took care of van Gogh at the end of his life, and this portrait of him is one of van Gogh’s most powerful and emotive paintings. The whole composition is strong and complex, with the intensity of vivid colour that characterizes his work. He used colour to express his feelings, and here it breaks down into simple, but incredible blocks of colour – rolling calm blues, a shock of red hair, green-leaved bluebells and a red and green tablecloth. The movement in Gachet’s slouched position is mirrored in the swirling flicks of paint, which give it a buzzing intensity. His doleful eyes and weary manner seem to confirm his worry for van Gogh, who by this time had been in and out of a mental asylum. An argument with Gauguin ended in a seizure of madness that led van Gogh to sever his ear and give it to a prostitute. Later that year he ended his torments with a bullet to the chest. Van Gogh sold only one painting in his lifetime. When Dr Gachet was auctioned in 1990 for $83,000,000 it became the most expensive painting in history, surpassed only in 2004 by a Picasso for $104,000,000.
THE ARTIST Van Gogh’s life is more than merely famous, it changed the public view about the artist and the genius. His extreme poverty, visionary belief in his art, eventual madness and suicide have given him iconic status as the tortured artist. Along with Cézanne and Gauguin he is the leader of the Post-Impressionists. He began by working for his uncle’s art dealership in London, but was so badly affected by unrequited love for his landlady’s daughter that he was fired. After this his life changed. He turned to religion and became a preacher in Belgium and England. Again he was fired for being overzealous. Then in 1880, only eleven years before his death, he suddenly decided that art would be the channel for his passion for humanity. For ten years his brother Theo, an art dealer’s assistant, sent him the paint, canvases and money he needed to survive. During a stay with him in Paris, already influenced by the lines and colours of Japanese prints, he met the Impressionists and Seurat and tried out their ideas. They weren’t enough for him. The pure force of emotion in colour took over in thick swirls and filled his canvases.
ab. Zundert 1853; d. Auvers-sur-Oise 1890
Dr Gachet, 1890
Oil on canvas
66 × 57 cm (26 × 22½ in)
Private Collection
THE PAINTING Through the deeply pallid face of this young girl, Gauguin is silently transmitting his hatred of conventionality. His blocks of unnatural colours don’t give any sign of the feelings of life, excitement, wonder or happiness of his later work, when it became free from all European conventions of form, society or religion. This cold blue, ‘civilized’ subject did not deserve the free explosion of sensuous colour that his naked Tahitians enjoyed in their simple, superior world. The sitter’s long drooping chest and shoulders, under that restrictive collar, suggest an unhealthy sort of woman. Her pretty face is dulled and saddened, her hair tied back. She is the opposite of the pert-breasted, smiling, primitive carving behind her with free-flowing hair. She is locked into an unhappy, developed, world. The beautiful natural landscape behind her is shut out, boxing her in like the horizontal lines behind her long vertical body. Gauguin had come to the agricultural region of Brittany in the hope of getting closer to primitive values. It didn’t impress him. He left Europe the next year.
THE ARTIST Gauguin was interested in the Impressionists, but soon found their obsession with the fleeting moment to be an artistic dead end. Like Cézanne he was a Post-Impressionist who wanted to paint something deeper and more important. He abandoned his stockbroking career, his wife and his five children, and went to South America and Martinique looking for simplicity. But poverty and disease forced him back to France. Van Gogh invited him to Arles to help start an artists’ colony, but the plan fell apart spectacularly when they fought over where the art should come from. Gauguin painted straight from the imagination. Van Gogh, clinging to reality as best he could, wanted to paint what he physically saw but infused with the emotion of his mind. His violent outburst sent Gauguin fleeing back to Paris for safety. From there he left the West for good. His next twelve years in Tahiti, broken by occasional, failed trips to Paris to sell his work, were a time of reflection on the true elements of humanity. Without ‘the disease of civilization’ he explored primitive representation. However his own disease, syphilis, combined with artistic neglect and extreme poverty, killed him in 1903. His bold blocks of colour and new ways of symbolizing actions and emotions led to Fauvism and Symbolism.
b. Paris 1848; d. Dominica, Marquesas Island 1903
Young Breton Woman, 1889
Oil on canvas
46 × 38 cm (18 × 15 in)
Private Collection
b. Aix-en-Provence 1839; d. Aix-en-Provence 1906
Nature Morte aux Fruits et Pot de Gingembre, c. 1895
Oil on canvas
46 × 61 cm (18 × 24 in)
Private Collection
THE PAINTING Until the Impressionists, still lifes were painted along realistic lines like Zurbarán’s. This still life is about ‘realizing’ (as Cézanne called it) all the three-dimensionality that real things had, into the flat surface of a canvas. He would sit staring at fruit for weeks, using wax fruit when it had rotted, trying to understand it spatially. These fruits do not look like real ones, but they have a solidity and ‘reality’ far greater than other paintings. Without losing the leaps into colour made by the Impressionists, Cézanne wanted to ‘make something solid and enduring’. He does just that with these bold, fervent colours. He doesn’t use conventional perspective, but there is great sense of depth and solidity.
THE ARTIST Cézanne is the most central figure in the development of twentieth-century art, but he spent most of his life working alone. He struggled unsuccessfully as an artist until he inherited his father’s country estate, when he immersed himself in the structure of painting. The solid form was what he wanted to paint. Impressionism was all about light and surface effects on the eye. Cézanne thought this had no substance, no solidity or depth. It was only in the last ten years of his life that his friend Pissarro convinced him to exhibit in Paris. But his single-minded study had made him an icon to younger artists. His huge importance was only appreciated after his death. The Cubists, Picasso, Matisse, Duchamp and countless others were inspired by him.
