Although the French Impressionists were dedicated to spontaneity and depicting contemporary life, their art was importantly influenced by the work of Old Masters and others who preceded them. This theme has been examined with regard to individual Impressionists; this is the first show to explore those influences on a comprehensive basis.
Juxtaposing works by such pioneering Impressionists as Bazille, Cassatt, Cezanne, Degas, Manet, Monet, Morisot, Pissarro and Renoir with those of El Greco, Raphael, Rubens and Velazquez, “Inspiring Impressionism: The Impressionists and the Art of the Past,” demonstrates how conscious the new group was of the techniques, traditions and subject matter of those who had gone before. Featured are 86 works, including paintings and works on paper, drawn from 40 museums.
The show is organized by and on view at the Denver Art Museum. It is co-curated by Denver’s deputy director for collections and programs, Timothy Standring, and Ann Dumas, a London-based independent scholar, in collaboration with the High Museum of Art (where it closed in January) and the Seattle Art Museum. It will be on view through May 25.
The exhibition, explains the High’s director, Michael E. Shapiro, “asks visitors to rethink preconceived notions about the Impressionist movement and&llow[s] audiences to discover how these artists, like many of their predecessors, imitated earlier art, borrowed particular motifs and transformed existing compositions and techniques into something completely new.”
Particular emphasis is placed on the importance of precedents set by Seventeenth Century Dutch and Spanish and Eighteenth Century French art, as these movements were viewed by the Impressionists.
As Dumas observes in her catalog essay, when the Impressionists’ first group exhibition opened in Paris in 1874, “Their paintings seemed to be a provocative rejection of all the qualities most revered in the art of the Old Masters and still preserved in the work of contemporary academic artists: draftsmanship, harmonious composition and subjects drawn from religion, history or mythology.” Charles Beaudelaire dubbed them “painters of modern life,” and the bright palette, contemporary †often mundane †subjects and the lack of finish of the works displayed “suggested that here was a group of rebels daring to present mere sketches as if they were finished paintings suitable for public exhibition,” writes Dumas.
Although the Impressionists were frequently dismissive of works in the Louvre and talked about turning their backs on art of the past, even as they sought to create a revolutionary new form of realism, their efforts were based on a thorough understanding of the conventions and traditions they claimed to reject.
Edouard Manet (1832‱883) never exhibited with the Impressionists, but he is included in the exhibition because they regarded him as a pioneer and mentor. Manet’s academic training, which encouraged his interest in Italian painting †Titian, Michelangelo and others †deeply influenced his early images of modern life, notably the infamous “Olympia” and “Luncheon on the Grass.”
His affinity for Spanish art, particularly that of Diego Velazquez, whose work he studied at the Louvre, is apparent in two versions of “The Little Cavaliers,” circa 1860, which are more loosely painted, brighter colored copies after the Old Master’s work. Like Degas, Renoir and other artists, Manet was intrigued by the painting of the “Infanta Margarita” (now considered a product of Velazquez’s workshop) at the Louvre.
On view in the show is a version of the “Infanta” by Velazquez’s workshop from the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna vis-à-vis Manet’s 1862 etching of it. Manet was also influenced by El Greco, the Sixteenth Century painter in Spain.
Manet was also drawn to painters from the Golden Age of Dutch art, notably the informal naturalness of Franz Hals’s (1581/85‱666) portraits and the rugged marine subjects of Ludolf Backhuysen (1630‱708). Manet’s straightforward portrait of his favorite model, “Victorine Meurent,” circa 1862, seems indebted to the strong brushwork and demure pose of Hals’s “Portrait of a Young Woman,” circa 1655‶0. The composition of Backhuysen’s “The Koning Willem III and Other Ships in the Sea-Lanes off Texel,” circa 1690, showing a group of storm-tossed vessels, is echoed in Manet’s striking “Marine in Holland” of 1872.
The oldest of the Impressionists, Camille Pissarro (1830‱903) studied a number of Dutch and French sources in developing his style. For example, his servant girls, such as “The Maidservant,” 1867, bring to mind Jean-Simeon Chardin’s “The Scullery Maid” of 1738. Many Impressionists admired the skill with which Chardin (1699‱779) depicted humble subjects and his mastery of light and color.
