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Europe 1800 - 1900
Course: Europe 1800 - 1900 > Unit 5
Lesson 3: Impressionism- A beginner's guide to Impressionism
- What does “Impressionism” mean?
- How the Impressionists got their name
- Impressionist color
- Impressionist pictorial space
- Japonisme
- Degas, The Bellelli Family
- Degas, At the Races in the Countryside
- Degas, The Dance Class
- Degas, Visit to a Museum
- Caillebotte, The Floor Scrapers
- Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street; Rainy Day
- Caillebotte, Man at his Bath
- Morisot, The Cradle
- A summer day in Paris: Morisot's Hunting Butterflies
- Cassatt, In the Loge
- Cassatt, Little Girl in a Blue Armchair
- Cassatt, Woman with a Pearl Necklace in a Loge
- Cassatt, The Loge
- Cassatt, The Child's Bath
- Mary Cassatt, The Coiffure
- Cassatt, Breakfast in Bed
- How to recognize Monet: The Basin at Argenteuil
- Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise
- Monet, The Argenteuil Bridge
- Painting modern life: Monet's Gare Saint-Lazare
- Monet, The Gare Saint-Lazare
- Monet, Cliff Walk at Pourville
- Monet's Wheatstacks (Snow Effect, Morning): Getty conversations
- Monet, Poplars
- Monet, Rouen Cathedral Series
- Monet, Water Lilies
- How to Recognize Renoir: The Swing
- Renoir, La Loge
- Renoir, The Grands Boulevards
- Renoir, Moulin de la Galette
- Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Portrait of Madame Charpentier and Her Children
- Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party
- Renoir, The Large Bathers
- Impressionism
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Monet, The Argenteuil Bridge
Claude Monet, The Argenteuil Bridge, 1874, oil on canvas, 60.5 x 80 cm (Musée d'Orsay, Paris) Speakers: Drs. Beth Harris and Steven Zucker Please note that there is significant background chatter in this video. The Musée d'Orsay is happily a very busy museum and this painting is hung in a relatively small room. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Want to join the conversation?
- I always get Monet and Manet confused. What should I learn/remember to keep them straight and tell the difference between their styles and subjects?
Thanks, Jonathan Price.
Has anyone visited the Musée d'Orsay's website at http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/home.html? Visit it and tell me what you like and why you like it.(14 votes)- Crude rule of thumb: In general, Monet disliked painting people up close, where Manet loved talking with his models, male or female. So your first rough guess would be: Is it a human being? Well, likely the painting was by MANet. (Apologies for the crudeness of this rule of thumb...because Manet DID paint landscapes, and Monet did paint people...occasionally).(22 votes)
- In which museum is this painting?(1 vote)
- Here's the webpage for the painting: http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/collections/works-in-focus/search/commentaire/commentaire_id/le-pont-dargenteuil-353.html?no_cache=1&cHash=f184c6f7b7. The English language homepage for the museum is here http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/home.html.(4 votes)
- Did any of the impressionist or post impressionist describe the mental (visualization) process/technique they used to translate there view of a landscape to a painting such as this?(3 votes)
- Some, but not always. The ones who were interviewed almost always did. Is that helpful?(0 votes)
Video transcript
SPEAKER 1: We're at
the Musee d'Orsay, and we're looking
at an 1874 Monet. This is "The Bridge
at Argenteuil," which is a suburb of Paris-- SPEAKER 2: Where
Monet lived briefly. SPEAKER 1: --and was accessible
to Paris by the train. And this is the new suburbs
that are made possible by not only the wealth
the city, but also the industry of this time. SPEAKER 2: And a
place where people would go to escape the intensity
of urban life in Paris, and go boating, and go
fishing, and go picnicking. And you can see,
from this painting, how fun that would be here. SPEAKER 1: Yes. What really comes across
is just the brilliance of the light on a summer day. SPEAKER 2: Monet is
really discarding hundreds of years of tradition
of the way that one would paint trees and water. And it has found a new method
for painting outdoor light. And remember, he's
painting this out of doors. This is a painting
painted en plein air. SPEAKER 1: This is the
height of Impressionism. 1874 is the year of the first
Impressionist exhibition. And Monet has, as you said,
discarded an entire tradition, turned painting on
its head by saying, what's important is not the
thing that I'm painting, but it is the optical experience
of seeing that's critical here. SPEAKER 2: And in
order to jettison those hundreds of years of
how to paint a landscape, Monet's asked himself,
what am I really seeing? If I put away everything
my brain tells me and everything a person
learns at the Academy-- as though my eye were born now--
and I just looked at the scene, what would I see? Patches of green, patches of
bluish green, dabs of purple. So that, not what I know,
not like chiaroscruo and this formula of
academic painting, but the actual visual
experience of this. SPEAKER 1: So, when you
look at, for instance, the English painter
Constable, you can identify the
types of trees, you can identify the hardware that's
on the barges that he renders. Here, almost nothing
is identifiable. It's not about that. It's not about understanding
of what kind of sailboat that is, what kind of sail that
that's canvas that's rolled up. None of that's important. In fact, as you
said, the water-- there are parts of
it that could be a green lawn in another context. But in fact, it's just
the reflective qualities of that surface. SPEAKER 2: Right. He's thought, oh, I
see a dab of green. I see a dab of blue. You have an intensity of color. I mean, he's using these
colors that would never be seen in academic
landscape painting, and-- SPEAKER 1: Because they
would have always been muted, they would have-- SPEAKER 2: Mixed. SPEAKER 1: That's right. SPEAKER 2: Here, they're just
the same in the foreground as they are in the background. For example, that
green that we see in the water, that's
the shadow of the tree. It's just as green and just
as deep as the tree itself. And so, there's a kind of
flattening that happens here that I think looked very
radical in the 1870s. And a kind of sketchiness and
a looseness to the brushwork that made it not look
like a finished painting. Now landscape painters
had done studies out of doors for hundreds of years. The idea was that
Monet was making a completely finished painting
out of doors-- saying, this is done. Even though it lacked the
kind of polish and finish expected by the Academy. SPEAKER 1: It was
a mere impression.