Phaidon Encyclopedia of Impressionism [antikvár]

IntroductionImpressionism is the name given to a school of painting which started in France and subsequently spread to other countries in the second half of the nineteenth and the first quarter of the twentieth century. It was a real revolution in painting. It was 'a method of painting that consists in reproducing an impression exactly as it is experienced', and the Impressionist artist 'aims at representing objects according to his own personal impressions without bothering about generally recognised rules'. The Impressionists painted out of doors, using a technique of separate, fragmented brush strokes and pure prismatic colours; they aimed at rendering changing effects of light and reflection with vivid immediacy and intensity.The Impressionists were innovators but they had their forerunners too, both long ago and in more modern times. For instance one can think of the Venetian Renaissance painters trying to express reality as it actually was and using brilliant hues and complementary colours. Then certain Spanish painters, particularly El Greco, Velazquez and Goya, express these new tendencies to an even greater extent; indeed Manet and Renoir were very strongly influenced by their work.Camon Aznar, in his analysis of what he calls the 'Spanish Impressionism' of those early days, declares that 'we can call it by the name instantism. The chief characteristic of Spanish Impressionism is the way it seizes on the living luminous moment, leaving gaps between the brushstrokes; painting in the open air or using only primary colours were not considered essential and black was freely used'.The Spanish author Quevedo, who was a contemporary of Velazquez, analysed the painter's technique in penetrating words, speaking of 'a few scattered brush-strokes that here represent truth'. And the historian Ortega y Gasset went as far as to say that 'just as Descartes reduces thought to what is rational so Velazquez reduces painting to what is visual'.Quite recently Lafuente Ferrari declared: 'If one can speak of Velazquez's Impressionism, the term means he succeeded in representing objects as they actually appear to the eye, as shapeless conglomerations of coloured planes. The volumes of his earlier paintings, with their hard clearly-defined contours, have now become apparitions that are none the less ghostly for being at the same time real and present to the spectator'.At about the same period, in Flanders, Rubens was painting shadows that were transparent and full of colour. Delacroix remarks how, in his paintings, light is made up of fresh delicate tints, while the tints of his shadows on the other hand are very warm, and their usual essential7