Text e. Camille Pissarro (1831-1903)

Another French Impressionist painter, who endured prolonged financial hardship in keeping faith with the aims of Impressionism, is Camille Pissarro. Despite acute eye trouble, his later years were his most prolific. The Parisian and provincial scenes of this period include Place du Theatre Francaise (1898) and Bridge at Bruges (1903). Pissarro was the son of a prosperous Jewish merchant, Abraham Gabriel Pissarro, and Rachel Manzano-Pomie. At the age of 12 he left home for studies in Paris, where he showed an early interest in art. Returning to the West Indies after five years to work in his father's store, he began making sketches of the exotic island and its people. Because he was unable to obtain his father's permission to study art, he ran away to Caracas in 1853 and remained there for two years with the Danish painter Fritz Melbye. Finally, Pissarro's father relented, and in 1855 he returned to France. His earliest canvases, dating from this period, are figure paintings and landscapes of the tropics and of the French countryside; although broadly painted, they show the careful observation of nature that was to remain a characteristic of his art throughout his life. The uninspired academic teaching at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he was enrolled, led Pissarro to seek out the painter Camille Corot, who permitted Pissarro to call himself Corot's 'pupil' at a Salon exhibition in 1864. At this time Pissarro was also attracted to the rural, sentimental paintings of the Barbizon artist Jean-Francois Millet and to the works of Gustave Courbet, the leading proponent of everyday Realism. During the 1860s Pissarro participated in the famous Parisian Cafe Guerbois discussions, in which artists and writers exchanged ideas, and worked with the younger painters Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet. To escape the Franco-German War, in 1870 Pissarro fled to England; there he and Monet, who had also fled France, visited the museums, where they viewed British landscape paintings. It was in London that Pissarro married Julie Vellay, formerly his mother's maid, who had already borne him two of their seven children. When Pissarro returned to France in 1871, he found his house in Louveciennes looted and a great number of his paintings destroyed. Soon he was to look for another house in Pontoise. (Because it was costly to live in Paris, Pissarro, like several of his painter friends, lived in villages not far from the city.) His surroundings formed the theme of his art for some 30 years and were always carefully chosen: “I require a spot that has beauty!” At Pontoise he was joined by Paul Cezanne in 1872, and the two of them painted out-of-doors, even in the middle of winter. Pissarro’s paintings are never dramatic; on the contrary, his leading motifs during the 1870s and 1880s are simply houses, factories, trees, haystacks, fields, labouring peasants, and river scenes. Forms do not dissolve but remain firm, and colours are strong; during the latter part of the 1870s his comma-like brushstrokes frequently recorded the sparkling scintillation of light, as in Orchard with Flowering Fruit Trees, Springtime, Pontoise (1877). Although his paintings were sold by the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who represented several of the Impressionists, Pissarro continued to experience financial hardships, which he described in letters to his eldest son, Lucien; this remarkable correspondence began in 1883 and lasted for 20 years. In some of the letters to his son Pissarro expressed dissatisfaction with his own work. Preoccupied by problems of style and technique, he eagerly embraced the Neo-Impressionist theories of Georges Seurat, whom he met in 1885 through the painter Paul Signac. Seurat's technique, consisting of meticulously painted small dots of juxtaposed colours, was adopted by Pissarro; for about five years he painted in this 'divisionist' manner, a style which made his works unpopular with dealers, collectors, and even his old fellow artists. Overwhelmingly discouraged by their continuing state of poverty, Madame Pissarro considered drowning herself and their two youngest children. Finally, Pissarro abandoned the style, not, however, because of the opposition he met but because “it was impossible to be true to my sensations and consequently to render life and movement, impossible to be faithful to the effects, so random and so admirable, of nature ...” At about this time, also, there was an estrangement from Paul Gauguin, who had formerly worked at his side but now was involved with the new Symbolist movement. A large and successful retrospective exhibition of Pissarro's paintings was held by Durand-Ruel in 1892, giving the artist greater financial stability, although by this time he was troubled by a chronic eye infection that frequently made it impossible for him to work out-of-doors. Both in 1893 and 1897 he took hotel rooms in Paris from which he painted 24 canvases of the city's streets by day and by night, in sun, rain, and fog. During the 1890s he also did a series of river scenes in Rouen, likewise depicting the various effects of nature. From 1900 until his death three years later, Pissarro continued working, mainly in Paris, Eragny, Dieppe, and Le Havre, with freshness of vision and increasing freedom in his technique. More than 1,600 works, consisting of oils, gouaches, temperas, pastels (and even paintings on fans and on porcelain) as well as nearly 200 fine prints, give testimony to the high quality of Pissarro's half century of work. Pissarro was the only Impressionist painter who participated in all eight of the group's exhibitions. His kindness, warmth, wisdom, and encouraging words cast him in a fatherly role to struggling younger artists – Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, and Gauguin – who were exploring new means of personal expression. Despite financial burdens that continued until he reached his 60s, Pissarro never lost faith in the new art believing that “one must be sure of success to the very end, for without that there is no hope!”

