Blog 120 30/07/2025 A Literary World: French Impressionism at the National Gallery of Victoria

Posted in on 30 July, 2025 in News

A Literary World

French Impressionism at the National Gallery of Victoria

Camille Pissarro

This week, I visited the French Impressionism exhibition in Melbourne, developed in partnership with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. More than 100 paintings by prominent artists are on view, including works by Cezanne, Fantin-Latour, Monet, Degas, Renoir, Pissarro, Manet, Signac, Sisley, Berthe Morisot, and Mary Cassatt. The rise of Impressionism can be seen in part as a response by artists to the newly established medium of photography. In the same way that Japonisme focused on everyday life, photography also influenced the Impressionists’ interest in capturing a snapshot of ordinary people doing everyday things. By 1849, artists were losing out on portrait commissions as around 100,000 Parisians were having their pictures taken yearly, and many customers often requested that their photographs be retouched to hide perceived faults, much as photographers do today. Rather than compete with photography, which recorded a certain moment in time, the artists of this new Avant-Garde movement felt free to represent what they saw in an entirely different way, focusing more on light, colour, and movement in a way that was not possible with photography. One of the most famous photographers from the mid-1800s, Nadar (Gaspard Félix Tournachon), who established the most fashionable portrait studio in Paris, allowed the Impressionists to hold their first exhibition in his studio in 1874.

Gaspard-Félix Tournachon known by the pseudonym Nadar.

Impressionist paintings were not meant to be viewed close up, but from a distance where the light and brushstrokes evoke the mood the artist tried to capture, but, as a designer, I couldn’t help looking at them with my nose almost pressed up against the canvas. Their brush strokes are so important. Sometimes the paint is applied thickly, in a lively manner, and at other times, controlled, yet in the brush of a true artist, that interplay of light and technique is deliberately controlled, and emotional. As much as they discussed their work and watched each other work, each artist retains his/her own style. Viewing these paintings through ten thematic sections, we glimpse their evolvement, most importantly, the practice of painting outdoors, known as en plein air, capturing brief and transient moments of nature and lighting. In this article, I wanted to show you some of the works on view, together with a close-up of their brushstrokes.

Claude Monet. Cap Martin near Menton. “It is so beautiful here., so bright, so luminous. One swims in blue air and it is frightening.”

Painting outdoors also meant that they could paint the urban industrial landscape as well as the picturesque woodlands and seascapes. The invention of paint in a tube by American John Rand in 1841 revolutionized painting and allowed artists to move from indoor studios to the great outdoors. Soon, these new artists began to meet in Parisian cafes to discuss their ideas. Among them was Eduardo Manet, a realist painter, whose radical ideas regarding modernity and spontaneity of brushstrokes would later become a staple of the Impressionist movement. Yet they weren’t called Impressionists at the time. Indeed, quite a few were realist painters with an academic background when they explored new ideas. At first, they exhibited under the name “The Cooperative and Anonymous Association of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers”. The name Impressionism started to be used when one of their press critics, used the name to describe the group, insultingly referring to one of Monet’s paintings, “Impression, Sunrise”. The group, being revolutionary thinkers, liked this word and decided to use it.

Eugène Boudin “I will do other things but I will always be the painter of beaches.” “Three brushstrokes directly from nature are worth more than two days of work in the studio.” “To bathe in the depths of the sky. To express the gentleness of clouds… to set the blue out of the sky alight. I can feel all this within me, poised and awaiting expression. What joy and yet what turmoil.”

Alfred Sisley

Sisley

Camille Pissarro “How can one combine the purity and simplicity of the dot with the fullness, suppleness, liberty, spontaneity and freshness of sensation postulated by impressionist art?”

Monet. “All the money I earn goes into my garden.”

Monet – Water Lilies. “The effect changes incessantly, not only from one season to the next, but because the lilies are not the spectacle; they are only the accompaniment.”

Monet – Camille Monet and a child in the artist’s garden in Argenteuil. “I have never had a studio, and I don’t see why people close themselves up in a room.”

Boudin

Fantin-Latour “I am astonished that these painted studies of flowers find any takers, it is such a painterly feeling I’m always astounded that anyone but painters anyone has a taste for them.”

Fantin-Latour

Monet

Édouard Manet. Victorine Meurant was Manet’s great model and muse in the 1860’s. Her oval face, russet hair and grey eyes appear in many of his paintings. This painting was probably made when she was a teenager.

Paul Cézanne “I want to astonish everyone with an apple.” “As for flowers, I have given them up. They wilt immediately. Fruit are more reliable. They love having their portraits done.”