Practice Comprehension Check

Activity 1. Scan the texts about the greatest French artists of the 19^th century and complete the profile of each painter:

The most important dates in the artist's life and career

The most important events in the artist's life and career

The most famous and spectacular works of art

Epithets and terms to characterize the peculiarities of the artist's style and manner of painting, his artistic achievements

Phonetic transcription of the most important proper nouns

Activity 2. How carefully have you read the texts? Answer the questions and provide your commentaries if necessary:

1. What is the essential difference in the treatment of detail in an Impressionist picture as compared with a picture painted by an academic painter?

2. What is meant by simultaneous vision?

3. What is meant by consecutive vision?

4. What contri­bution did the Impressionists make to painting?

5. Why is Delacroix considered to be one of the pioneers in the analysis of colour?

6. Explain the phenomenon of complementary colours. (How do complementary colours act upon one another?)

7. What is meant by local colour, atmospheric colour, and illumination colour?

8. What are the primary colours in pigment?

9. What are the primary colours in light?

10. Why did the Impressionist painters discard black?

11. Why did the Impressionists refrain from mixing colours on their palettes?

12. How was colour ap­plied?

13. How did they secure the effect of the tint desired in a painting?

14. What is meant by optical mixing?

15. How did they get the effect of a pearly grey, of a brilliant brown?

16. What names have been given to this technique and why?

17. How can one recognise an Impressionist painting?

Activity 3. Here are the descriptions of some famous works of art created by the Impressionists. Match them to the titles given below:

1. Although this painting is more academic in approach than the artist’s later work, he has nevertheless imbued it with a bright, airy feeling far removed from the formal, brown paintings which were the accepted fashion of the day. Despite its size, the artist insisted on painting it entirely out-of-doors and always in sunlight. Using his mistress, Camille, later to become his wife, as model for all four women, he worked on the painting in the garden of a house he had rented at Ville d’Avray in 1866. The painting is not entirely successful, since the almost life-size figures are a little stiff and there is something slightly disturbing about their activities, which persuades us to look for a hidden significance in the picture that was probably never intended. In particular, one woman half-hides her face in a bouquet while looking meaningfully at us, while another appears to be rushing across the pass although she is probably only reaching out to pluck a blossom from a bush.

2. This perfect painting is quite modest-sized. The wonderful quality of the light and the sober grandeur of the interior give the occasion an air of noble, classical calm. The scene looks like a randomly frozen moment in the flow of time, with dancers scattered through the rooms while one of their number takes up her position, ready to obey the master’s commands, and a seated fiddler waits to strike up an accompaniment. The vertical of the music stand rises to form a right-angled corner with the red line of the practice bar; the dancers seen through the archway make a neatly symmetrical pair; and the skirt and leg glimpsed through the left-hand doorway run in parallel with the back-thrust leg of the principal dancer. Here, meticulous design and poetic feeling are inseparable.

3. This is a wonderful portrait of a genuine Spanish dancer. It looks like a conventional, dark-toned picture. Above all the subject gave the artist an excuse for painting colourful embroidery and delicately patterned lace – the kind of virtuoso display that the public could normally be expected to admire. The dancer is posed behind a piece of stage scenery; the audience can just be glimpsed on the right-hand side of the picture. Certain theatricality always appealed to this painter.

4. After the Franco-Prussian war and the civil war of the Communards, Paris experienced a new beginning. The young painters soon to be termed ‘Impressionists’ came back from abroad or from the country. Life was hard for most of them. The conservative members of the French art establishment did not take to their art, and many of their painters were rejected by the Salon. In April 1874 a group of artists exhibited independently in the Boulevard des Capucines. The exhibition was a financial flop. One of the paintings in the exhibition, for example, was criticized for the way in which the crowds walking along the boulevard looked like ‘innumerable black tongues’.

5. This brilliant lovely dappled portrait was also severely criticized. Albert Wolff pronounced his verdict on the painting in the following way: “Try to explain to [the artist] that a woman’s torso is not a mass of decomposing flesh, with green and violet patches signifying that the corpse is in an advanced state of putrefaction: you could try, but it would be a waste of effort.” Nevertheless, the painting was bought by Gustave Caillebotte, whose purchases, gifts and backing for exhibitions helped to sustain the Impressionists over the next few years.

6. This painting, which has been called a ‘jewel of Impressionism’, was among those exhibited by the painter at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. It was painted during a wonderfully fruitful period when he and his family were living at Argenteuil on the Seine near Paris. The red flowers make a fine contrast with the violet and green of the rest of the picture; the figures walking through the grass add a human dimension, unusual for the painter who often omitted it from his colour symphonies. The figures are the painter’s wife, and their son Jean. The house in the distance may be his home at Argenteuil.

A. Auguste Renoir’s Nude in Sunlight

B. Claude Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines

C. Claude Monet’s Poppy Field

D. Claude Monet’s Women in the Garden

E. Edgar Degas’ Dance Foyer at the Opera

F. Edouard Manet’s Lola de Valence