IMPRESSION, SUNRISE
BY CLAUDE MONET
This week I want to talk about a painting that is perhaps so familiar one doesn’t look at it carefully anymore. This is the painting that gave ‘impressionism’ its name and is forever associated with the famous 1874 exhibition of works by artists including not only Monet but Degas, Renoir, Sisley and Pissarro. They, at that time, considered themselves ‘independent’ artists but after a negative review of the show that – having seen Monet’s Impression, Sunrise – mocked these artists as impressionists the name stuck. It actually wasn’t the first time the term had been used in painting but it was the first time a group of artists had been labelled as such. That group, amplified by artists such as Morisot, Caillebotte, Cassatt and Manet, became and remains the most popular artistic movement in history.
For Monet, it was just a painting of the port in his hometown of Le Havre. Here he had been born in 1840 and had grown up with a desire to be an artist – initially working on caricatures but gradually moving into oils and thrilled to be working in a new way – en plein air (in the open) with oil paint in tubes (invented shortly after Monet’s birth) and working quickly with brush strokes that attempted to capture fleeting moments of light. The conservative artworld turned its back on these works – rejecting them, for example, from the annual Paris Salon – thus forcing artists like Monet to hold their own show – as they did in that April of 1874.
In the painting Monet has tried to capture a sunrise over a familiar scene for him – dawn at the port. In our recent film on Monet we found the exact spot where he stood to paint this and it’s fascinating to see the reality (even today) and then compare with his interpretation. The title Impression, Soleil Levant was, it is said, a last minute choice but Impression, Sunrise proved to be highly significant. One critic, Louis Leroy, is often quoted for his damning review: ‘wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than this seascape’. But he was not alone: another critic said they had to be called impressionsts for they evoked the sensation of a place rather than the place itself. And a third claimed: “Monet is the Impressionist painter par excellence…[he] transmits a lively and striking sensation of the observed scene”. This was not the first time the term ‘impressionism’ has been used both as criticism or description but after this show it stuck.
In an interview for the magazine La Revue Illustrée, Monet later reflected on this painting:
“A landscape is only an impression, instantaneous, hence the label they’ve given us – all because of me, for that matter. I’d submitted something done at Le Havre, sunlight in the mist with a few masts in the foreground jutting up from the ships below. They wanted a title for the catalogue; it couldn’t really pass as a view of Le Havre, so I answered: “Put down Impression.” Out of that they got impressionism, and the jokes proliferated….”
So it’s an important picture in the history of art. But what of the picture itself. Well, let’s take a look. Like any impressionist painting, it works on many levels. Part of the appeal of impressionist paintings is that they are colourful and easily understood – a boating party, a dance, a grain stack or a port. We humans love bright colours so the dance of blue and orange, green and yellow are exciting and pleasurable to us. It’s no accident that McDonalds choose bright red and yellow as their signature colours – it stimulates the brain, its attractive, but also restless and frenetic (encouraging folk to eat and go quickly was the McDonalds thinking, by the way). With Impression, Sunrise you can sense Monet working quickly – a dab here, a dab there. I can imagine the feature film – like those dreadful Van Gogh films where he stabs the oils on his palette and, sweating and dishevelled, daubs and scrapes and attacks the canvas. Actually, Monet was a highly trained, careful and thoughtful painter. He may have been trying to capture a ‘fleeting moment’ but he’d have thought this through, prepared, made sketches, then made changes and so on. He’d have known exactly where he was going to be and exactly where the sun was going to be (assuming there were not clouds that day). What’s fascinating about impressionism is how much thinking and planning went into capturing what seems like, at first glance, something improvised and instinctive.
What I love about this painting – and so much of the work by the Impressionists – is that while, of course on one level, it is utterly unrealistic – imagine for a moment actually seeing a scene like this in real life – and yet it transcends the need to be photographic. This is Le Havre harbour early one morning and the feel of the water, the industry of the fisherman, the glorious sense of a new day captured in a dab of orange or a splash of white; all these go beyond what our eyes see to something more powerful – to what our brain makes of the world. For me this is one of those paintings that we almost get tired of because of the frequency with which it appears – I would cite the Mona Lisa, Girl with a Pearl Earring, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers as other examples – but it is a painting that actually can be endlessly revisited and appreciated for the truly great work it is.
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