Impressionism Archives – Daily Art Fixx

Berthe Morisot: 1841-1895

January 14, 2017 By Wendy Campbell

Born to a prosperous family on January 14, 1841, in Bourges, Cher, France, Berthe Morisot was a central member of the Paris Impressionists. Morisot, as well as her sisters, were encouraged at an early age to pursue art and studied with neoclassical painter Geoffroy-Alphonse Chocarne. In 1858 she and her sister Edma studied at the studio of Joseph-Benoît Guichard, and through him met the leading landscape painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot who encouraged the siblings to paint outdoors.

Morisot exhibited at the Salon from 1864 to 1873. Around 1867, she met Édouard Manet with whom she developed a close friendship. Morisot modeled for Manet numerous times and in 1874 she married his brother, Eugène. That same year she refused to show her work at the Salon and instead participated in the first independent show of Impressionist paintings. In 1878, Morisot had a daughter Julie who became a main source of inspiration for her paintings.

Morisot painted her daily experiences and reflected 19th century cultural expectations of her class and gender. Her works included landscapes, family and domestic life, portraits, garden settings and boating scenes. She avoided urban and street scenes as well as the nude figure. Morisot worked with pastels, watercolors, and oil, and in her later years, she experimented with lithography and drypoint etching.

Morisot became an important member of the Impressionist group. Painters and writers would meet at her home including Renoir, Degas, and Mary Casssatt. Morisot was never commercially successful in her lifetime. At the time however, her paintings sold for slightly higher prices than those of Renoir, Monet, and Sisley.

Berthe Morisot died of pneumonia on March 2, 1895 in Paris at the age of 54. She was interred in the Cimetière de Passy.

Sources: Wikipedia, Cleveland Museum of Art, Biography.com

Claude Monet: 1840 – 1926

November 14, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

Born on November 14, 1840, in Paris, France, Oscar Claude Monet was a founder and leader of the Impressionist art movement in France. The name Impressionism is derived from his 1873 painting Impression, Sunrise. Monet grew up in Le Havre on the Normandy coast. His mother died in 1857 and it was his aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre, who supported his desire to become an artist.

From 1862 to 1864, Monet studied art intermittently in Paris under Charles Gleyre where he met fellow students Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille and Alfred Sisley. Also during this time, he developed a friendship with the painter Johann Barthold Jongkind that influenced his direction as a landscape painter. In these early years, Monet became known for his charcoal caricatures, which he would sell for a small fee. In 1856 or 1857, he met the artist Eugène Boudin who introduced Monet to plein-air painting.

Monet gained some recognition in 1865, when two of his works were exhibited at the Salon. The latter half of the 1860s was a period of experimentation for Monet. He pursued his interested in contemporary subject matter and “he further explored the nature of Realism as embodied in plein-air painting.” However, Monet’s financial difficulties led him to return to Le Havre, leaving his pregnant companion, Camille-Léonie Doncieux, in Paris. She gave birth to their first son, Jean in 1867, and their second son Michel in 1868. The couple married in 1870.

In the summer of 1870, the Franco-Prussian war broke out and Monet fled with his family to London that autumn to avoid conscription. Monet remained in London for about nine months, and he painted numerous views of the Thames River. He reconnected with Camille Pissarro and met Paul Durand-Ruel, who became his first dealer. After spending the summer painting in Holland in 1871, Monet returned to Argenteuil, an industrial town and boating centre on the Seine, west of Paris. He remained here until 1878.

Monet joined with other artists in the formation of the Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs etc, which held its first exhibition in April 1874. Monet showed his painting Impression, Sunrise and the group emerged from the exhibition with the name “the Impressionists” dubbed by the critic Louis Leroy.

In 1878, Monet’s financial troubles and his wife’s illness led the family to enter a household arrangement in Vétheuil with the family of former patron Ernest Hoschedé. After Camille’s death in 1879, Monet and Alice Hoschedé continued to live together, waiting until Ernest Hoschedé died before marrying in 1892.

Monet exhibited with the Impressionists intermittently and showed his work at the Salon in 1880. He had a solo exhibition at Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris in 1883, and at several of Georges Petit’s Expositions Internationales de Peinture. In 1889, Galerie Georges Petit held a major retrospective of his work, showing 145 paintings. In 1891, Durand-Ruel had an exhibition of Monet’s first series paintings, Grainstacks, which were met with great critical acclaim.

“By 1890 Monet was financially secure enough to purchase a house at Giverny, later adding adjacent land and installing both the water-lily garden and Japanese bridge, which he would later famously paint in series. Over the next decade he completed more series studies of the lily garden at Giverny, which he continued to enlarge.”