 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

 Language Focus: Vocabulary

Activity 1. Match the words underlined in the texts to their synonyms or synonymous expressions:

premise lampoon boisterous abject rebuff avidity scintillating mundane loll glaze

very impressive, brilliant, dazzling ridicule, mock, satirize refuse, reject, snub, turn down lounge, relax, sprawl noisy, loud, unruly, rowdy assumption, assertion commonplace, banal, routine total, complete, hopeless enthusiasm, ardour, zeal, eagerness gloss, polish, shine, varnish

Activity 2. Match the words underlined in the texts to their dictionary definitions:

to jeer graft implausible to embroil roll call to flare to flank to vindicate to speckle volatile to conscript squashing bustle awning to loot

to steal things from houses or shops during a war or after a disaster such as a fire or flood to cover with a lot of small spots or marks to shout or laugh at someone in an unkind way showing you have no respect for them to deeply involve oneself in a difficult situation or argument to suddenly become angry or violent to make someone join the armed forces a sheet of cloth hung above a window or door as protection against rain or sun to be at the side of something pushing or pressing something so that it fits into a small place dishonest or illegal activities in politics or business that involve giving people money or advantages in exchange for their help or support to prove that someone is right difficult to accept as true can suddenly change or become more dangerous, angry or violent the process of reading out an official list of people’s names to check who is present a frame warn by women in the past to hold out the back of their skirts

Activity 3. Rearrange the text given below. Make sure you read through the completed text to check that the order of the paragraphs makes sense. Add new words which may come in handy when speaking about painting as a supplement to your vocabulary list:

1. Manet gave no name to the style he had created; when his followers began calling themselves Impressionists, he refused to accept the term for his own work. The word Impressionism had been coined in 1874, after a hostile critic had looked at a picture entitled Impression: Sunrise, by Claude Monet (1840-1926), one of the leading Impressionist painters, and it certainly fits Monet better than it does Manet.

2. Scenes from the world of entertainment – dance halls, cafes, concerts, the theatre, Paris streets and street life with its characteristic bustle, commotion and endless flow of traffic and pedestrians were favourite subjects for Impressionist painters. Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), another important member of the group, filled his with the joy of life of a singularly happy temperament. The flirting couples in Le Moulin de la Galette dappled with sunlight and shadow, radiate human warmth that is utterly entrancing, even though the artist permits us no more than a fleeting glance at any of them. Our role is that of the casual stroller, who takes in this slice of life as he passes.

3. In the landscapes River Bank (1873) and London Fog (1903), the canvas is filled as it were with the subtle, barely perceptible movement of currents of moist air, in which outlines of things melt into nothing. But Monet’s multi-coloured landscape paintings never fall apart in compositional terms, because for all the freedom of their painterly transposition the artist always subjected them to the same organizational pattern: the light of the sun, which illuminates all the elements of the picture and connects them together like a net cast around them.