Frederic Bazille (1841‱870), whose promising career was cut short when he was killed in the Franco-Prussian War, was another influenced by Chardin. His graphic “The Heron,” 1867, owes much to Chardin’s “Still Life with Dead Pheasant and Hunting Bag” of 1760. In large floral compositions, like “Flowers,” 1868, Bazille drew on works like “Vase of Flowers on a Marble Table” by French decorative painter Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer (circa 1634‱699).
Edgar Degas (1834‱917), was deeply involved with the Impressionists, even though he did not entirely embrace their priorities. He mixed his affinity for classically oriented compositions with his predilection for modern subjects and colors and his interest in photography and Japanese prints. He did a great deal of copy work in the Louvre and other museums. Intriguing works based on paintings by Italians †Lippi, Mantegna, Raphael, Veronese †and others are in the exhibition.
Degas’s “Visit to a Museum,” circa 1879‸0, thought by some to depict his friend Mary Cassatt and her sister admiring works in the Louvre, appears unfinished. But as art curator Richard Rand observes in the catalog, “It vibrates with a vital energy as Degas’s brush dances around the figures.” Louis Beroud (1852‱930) painted a number of splendid canvases involving copyists in the Louvre, including “An Evening in the Louvre,” 1912.
Paul Cezanne (1839‱906) was a lifelong habitué of the preeminent Parisian repository of visual arts, where he copied works by a variety of European artists. “The Louvre,” he said, “is the book where we learn to read.” Cezanne’s sensitive drawing “Boy Searching for Lice, after Murillo,” circa 1882‱885, is a copy of “The Beggar Boy,” a painting now deemed to be after Batolome Esteban Murillo (1617/18‱682), the prolific Spanish baroque artist.
Cezanne’s celebrated still lifes owed much to his study of Dutch painters and to the incorporation of sculptural works. His “Still Life with Statuette,” 1894‹5, for instance, features a plaster “Putto,” after the Flemish sculptor Francois Du Quesnoy (1594‱643).
Cezanne frequently cited Rubens and Tintoretto as influences, but in his catalog chapter, Michael Clark, director of the National Galleries of Scotland, contends that Cezanne’s paintings of Mont Saint-Victoire “find their only true predecessors in [Nicolas] Poussin’s rigidly ordered compositions of the late 1640s&• Poussin (1594‱665) the French-born painter who spent most of his career in Rome, employed a disciplined approach to landscape painting, a practice followed by Cezanne.
Of all the Impressionists, their ringleader, Claude Monet (1840‱926), says Dumas, “seems to be the most estranged from the art of museums.” It was not that he was “ignorant of older art: he simply sought to suppress his knowledge of it in the interests of a direct response to the motif.” His early work was inspired by prior French painters.
During sojourns in the Netherlands in the early 1870s, Monet painted canals, rivers, boats and windmills in a manner reminiscent of Dutch Golden Age artists. Back home, his “Autumn on the Seine, Argenteuil,” 1873, with its tree-lined waterway, distant community and high sky, bears a resemblance to “River Landscape,” 1644, by Dutch painter Salomon van Ruysdael (1600/3‱670).
The only French woman artist among the Impressionists, Berthe Morisot (1841‱895), applied a lively, translucent technique to landscapes and images of women with children inspired by such French rococo predecessors as Boucher, Fragonard, Huet and Watteau. An active copyist at the Louvre, at the age of 19 Morisot created her own version of “Calvary,” a complex canvas by Sixteenth Century Italian painter Paolo Veronese (1528‱588).
In her views of outdoor domestic leisure, like “In the Garden at Maurecourt,” circa 1884, Morisot drew on the rococo theme of the “fete champetre,” (country festival) depicted by Jean-Antoine Watteau and Jean-Baptiste Huet (1745‱811) in “Young Couple in a Landscape.”
