Impressionism [antikvár]

CHAPTER ONEThe roots of ImpressionismThe history of Impressionism is now so well known that we rarely pause to wonder why a group of friends, men of different temperaments and with widely dissimilar early experiences, should so rapidly have come to share so many assumptions about the nature of painting. Why did so many great painters commit themselves to an immediate and faithful rendering of some passing scene, actually before their eyes ? Why did Monet, Pissarro and their friends paint mainly landscapes or city scenes, and only rarely human figures dominating their backgrounds ? And why did they disdain the religious and historical subjects which in the i86os and later were still the most admired and respected choice of more conventional and academic painters; Why did they all insist on painting in the open air, and on the use of bright prismatic colours ? Why did they consider light and the exchange of coloured reflections as the unifying elements of a picture, instead of relying on the traditional method of construction based on drawing, outline or sharp contrasts of light and shade e Why do their canvases often display visible, choppy strokes of paint applied with a hog's-hair brush, rather than the smoother surface achieved by Delacroix and Corot, whose work they admired ? How were they able to ignore or bridge the gulf which even a forward-looking critic like Baudelaire considered to exist between a spontaneous preparatory sketch and the finished work?These are interlocking questions which we can answer no more dogmatically than Monet, Renoir and Pissarro themselves did. At no time did they enunciate a set of principles, nor were they inclined to produce manifestoes, as Courbet and Signac did. In common with many thinkers and writers of the i86os and 1870s (such as Flaubert, Sainte-Beuve and the Goncourts), the Impressionist painters distrusted intellectual generahties. They created Impressionism in the