4. Of course, Renoir at his best embodies the principles and methods of Impressionism in portrait painting. He did not attempt to reveal in his portraits intricate feelings and emotions; he caught the spontaneous movement, the half-smile, the gentle reverie of his model. Unaffected animation and simplicity characterize his Girl with a Fan and Portrait of the Actress Jeanne Samary. Renoir's colours are notable for their freshness, the richness of hues, and the extremely delicate transition from one tone to the next.

5. What brought about this “revolution of the colour patch”? We do not know, and Edouard Manet (1832-1883) himself surely did not reason it out beforehand. It is tempting to think that he was impelled to create the new style by the challenge of photography. He wanted to prove that a canvas was a surface covered with paints, flat patches of color.

6. Monet’s The River (1868) is flooded with sunlight so bright that conservative critics claimed it made their eyes smart; in this flickering network of colour patches, the reflections on the water are as ‘real’ as the banks of the Seine. Monet’s painting is a ‘playing card’; were it not for the woman and the boat in the foreground, the picture could hang upside-down with hardly any difference of effect. The mirror image here serves a purpose contrary to that of earlier mirror images: instead of adding to the illusion of real space, it strengthens the unity of the actual painted surface. This inner coherence sets The River apart from Romantic ‘impressions’ like Constable’s Hampstead Heath even though they share the same on-the-spot immediacy and fresh perception.

7. Towards the 1870s Impressionism reached its peak in France, the movement having originated as a protest against the rigid convention which prevailed in official art. The Impressionists emerged as heirs to the realist traditions and enriched painting with their fresh, joyful colours, their representation of light and exquisite rendering of atmosphere. They drew only from life capturing the spontaneity and naturalness of the first visual impression. In conveying the wealth of colour in the real world around them the Impressionists attempted to catch and to record its face, forever changing under the play of light.

8. But it is important to stress that Renoir never felt obliged to adhere strictly to one particular method; we know him to change his technique whenever he felt like it. As a result, it is sometimes not at all easy to date some of his canvases; after painting several pictures in one fashion, he would paint another in which he went back to an earlier way of working, just when one would have been justified in thinking that he has abandoned it for good.

9. Monet had adopted Manet’s concept of painting and applied it to landscapes done out-of-doors. An early work of his, Lady in the Garden (1860s), reflects the first success of the new manner of painting. Abandoning black and subdued tones, Monet painted the shade in colour depending on the surrounding milieu. The woman’s white dress in the shade of the parasol, for example, acquires a bluish hue against the background of the green foliage and the blue sky.

Activity 4. Read the texts below and complete them using the words from the boxes:

phenomena apparent vanguard exclusively easel streamed fleeting platform memories lively financial reality public atmosphere developed

Monet at the Peak Of Impressionism

Despite his occasional successes, Monet’s …¹… situation did not improve. But he did increasingly enter the …²… eye, and was also perceived as being at the …³… and finally as being a main representative of Impressionist painting.

Around this time he discovered the vitality and splendid colour of city life for himself. Like the English artist Turner, Monet now …⁴… an enthusiasm for the new technology, which was now …⁵… everywhere and had a great influence on people's lives. Thus he set up his …⁶… in the Parisian Gare St Lazare, and in a series of paintings he captured the moments in which powerful steam locomo­tives reached the …⁷… and hundreds of people from the suburbs …⁸… out of the carriages. With the same blurring style, and the same …⁹…, brightly-coloured contrasts that characterize his landscape paintings, Monet managed to capture the hectic, noisy and confusing …¹⁰… of a station hall.

