{"id":1135,"date":"2017-08-07T22:14:56","date_gmt":"2017-08-08T05:14:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/trowzersakimbo.com\/blog\/?p=1135"},"modified":"2017-08-07T22:14:56","modified_gmt":"2017-08-08T05:14:56","slug":"why-impressionism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/trowzersakimbo.com\/blog\/2017\/08\/07\/why-impressionism\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Impressionism?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Monet
“Haystacks, Effect of Snow and Sun,” by Claude Monet<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Many factors came together, at a particular place in time, for Impressionism, one, to come about and two, to succeed.<\/p>\n

First was the arrival of a fairly efficient method of making tangible, hold in you hands, copies of the images captured by a camera. Cameras, in the form of the Camera Obscura<\/em>, had been in use by artists\u00a0since before the Italian Renaissance, \u00a0but a practical means of recording the images viewed through a box with a lens\u00a0didn’t come about until about 1840. It’s also significant that this development (excuse the pun) was revealed by\u00a0Louis Daguerre, in Paris.<\/p>\n

\"Louis
Daguerreotype of Louis Daguerre.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Photography quickly replaced the artists as\u00a0visual documenter and encouraged them to look introspectively at what it was they did. Turner, Delacroix and Manet were some of the first to\u00a0move away from treating their\u00a0paintings as if they were a\u00a0window\u00a0through\u00a0which to view\u00a0subject matter, paying\u00a0more attention to the\u00a0canvas surface and its 2 dimensional attributes. They\u00a0flattened their picture planes and explored the expressive qualities\u00a0in paint application.<\/p>\n

Driven by the needs of its\u00a0growing textile industry, The Industrial Revolution introduced new, brightly-colored pigments to the artist’s palette: cadmium yellows, reds,\u00a0oranges\u00a0and greens,\u00a0cobalt based colors like blue and violet. Prior to this, only earth toned colors were available. The most brilliant\u00a0paint color in the Renaissance palette was something like an Indian Red<\/em>.<\/p>\n

American John Rand enabled artist color portability with the invention of the tin paint tube, in 1841. Before his invention, the most popular container for storage of mixed colors was a ram’s bladder. A bit of discouragement in\u00a0transportation of paints.<\/p>\n

\"Goethe
Goethe’s color wheel from his 1810, “Theory of Colours.”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The french easel appearing in the mid-19th Century, also encouraging\u00a0outdoor, on location work, but one of the biggest developments changing\u00a0the direction of painting was artists exposure to 19th Century scientific discussions\u00a0of\u00a0Color Theory<\/em>.\u00a0Although color theory principals\u00a0actually appeared in the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, the study was furthered by\u00a0Isaac Newton in the 18th Century, then fine tuned and published widely\u00a0throughout the\u00a019th Century,\u00a0accelerated largely by\u00a0the color needs of Industrial Revolution’s textile industry.\u00a0Primary, secondary, complimentary and tertiary color and how it is produced in nature was being discussed openly for the first time, along with the publication of Color Wheels<\/em> and charts, leading directly to the Impressionist use of Broken Color<\/em> and Pointillism<\/em>.<\/p>\n

So these developments and innovations\u00a0brought\u00a0Impressionism\u00a0to the canvases of Monet, Renoir, Cassatt, Pissarro, Degas,\u00a0Morisot and the others, but “If you build it they will come,” does not always work out, the paintings\u00a0of these iconoclasts were far from well received. In fact, the label\u00a0Impressionists<\/em>\u00a0was derived\u00a0from\u00a0an insult by a\u00a0French art\u00a0critic, of\u00a0the period, Louis Leroy, who described an exhibition of the work as\u00a0merely impressions<\/em> of paintings. Bad boys and girls that they were, the painters\u00a0proudly adopted the insult as a label for their movement.<\/p>\n

\"Paul
“Portrait of Paul Derrand-Ruel,” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Like the Beatle’s<\/em> George Martin, there was another individual, behind the Impressionist’s curtain, a French expatriate art dealer, living in London, Paul Derrand-Ruel, crucial to Impressionisms success. Derrand-Ruel believed in their work, when no one else did, and put his money where his belief was, purchasing their canvases in bulk, providing them additional monthly \u00a0funds, paying\u00a0their bills for\u00a0rent,\u00a0tailors,\u00a0paint suppliers,\u00a0doctors, etc., keeping them afloat and painting. He also provided moral support, even offering a room in his home to Monet, for use as a studio. Derrand-Ruel\u00a0loaned Monet the funds to purchase his now famous home Giverny<\/em>. The art dealer\u00a0tried many methods, at the time untraditional, to gain popularity for his artists, print reproductions, solo shows, but it was a trip to America with 300 paintings that proved\u00a0the ultimate solution. American buyers carried none of negative\u00a0prejudice towards the work, present in Europe, and lapped the canvases up.<\/p>\n

Ironically, through the efforts of Paul Derrand-Ruel, it was America, not France, responsible for survival of the artists and the success of Impressionism!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Many factors came together, at a particular place in time, for Impressionism, one, to come about and two, to succeed. First was the arrival of a fairly efficient method of making tangible, hold in you hands, copies of the images captured by a camera. Cameras, in the form of the Camera Obscura, had been in … Continue reading “Why Impressionism?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/trowzersakimbo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1135"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/trowzersakimbo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/trowzersakimbo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/trowzersakimbo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/trowzersakimbo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1135"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"http:\/\/trowzersakimbo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1160,"href":"http:\/\/trowzersakimbo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1135\/revisions\/1160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/trowzersakimbo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/trowzersakimbo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/trowzersakimbo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}