for example, caught their attention. His broken strokes of bright colour and ability to render nature’s shimmering effects with a delicately nuanced palette made an important contribution to Impressionism, as did the expressive handling of Honoré Fragonard. These two painters had already distanced themselves from a lacquer-smooth paint surface in the 18th century.
An attentive eye saw what an important a role form and brushwork played in their canvasses. They showed that it was not only unnecessary to discreetly conceal brushwork, but that brushwork could be used to render movement and the changing effects of nature. Painters born around 1840 entered the field of art already armed with the notion that they could use subjects from everyday life, but in the early 19th century, France still had the most conservative attitude in Europe towards landscape painting.
The classically composed landscape, although based on a study of details from nature, such as the observation of trees, leaves, and rocks, reigned over the annual Salon. The Dutch masters, however, had started painting the well-observed living nature of their country in the 17th century.
In their small, modest canvasses appeared various aspects of the real Holland: its vast sky, frozen canals, frost-covered trees, windmills, and charming little towns. They knew how to convey their country’s humid atmosphere through nuanced tonalities. Their compositions contained neither classical scenes nor theatrical compositions. A flat river typically ran parallel to the edge of the canvas, creating the impression of a direct view onto nature. Elsewhere, the Venetian landscape painters of the 18th century gave us the specific landscape genre of the veduta.
The works of Francesco Guardi, Antonio Canaletto, and Bernardo Bellotto have a theatrical beauty built upon the rules of the Neo-classical school, but they depict real scenes taken from life; indeed, they were noted for such topographical detail that they have remained in the history of art as documentary evidence of towns long since destroyed.
Moreover, the vedute depicted a light veil of humid mist above the Venetian lagoons and the particular, limpid quality of the air over the riverbanks of the island of Elbe.
The future Impressionists also had a keen interest in painters whose work had yet to find its way into museums, such as the sketching club founded in England in the late 18th century.
Its members, who worked directly from nature and specialised in light landscape sketches, included Richard Parkes Bonington, who died in 1828, at the age of twenty-six. Bonington’s watercolour landscapes had a novel limpidity and grace as well as the subtle sensation of the surrounding air.
Alfred Sisley, Villeneuve-la-Garenne (Village on the Seine), 1872.
Oil on canvas, 59 × 80.5 cm. The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.
The Road from Chailly to Fontainebleau, 1865.
Oil on canvas, 97 × 130.5 cm. Ordrupgaard, Charlottenlund.
The Bodmer Oak (Le Bodmer), 1865.
Oil on canvas, 54.3 × 40.9 cm. Private collection, US.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Riding in the Bois de Boulogne (Madame Henriette Darras or The Ride), 1873.
Oil on canvas, 261 × 226 cm. Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
Interior, after Dinner, 1868–1869. Oil on canvas, 50.2 × 65.4 cm.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
The First Impressionist Exhibition
Bonington spent a large part of his life in France, where he studied with Gros and was close to Delacroix. Bonington depicted the landscapes of Normandy and the Île-de-France, locations where all the Impressionists would much later paint. The Impressionists were probably also familiar with the work of the English painter John Constable, from whom they may have learned how to appreciate both the integrity of landscape and the expressive power of painterly brushwork.
Constable’s finished paintings retain the characteristics of their sketches and the fresh colour of studies done after nature. And the Impressionists surely knew the work of Joseph Mallord William Turner, acknowledged leader of the English landscape school for sixty years until 1851. Turner depicted atmospheric effects. Fog, the haze at sunset, steam billowing from a locomotive, or a simple cloud became motifs in and of themselves.
His watercolour series entitled Rivers of France commenced a painterly ode to the Seine that the Impressionists would later take up, and included a landscape with Rouen Cathedral that was a predecessor of Monet’s own Rouen Cathedral series.
Professors at the École des Beaux-Arts in mid-19th-century Paris were still teaching the historical landscape based on the ideal models created in 17th-century France by Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain. The Impressionists, however, were not the first to rebel against clichéd themes and to stand up for truth in painting.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir told his son of a strange encounter he had in 1863 in Fontainebleau forest. For whatever reason, a group of young ruffians did not like the look of Renoir, who was painting directly from nature dressed in his painter’s smock:
With a single kick, one of them knocked the palette out of Renoir’s hands and caused him to fall to the ground. The girls struck him with a parasol (“in my face, with the steel-tipped end; they could have put my eyes out!”). Suddenly, emerging from the bushes, a man appeared. He was about fifty years old, tall and strong, and he too was laden with painting paraphernalia. He also had a wooden leg and held a heavy cane in his hand. The newcomer dropped his things and rushed to the rescue of his young fellow painter. Swinging his cane and his wooden leg, he quickly scattered the attackers. My father was able to get up off the ground and join the fight… In no time the two painters had successfully stood their ground. Oblivious to the gratitude coming from the person he had just saved, the one-legged man picked up the fallen canvas and looked at it attentively. “Not bad at all. You are gifted, very gifted.” The two men sat down on the grass, and Renoir spoke of his life and modest ambitions. Eventually the stranger introduced himself. It was Díaz.
Narcisse Virgile Díaz de la Peña belonged to a group of landscape painters known as the Barbizon school. The Barbizon painters came from a generation of artists born between the first and second decades of the 19th century. Almost fifty years separated them from the Impressionists.
The Barbizon painters had been the first to paint landscapes after nature. It was only fitting that Renoir met Díaz in Fontainebleau forest. The young painters of the Barbizon school were making traditional classical landscapes, but by the 1830s this activity no longer satisfied them. The Parisian Théodore Rousseau had fallen in love with landscape in his youth while travelling throughout France with his father.
Camille, or The Woman in a Green Dress, 1866.
Oil on canvas, 231 × 151 cm. Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen.
The Luncheon, 1868. Oil on canvas, 232 × 151 cm.
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main.
According to his biographer: “One day, on his own and