But his true love, more and more, turned …¹¹… to landscape painting. For Monet, landscape paintings were not painted …¹²… or captured moods within the landscape itself, rather they were to grasp the purely visual, experienced impression of an object or landscape. Monet was not concerned with the 'objective beauty' of things, but mainly with the momentary, …¹³… impression. He wished to capture the transitory aspect of …¹⁴… as in a 'snapshot'. He believed that Impressionist painting depicted the …¹⁵… of the moment. In this sense Monet saw his art as Realism.

cheerful vibrate leaves comprehensible unpleasant discerned vague stored confidence synthetic reflections elements abstract countless

Renoir

“For me a painting must above all be beautiful, loveable and delightful, something really pretty. There are enough …¹… things, we don't need to make new ones”, wrote Renoir. Accordingly, he is seen as the painter of the …²… side of life. The play of sunlight and the reproduction of …³…, but particularly the human figure in natural light, form the central content of Renoir's paintings. In the pleasure-garden ‘Moulin de la Galette’, the light shines through the …⁴… of the trees, and dances over the ground and the figures in …⁵… little patches of glimmering colour. The people as well as the ground seem to …⁶… in the play of light between the light and dark patches. Renoir had absolute …⁷… in the descriptive effect of colour: with short, soft strokes and delicate grades of colour, he produced gentle, vague contours, so that all the picture …⁸… seem to blend, to blur. Details can no longer be …⁹… among these veils of colour.

Thanks to the so-called ‘synthetic’ process of seeing, however, Renoir's paintings remain …¹⁰… to the viewer. With the vague painting on canvas that only hints and describes, the viewer automatically compares ‘typical’ images …¹¹… away in the unconscious, and thus completes it. Renoir – like his friend Monet – deliberately addressed the …¹²… process of reception, in order to make his paintings appear even more vivid through the viewer's own efforts. He made use of Leonardo’s sfumato technique of …¹³… contours, and at the same time created one of the bases for the …¹⁴… painting of the 20th century.

Activity 5. Read the text below and complete it using the words from the box on the right in the correct form. Always check that the word you have formed is not only lexically and/or grammatically appropriate but also makes sense in the context:

IMPRESSIONISM AND ITS PECULIARITIES Impressionist painters were considered radical in their time because they …1… many of the rules of picture-making set by earlier …2… . They found many of their subjects in …3… around them rather than in history, which was then the …4… source of subject matter. Instead of painting an ideal of beauty that earlier artists had …5…, the …6… tried to depict what they saw at a given moment, capturing a fresh, original …7… that was hard for some people to accept as …8… . They often painted out of doors, rather than in a studio, so that they …9… observe nature more directly and set down its most …10… aspects – especially the changing light of the sun. The style of Impressionist painting has several …11… features. To …12… the appearance of spontaneity, Impressionist painters used broken brushstrokes of bright, often unmixed colors. This practice …13… loose or densely textured surfaces rather than the …14… blended colors and smooth surfaces favored by most …15… of the time. The colors in Impressionist paintings have an overall …16… because the painters avoided blacks and earth colors. The Impressionists also …17… their compositions, omitting detail to achieve a …18… overall effect.

Break Generate Live Acceptance Definition Impress Visible Beauty Can Fleet Characterize Achievement Production Care Art Luminous Simple Strike

THE GARDEN AT GIVERNY Monet first rented the house and garden at Giverny, a small village where the river Epte and the Seine joined, early in the 1880s. Today its beautiful gardens, …1… when Monet bought the property in 1892, with its …2… outhouses, studios and greenhouses, have become a place of …3… for all lovers of art. There they find a large garden …4… disarrayed, full of clumps of flowers planted by the painter to ensure for himself an …5… vista of subjects for his paintings. By the end of his life, Monet’s garden at Giverny was his sole …6…; he would even say, in moments of …7 … at the way his paintings did not turn out as he …8… them, that his garden was his true masterpiece. Irises were among Monet’s …9… flowers and he went to a great deal of trouble to get the best bulbs for his garden, even importing special varieties from Japan. Apart from their …10… interest, Monet saw them as models for his paintings, either in great banks of colour or in single stems. As with his waterlilly pond paintings, Monet was totally …11… at this period of his life to the exploration of colour …12… in which each brushstroke was like a note in a piece of music. Its …13… and tone were in complete balance with every other brushstroke, thus creating a perfect …14… . Monet’s garden was a riot of colour in springtime, as he took good care to buy the …15… flower bulbs and instructed his gardeners how, when and where to plant them. Spring was a good time to paint his …16… and he did so with enthusiasm and liberal use of colour, though always controlled and carefully …17… so that the paintings retained their …18…, and look as clear and lively today as when they were painted.