“From 1903 to 1908 Monet concentrated on the enlarged pond with its floating pads and blossoms set in orderly clusters against the reflections of trees and sky within its depths. The results were seen in the largest and most unified series to date, a suite of 48 canvases known as Waterlilies, a Series of Waterscapes shown at Durand-Ruel’s gallery in May 1909.”

After the death of his wife Alice in 1911 and subsequent death of his son Jean in 1914, Monet began work on an expansive new garden studio, in which he would fabricate his Grandes-Décorations, the large-scale water-lily series that he worked on until his death. He continued his work despite suffering increasingly from cataracts, for which he had three operations on his right eye in 1923.

In 1918 Monet announced that he would donate Grandes-Décorations to the State. The Orangerie at the far end of the Tuileries Gardens from the Musée du Louvre was decided as the location for the murals.

Claude Monet died on December 5, 1926 of lung cancer at the age of 86. He is buried in the Giverny church cemetery. On May 16. 1927, five months after Monet’s death, Grandes-Décorations opened to the public for the first time. The Musée Claude Monet, his house and gardens at Giverny, was refurbished and opened to the public in 1981.

For a full biography of Claude Monet, visit the source links below.

Sources: MoMA, Guggenheim, Wikipedia, Artcyclopedia

Gustave Caillebotte: 1848-1894

August 19, 2016 By Susan Benton

Gustave Caillebotte has only recently been recognized as a significant contributor to the Impressionist movement, more than seventy years after his death. His independent wealth, allowing him to be a major art collector and financial supporter of some of the most well-known Impressionist artists, overshadowed his own contribution to and impact on the art movement of his time. Art historians who have reevaluated his paintings and drawings now assert that his unusual use of varying perspective is particularly commendable and sets him apart from his more famous peers.

Caillebotte was born on August 19, 1848 to Martial Caillebotte and Celeste Daufresne. Gustave’s father had inherited the family’s military textile business and was also a judge at the Seine department’s Tribunal de Commerce. Gustave had two younger brothers Rene (1851-1876) and Martial (1853-1910). The family were well off and in 1860 purchased a summer home just south of Paris, in Yerres. Though Gustave didn’t spend much time focused on art as a child, it is believed that the summers spent at Yerres correspond with the time that Caillebotte began to draw and paint.

Caillebotte went to law school, earning his degree in 1868 and his license to practice in 1870. However, not long after he was drafted into the Garde Nationale Mobile de la Seine to fight in the Franco-Prussian war. Caillebotte was never to return to law. He began instead to study painting seriously, perhaps inspired by his visits to the studio of painter Leon Bonnat. He also attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1872, but did not stay long.

In 1874, he inherited his father’s fortune, followed by his mother’s in 1878, providing him with the opportunity to study art and paint without the need or burden to sell his work to support himself. The lack of sales of his paintings contributed to the lack of recognition of his work. In fact, many of his paintings are still owned by his heirs.

His financial situation also allowed him to help fund Impressionist exhibitions and support his fellow artists and friends. He amassed a collection of more than seventy works, including masterpieces by Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, and Alfred Sisley. Interestingly, a self-portrait shows some of the works he had purchased in the background of his painting. Though he donated his personal collection to the Musée d’Orsay, only two of his own works were included, another contributing factor to his relative unidentified influence on Impressionist art.

Caillebotte was also able to explore other interests because of his freedom from financial obligations including stamp collecting (his collection is now in the British Museum), orchid horticulture, yacht building, and textile design.

Over a period of six years, Caillebotte participated regularly in and supported Impressionist exhibitions. In 1876 in the second such exhibition, Caillebotte showed eight of his own works. One of the works, Floor-scrapers (1875), now seen as an early masterpiece, was considered “vulgar” by some critics because if its subject of laborers working on a wooden floor. It has been suspected that that is the reason it was rejected by the Salon of 1875. Caillebotte’s subjects of his exhibited work were the people and places he saw in and around Paris. Featuring skewed perspectives and modern subjects, the canvases reflect the changing landscape of the capital following the devastating war and the necessary rebuilding, and the new vision of a modern city.

Caillebotte’s style is most closely linked to Realism but his work was also strongly influenced by his Impressionist associates, and his style and technique varies considerably among his works. Caillebotte painted many domestic and familial scenes, interiors, and portraits. Many of his paintings depict members of his family; scenes of boating, fishing, swimming, dining, card playing, piano playing, reading and sewing all done in an intimate, unobtrusive manner which observes the quiet ritual of upper-class life. Caillebotte also painted some still-life food and flowers, and a few nudes.

Caillebotte’s paintings of urban Paris are his most striking and most well-known: The Pont de l’Europe (Le pont de l’Europe) (1876), and Paris Street; Rainy Day (Rue de Paris; temps de pluie, also known as La Place de l’Europe, temps de pluie) (1877). Photography was just coming into common use at the time, and Caillebotte may have used this new technology in planning and executing his works.

