Natalia Brodskaïa - Camille Pissarro

Author: Nathalia Brodskaya

Layout:

Baseline Co Ltd

61A-63A Vo Van Tan

th Floor

District 3, Ho Chi Minh City,

Vietnam.

Confidential Concepts, worldwide, USA

Parkstone Press International, New York, USA

Picasso Estate/Artists Rights Society, New York

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or adapted without the permission of the copyright holder, throughout the world.

Unless otherwise specified, copyright on the works reproduced lies with the respective photographers. Despite intensive research, it has not always been possible to establish copyright ownership. Where this is the case, we would appreciate notification.

ISBN: 978-1-78160- 632-2

Nathalia Brodskaya

Camille

Pissarro

The Road from Versailles to Louveciennes, 1870.

Oil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm.

Private Collection, Zurich.

Impression: Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant, Muse Marmottan, Paris) was the prescient title of one of Claude Monets paintings shown in 1874 in the first exhibition of the Impressionists, or as they called themselves then, the Socit anonyme des artistes, peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs (the Anonymous Society of Artist, Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers ) . Monet had gone painting in his childhood hometown of Le Havre to prepare for the event, eventually selecting his best Havre landscapes for display. Edmond Renoir, journalist brother of Renoir the painter, compiled the catalogue. He criticised Monet for the uniform titles of his works, for the painter had not come up with anything more interesting than View of Le Havre . Among these Havre landscapes was a canvas painted in the early morning depicting a blue fog that seemed to transform the shapes of yachts into ghostly apparitions. The painting also depicted smaller boats gliding over the water in black silhouette, and above the horizon the flat, orange disk of the sun, its first rays casting an orange path across the sea. It was more like a rapid study than a painting, a spontaneous sketch done in oils what better way to seize the fleeting moment when sea and sky coalesce before the blinding light of day? View of Le Havre was obviously an inappropriate title for this particular painting, as Le Havre was nowhere to be seen. Write Impression, Monet told Edmond Renoir, and in that moment began the story of Impressionism.

On 25 April 1874, the art critic Louis Leroy published a satirical piece in the journal Charivari that described a visit to the exhibition by an official artist. As he moves from one painting to the next, the artist slowly goes insane. He mistakes the surface of a painting by Camille Pissarro, depicting a ploughed field, for shavings from an artists palette carelessly deposited onto a soiled canvas. When looking at the painting he is unable to tell top from bottom, or one side from the other. He is horrified by Monets landscape entitled Boulevard des Capucines . Indeed, in Leroys satire, it is Monets work that pushes the academician over the edge. Stopping in front of one of the Havre landscapes, he asks what Impression: sunrise depicts. Impression, of course, mutters the academician. I said so myself, too, because I am so impressed, there must be some impression in here and what freedom, what technical ease! At which point he begins to dance a jig in front of the paintings, exclaiming: Hey! Ho! Im a walking impression, Im an avenging palette knife ( Charivari , 25 April 1874). Leroy called his article, The Exhibition of the Impressionists. With typical French finesse, he had adroitly coined a new word from the paintings title, a word so fitting that it was destined to remain forever in the vocabulary of the history of art.

Responding to questions from a journalist in 1880, Monet said: Im the one who came up with the word, or who at least, through a painting that I had exhibited, provided some reporter from Le Figaro the opportunity to write that scathing article. It was a big hit, as you know. (Lionello Venturi, Les Archives de limpressionnisme , Paris, Durand-Ruel, 1939, vol. 2, p. 340).

. Two Women, Chatting by the Sea, Saint Thomas, 1856.

Oil on canvas, 28 x 41 cm.

National Gallery of Art, Washington.

The House of Pre Gallien, Pontoise, 1866.

Oil on canvas, 40 x 55 cm.

Ipswich Borough Council, Museums and Galleries, Suffolk.