Large Vary Pilgrim Romance End Inspire Desperate Imagination Favor Botany Commitment Combine Intensify Compose Necessity Create Application Fresh

Activity 6. Use these word combinations speaking about your favourite French painters and their famous works of art:

At their own peril; to be the fountainhead of art; sensuous richness of colouring; to reveal psychological penetration; daring use of colour; to paint vivid sensations of light; to make merry; to dissolve forms in light; to enrich painting with fresh, joyful, glowing, brilliant and luminous colours; to turn one’s back on something; one’s urge for emotional expression; to pave the way; to capture spontaneity and naturalness of the first visual impression; to establish a standard of representational accuracy; flat patches of colour; to fuse in the eye of the beholder; to set up a quivering vibration; to seize a fugitive effect.

 Developing Conversation Skills

Activity 1. Let's visit an art gallery! Read the descriptions of the paintings given below and say more about the artists' life, style and manner of painting.

Edouard Manet (1832-1883)

Gare Saint-Lazare

As chic as a fashion plate, Manet's picture shows how he reacted against the academy and found a fresh style to paint the life of his times. The fashionable young woman is Victorine Meurend, Manet's favorite model, whom he painted in The Picnic and Olympia, where his bold treatment of the nude figure shocked or entertained most of Paris. The little girl was the daughter of a friend, in whose garden Manet painted the picture. The child looks through the iron railing, evidently fascinated by a train that has pulled into the Saint-Lazare station in Paris. Obligingly the train has left behind it a cloud of white smoke which obliterates unwanted detail from the background so that Manet can arrange the figures in a handsome pattern against the regular intervals of the railing.

Like the Impressionists Manet used light colors and, by suppressing shadows, he secured the effect of bright, outdoor lighting. While he satisfies the Realist's love for an apparently casual composition, with its figures off-center and “unposed,” actually he has sensitively composed them according to principles learned from Japanese prints. As in the Oriental woodcuts, here, too, broad silhouettes of contrasting colors lend the picture its sparkle, while graceful curving contours in the figures and costumes form a pleasing design.

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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Claude Monet (1840-1926)

Rouen Cathedral, West Facade, Sunlight

The hot sun of early afternoon blazes down upon the lacy stone facade of Rouen Cathedral. Painted in 1894, twenty years after the first Impressionist exhibition, this picture reveals Monet's ultimate achievement in capturing sunlight with broken color. The myriad glowing spots of color almost dissolve the cathedral's form. Small, separate touches of paint, prismatic in their brilliance, complement each other to dazzle the eye and suggest the shimmer of actual light. Monet painted an extensive series of pictures showing different effects of light playing across the elaborate Gothic tracery of Rouen Cathedral. He said that often he could paint on each picture for only two or three minutes at a time; after that, the light would have changed and, for him, the subject would become quite different.

Monet created a new kind of pictorial unity. It did not depend upon lines or patterns, but upon the unity of a single visual sensation, an impression. He gave up such traditional aims as balancing his composition or expressing emotions about his subjects. Instead he painted vivid optical sensations. Through long experience he had discovered what effects of light might be achieved by juxtaposing certain bright, pure colors which interplay, one against another, to simulate the visual experience of light. As Cezanne said, “Monet was only an eye, but what an eye!”

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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Berthe Morisot (1841-1895)