Caillebotte had purchased a home on the Seine River at Petit-Gennevilliers near Argenteuil, in 1881. He moved there permanently in 1888. Caillebotte’s stopped painting large canvases in the early 1890s and also stopped showing his work at just 34 years old – another factor in keeping his work in the background compared to that of his colleagues. He spent much of his time gardening, building and racing yachts with his brother, Martial, and visiting with his friend Renoir. Though Caillebotte did not marry, the fact that he left a large annuity to Charlotte Berthier, a woman eleven years his junior and of the lower class, seems to support other evidence that he had a long-term serious relationship with her.

Caillebotte died of pulmonary congestion while working in his garden in 1894, at age 45, and was interred at Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Sources: gustavcaillebotte.org, bbc.com, nga.gov

Edgar Degas: 1834-1917

July 19, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas was born on July 19, 1834, to a wealthy banking family in Paris, France. Educated in Latin, Greek, and ancient history at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, Degas initially intended to study law, briefly attending the Sorbonne’s Faculté de Droit in 1853.

In 1855, he studied painting at the École des Beaux-Arts with Louis Lamothe, learning the traditional Academic style with its emphasis on line and the importance of draftsmanship. Degas was also influenced by the paintings and frescoes he saw during several trips to Italy in the late 1850s.

Degas exhibited his history painting “The Misfortunes of the City of Orléans “ at the Salon in 1865, but following that he began focusing on painting scenes of modern life. He favoured themes of ballet dancers, laundresses, milliners, horse racing and other every day scenes. His interest in ballet dancers increased in the 1870s and he produced over 600 works on the subject. In his later years, Degas created works of women bathing, entirely without self-consciousness and un-posed.

From the late 1860s onward, Degas also produced many small sculptures in wax. He concentrated on the subjects seen in his paintings–horses, dancers and women washing. His interest in this medium increased in the mid-1880s in part as a result of his failing eyesight.

Before 1880, he generally used oils for his completed works, which were based on preliminary studies and sketches made in pencil or pastel. After 1875, he began using pastels more frequently, even in finished works, and by 1885, most of his more important works were done in pastel. In the mid-1870s Degas returned to the medium of etching and began experimenting with printmaking media such as lithographs and monotypes.

Degas saw his work as “Realist” or “Independent” and did not like being labeled an “Impressionist” even though he was considered to be one of the group’s founders, an organizer of its exhibitions, and one of its core members. Like the Impressionists, his aim was to capture moments of modern life, yet he had little interest in painting plein air landscapes and his use of clear, hard outlines, set his works apart from the other Impressionists. An observer of everyday scenes, Degas captured in his works, natural positions and movement of the human body.

Degas continued working until about 1912, when he was forced to leave his long-time studio in Montmartre. He never married and any emotional relationships he may have had, remain uncertain. Edgar Degas died on September 27, 1917, at the age of 83.

Sources: MET Museum, MOMA, Wikipedia

Pierre-Auguste Renoir: 1841-1919

February 25, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

Born on February 25, 1841, in Limoges, Haute-Vienne, France, Pierre-Auguste Renoir was (with Claude Monet), a leading painter and originator of the Impressionist movement.

Renoir’s family moved to Paris in 1844 and in 1854, at the age of 13, he was apprenticed to the porcelain maker M. Levy where his artistic skills enabled him to paint designs on fine china. Renoir’s ambition to become a professional painter led to his study of the Old Masters’ paintings at the Louvre. By 1861, he was a regular visitor to the studio of Swiss painter and teacher Charles Gleyre. At Gleyre’s studio he began working en plein air and met other painters including Alfred Sisley, Frédéric Bazille and Claude Monet. He was admitted to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in the spring of 1862.

In 1864, Renoir’s painting “La Esmeralda” was accepted by the Salon and the following year, his portrait of William Sisley was also accepted. From 1870-71 Renoir served in the Franco-Prussian war in the Tenth Cavalry Regiment.

After several rejections from the Salon in 1872 and 1873, Renoir joined a group of artists, headed by Monet, in the first Impressionist Exhibition in Paris. His works for this exhibition adopted a lighter palette with more delicate and expressive brush strokes. Renoir continued to exhibit at the second and third Impressionist Exhibitions but by the fourth in 1879-80, he returned to showing at the Salon, where he achieved great success.

In the mid-1880s, after traveling through Italy and working with Paul Cézanne in the South of France, Renoir experimented with more linear contours, thinner paint layers, and smoother brush strokes. This “Ingresque (dry) Period”, received a mixed reception and lasted for about six years. After this period, Renoir, favouring the achievements of the Old Masters and a more fluid style, returned to using broader brush strokes and more vibrant colors.