Reflecting her longtime affinity for rococo painting and her admiration for artist’s handling of paint, Morisot made a copy of a portion of “Vulcan Presenting Arms to Venus for Aeneas,” 1756, by Francois Boucher (1703‱770), called “Venus Asking Vulcan for Arms,” 1884, to hang in her home in Paris. “In Morisot’s hand,” observes art historian Richard Rand, “the brushwork assumed an even more audacious fluency, energizing the composition despite an extremely circumscribed range of pale tones: blues, pinks and white&•
Visiting the Louvre while growing up nearby, Pierre-August Renoir (1841‱919) gained lifelong inspiration from the museum’s masterpieces. The influence of Peter Paul Rubens and Velazquez, for instance, can be seen in his work.
Moreover, as an apprentice painter of porcelain early in his career, Renoir often copied details of compositions by Boucher, Fragonard and Watteau, developing an enduring affinity for bright palette and light touch of the French rococo. “Even in the 1870s, when, like his fellow Impressionists, Renoir was primarily involved with themes taken from contemporary Paris, he often viewed these subjects through an Eighteenth Century lens,” says Dumas.
Thus Renoir adapted motifs advanced by Watteau in works such as “The Robber of the Sparrow’s Nest,” circa 1712, to images of modern bourgeois life, like the young woman in a white dress and her suitor in an outdoor setting in “Confidences,” circa 1873.
There are echoes of Seventeenth Century Dutch skating scenes, such as Aert van der Neer’s “Skaters on a Canal by a Village,” as well as a reworking of the rococo theme in Renoir’s expansive and evocative “Skaters in the Bois de Boulogne” of 1868.
Like so many of his colleagues, Renoir admired the special touch that Chardin brought to images of humble subjects. The influence of works like Chardin’s exquisite “Basket of Plums,” circa 1765, can be seen in Renoir’s equally astute composition, “Still Life with Peaches and Grapes,” 1881.
Renoir’s fleshy female bathers and nudes owe much to his study of paintings of similar subjects by such artists as Raphael, Rubens and Boucher. His late nudes, such as the broadly brushed, richly colored, majestic “Nude on a Couch” of 1915 seem primarily inspired by the romanticized compositions and what he called the “limpidity of the flesh” in paintings by Venetian master Titian (circa 1485‱576), like “Danae,” after 1554.
The only American to exhibit with the Impressionists, expatriate Cassatt (1844‱926), best known for her intimate views of genteel women and tender depictions of women and children, was particularly attracted to Eighteenth Century French paintings of domestic scenes. According to Dumas, Cassatt’s “Mrs Duffee Seated on a Striped Sofa, Reading,” 1876, “alludes to such distinguished precedents as [Jean-Honore] Fragonard’s ‘A Young Girl Reading,’ circa 1776, not only in its subject matter but also in its mood of quiet self-absorption, in details of its dress, and in its fluent handling †an aspect of Fragonard’s work much admired by the Impressionists.”
Steeped in Italian renaissance art from private collections in Paris and travels in Italy, Cassatt drew on traditional views like “Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John,” circa 1515′0, by Milanese painter Bernardino Luini (circa 1480‱532) for such signature works as “The Family” of 1893.
The exhibition provides vivid documentation of the manner in which the Impressionists assimilated a broad range of styles and subject matters into their depictions of modern life. They utilized their links to art of the past to help overcome public skepticism about the bold, highly different paintings they created and to “validate innovations that so notoriously undermined academic authority,” states curator John Collins in the catalog.
The extent to which these rebellious artists succeeded in winning over the critics and public is reflected in the worldwide popularity of Impressionist exhibitions. As curator Dumas observes, “These radical spirits of the 1870s have themselves long since become guardians of tradition and have taken their place in the canon of great artists enshrined in museums throughout the world.”
After closing in Denver, “Inspiring Impressionism” will be on view at the Seattle Art Museum from June 19 through September 21. The 280-page catalog, overflowing with reproductions of works in the exhibition and many others, was edited by Dumas and contains insightful essays by eight experts. Published by the Denver Art Museum in association with Yale University Press, it sells for $65 (hardcover) and $35 (softcover).
The Denver Art Museum is at 100 West 14th Avenue Parkway. For information, 729-865-5000 or www.denverartmuseum.org .
