Guillaumin. Paul Cézanne travelled to the exhibit from his native town of Aix-en-Provence, also at Pissarro’s invitation. The young Cézanne had broken with official painting in his earliest works, but he no longer shared the Impressionists’ outlook on art. His participation may have aroused the concern of Édouard Manet, who definitely had been invited. According to his contemporaries, Manet said that he would never exhibit alongside Cézanne. But Manet may have simply preferred a different path. According to Monet, Manet encouraged Monet and Renoir to continue in their attempts to conquer the Salon. Manet found the Salon to be the best battlefield. In Degas’s opinion, Manet was prevented from joining them because of vanity. “The realist movement doesn’t need to fight with others,” Degas said. “It is, it exists, and it must stand alone. A realist salon is needed. Manet did not understand that. I believe it was due much more to vanity than to intelligence.” (Manet, Paris 1983, Éditions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, p. 29). In the end, neither Manet, nor his best friend, Henri Fantin-Latour exhibited alongside the young artists. The idea of an independent exhibition also frightened Corot, and although he liked the painting of the future Impressionists, he discouraged the young landscape painter Antoine Guillemet from participating. But Corot was unsuccessful in dissuading the courageous Berthe Morisot, a student of both Corot and Manet, whom at that moment joined the future Impressionists.
Finding a location for the exhibit was a difficult problem to solve. It was risky to rent a space to young painters who were not only totally unknown, but who dared challenge the official Salon. “For some time we were automatically rejected by the designated jury, my friends and I,” Claude Monet later remembered. “What were we to do? Just painting wasn’t enough, we had to sell paintings, we had to live. The dealers wouldn’t touch us. Still, we had to exhibit. But where?” (L. Venturi, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 340). An unexpected solution was found. “Nadar, the great Nadar with the heart of gold, rented us the space,” recalled Monet. (L. Venturi, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 340).
16. Berthe Morisot, Reading, 1873.
Oil on canvas, 46 × 71.8 cm.
The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland.
Nadar was the pseudonym of Gaspard Félix Tournachon, a journalist, writer, draughtsman, and caricaturist. According to a nineteenth-century historian, Nadar was equally well-known in London and Paris, Australia and Europe. A distinguished photographer, he made photographic portraits of his famous contemporaries, including Alexandre Dumas, George Sand, Charles Baudelaire, Eugène Delacroix, Honoré Daumier, Gustave Doré, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Charles Gounod, Richard Wagner, and Sarah Bernhardt, among many others. But this was not his only claim to fame. He was also a fearless aeronaut. During the Franco-German war, Nadar travelled by balloon over German lines to deliver mail from besieged Paris and it was Nadar in his balloon who got the French war minister, Léon Gambetta, out of the capital in 1871. Nadar was the first person to capture a birds-eye-view of Paris by photographing from the top of an aerostat. He was also the first to photograph the catacombs of Paris, which had opened in the mid-nineteenth century. The second-floor photography studio that he turned over to the future Impressionists, was located in the very heart of Paris, at 35, boulevard des Capucines.
It was unlike the immense galleries that normally housed the Salon exhibitions. “The Salons, with walls covered in dark red wool, are extremely favourable to paintings,” wrote the critic Philippe Burty. “They [the paintings] are side-lit by natural light, as in apartments. They are all separated, which sets them off advantageously.” (L. Venturi, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 288). Canvases of modest dimensions, lost in midst of the Salon’s huge academic paintings, in Nadar’s studio found the optimal conditions for the “free expression of individual talents.” (L. Venturi, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 287).
17. Claude Monet, Springtime, 1872.
Oil on canvas, 50 × 65.5 cm.
Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore.
One hundred and sixty-five paintings were assembled for the exhibit, the work of thirty rather dissimilar artists. Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, and Paul Cézanne exhibited alongside the four Gleyre pupils. The following artists were also represented: the engraver Félix Braquemont; a friend of Édouard Manet named Zacharie Astruc; Claude Monet’s oldest friend, Eugène Boudin, landscape painter of Le Havre; and Degas’s friend, the sculptor and engraver Ludovic-Napoléon Lepic. Additionally, the extremely fashionable Joseph de Nittis gave in to the exhortations of Degas. The names of the other participants in the first Impressionist exhibition meant little to their contemporaries and have not remained in the history or art. Degas suggested they call their association “Capucin,” after the name of the boulevard, and because it was an unprovocative word that could not be taken politically or assumed to be hostile to the Salon. Eventually they adopted the name Société anonyme des artistes, peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs, etc. (The Anonymous Society of Artist, Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers). In the words of Philippe Burty: “Along with their quite obvious individual intentions, the group that thus presented itself for review held a common artistic goal: in technique, to reproduce the broad atmospheric effects of outdoor light; in sentiment, to convey the clarity of the immediate sensation.” (L. Venturi, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 288). In fact, only a few of the exhibiting artists expressed both these qualities in their painting: they are the painters that have remained in the history of art under the name of Impressionists.
18. Claude Monet, The Beach at Sainte-Adresse, 1867.
Oil on canvas, 75.8 × 102.5 cm.
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.
The term Impressionism not only designates a trend in French art, but also a new stage in the development of European painting. It marked the end of the neo-classical period that had begun during the Renaissance. The Impressionists did not entirely break with the theories of Leonardo da Vinci and the rules according to which all European academies had conceived their paintings for over three centuries. All the Impressionists had more or less followed the lessons of their old-school professors. Each of them had their preferred old masters. But for the Impressionists, the essential thing had changed: their vision of the world and their concept of painting. The Impressionists cast doubt on painting’s literary nature, the necessity of always having to base a painting on a story, and consequently, its link to historical and religious subjects. They chose the genre of landscape because it only referred to nature and nearly all the Impressionists started their artistic itinerary with the landscape. It was a genre that appealed to observation and observation alone, rather than to the imagination, and from observation came the artist’s new view of nature, the logical consequence of all his prior pictorial experience: it was more important to paint what one saw, rather than how one was taught – that was a fact! It was impossible to see the workings of nature within the confines of the studio, so the Impressionists took to the outdoors and set up their easels in fields and forests. The close observation of nature had a power until then undreamt of. If the natural landscape was incompatible with the traditional concept of composition and perspective, then artists had to reject academic rules and obey nature. If traditional pictorial technique stood in the way of conveying the truths artists discovered in nature, then this technique had to be changed. A new genre of painting appeared in the works of the Impressionists that lacked traditional finish and often resembled a rapid oil sketch. But the Impressionists still lacked a new aesthetic theory that could replace tradition. Their one, firm conviction was that they could employ any means to arrive at truth in art. “These daredevils assumed that the work of the artist could be done without professing or practising a religious respect of academic theories and professional practices,” wrote one critic, three years after the first Impressionist exhibition in 1877. “To those who ask them to formulate a program, they cynically reply that they have none. They are happy to give the public the impressions