In 1890, Renoir married Aline Victorine Charigot, who had modeled for him, and with whom he already had a child – Pierre in 1885. He painted numerous scenes of his wife, their three children, and their daily family life.

By 1900, Renoir was an established artist. He became Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1900 and his international standing grew, especially in the United States. In 1904, he was honoured at the Salon d’Automne with a gallery devoted to his works.

After 1902, Renoir’s health declined and in 1907, he moved to the warmer climate of Cagnes-sur-Mer, close to the Mediterranean coast. From 1912 on he was confined by rheumatism to a wheelchair. He continued to paint and also tried sculpting in the last years of his life. To facilitate painting his larger works, Renoir used a moving canvas or picture roll to aid with his limited mobility.

In 1919, Renoir visited the Louvre to see his paintings hanging with the Old Masters. He died in the village of Cagnes-sur-Mer, Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, on December 3, 1919.

Sources: MoMA, Wikipedia, Cleveland Museum of Art

Édouard Manet: 1832-1883

January 23, 2013 By Wendy Campbell

Born on January 23, 1832, Édouard Manet was a French painter and a key figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism.

Manet’s father wanted him to attend law school however Manet wanted to study art. His father’s rejection of this idea led Manet to apply for the naval college but he failed the entrance exam. In 1848, Manet worked as an apprentice pilot on a transport vessel and upon his return to France in June 1849, he failed the naval examination a second time. At this time, his parents gave him permission to study painting.

Manet studied with the classical painter Thomas Couture from 1850 – 1856. He then set up and shared a studio with Albert de Balleroy, a painter of military subjects.

Manet was accepted at the Salon in 1861 with his painting “Spanish Singer” and from 1862-1865, he participated in exhibitions at the Martinet Gallery.

In 1863 Manet married his long-time companion Suzanne Leenhoff – a Dutch piano teacher and mother of their eleven year old son Leon Koella Leenhoff.

Manet’s painting “Déjeuner sur l’herbe” was rejected in 1863 so instead he exhibited it a the Salon des Refusés. At the Salon of 1865, his painting “Olympia”, also created in 1863, caused a scandal. “The painting’s reclining female nude gazes brazenly at the viewer and is depicted in a harsh, brilliant light that obliterates interior modeling and turns her into an almost two-dimensional figure.”

A large number of his works were rejected once again for the Universal Exposition of 1867. In imitation of Realist painter Gustave Courbet, Manet had a stall erected at the corner of the Place de l’Alma and the Avenue Montaigne to exhibit his paintings.

In 1869 Manet painted a portrait of the artist Berthe Morisot, whom he had met at the Louvre. Morisot, who would become one of the leading female French Impressionists, visited Manet’s studio often after that and he continued to paint portraits of her until her marriage to his brother Eugène Manet in 1874.

From 1870-1871, during the Franco-German War, Manet served as a staff lieutenant in the National Guard and witnessed the siege of Paris. In February 1871 he returned to Paris shortly before the Commune. Half of his studio was destroyed, but he had stored his canvases in a safe place and found them undamaged. The art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel purchased almost all of Manet’s work for 50,000 francs.

In 1874 Manet developed a friendship with the Impressionist painter Claude Monet, with whom he painted on the banks of the Seine. Although he maintained friendships with Monet and the other Impressionists, Manet did not participate in the Impressionist exhibitions and continued to submit his paintings to the official Salon.

In 1880 Manet had a solo exhibition at the offices of the periodical “La Vie moderne” (Modern Life), but by this time he had begun to be affected by syphilis. In April 1883, Manet became bed-ridden. Gangrene developed in his left leg which had to be amputated. He died on April 30, 1883 in Paris and was buried in the Cimetière de Passy.

“Manet’s debut as a painter met with a critical resistance that did not abate until near the end of his career. Although the success of his memorial exhibition and the eventual critical acceptance of the Impressionists raised his profile by the end of the 19th century, it was not until the 20th century that his reputation was secured by art historians and critics. Manet’s disregard for traditional modeling and perspective made a critical break with academic painting’s historical emphasis on illusionism. This flaunting of tradition and the official art establishment paved the way for the revolutionary work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. Manet also influenced the path of much 19th and 20th century art through his choice of subject matter. His focus on modern, urban subjects—which he presented in a straightforward, almost detached manner—distinguished him still more from the standards of the Salon, which generally favoured narrative and avoided the gritty realities of everyday life. Manet’s daring, unflinching approach to his painting and to the art world assured both him and his work a pivotal place in the history of modern art.”

Sources: Biography.com, Wikipedia