The future Impressionists also had a keen interest in painters whose work had yet to find its way into museums, such as the sketching club founded in England in the late 18th century.
Its members, who worked directly from nature and specialised in light landscape sketches, included Richard Parkes Bonington, who died in 1828, at the age of twenty-six. Bonington’s watercolour landscapes had a novel limpidity and grace as well as the subtle sensation of the surrounding air.
Alfred Sisley, Villeneuve-la-Garenne (Village on the Seine), 1872.
Oil on canvas, 59 × 80.5 cm. The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.
The Road from Chailly to Fontainebleau, 1865.
Oil on canvas, 97 × 130.5 cm. Ordrupgaard, Charlottenlund.
The Bodmer Oak (Le Bodmer), 1865.
Oil on canvas, 54.3 × 40.9 cm. Private collection, US.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Riding in the Bois de Boulogne (Madame Henriette Darras or The Ride), 1873.
Oil on canvas, 261 × 226 cm. Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
Interior, after Dinner, 1868–1869. Oil on canvas, 50.2 × 65.4 cm.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
The First Impressionist Exhibition
Bonington spent a large part of his life in France, where he studied with Gros and was close to Delacroix. Bonington depicted the landscapes of Normandy and the Île-de-France, locations where all the Impressionists would much later paint. The Impressionists were probably also familiar with the work of the English painter John Constable, from whom they may have learned how to appreciate both the integrity of landscape and the expressive power of painterly brushwork.
Constable’s finished paintings retain the characteristics of their sketches and the fresh colour of studies done after nature. And the Impressionists surely knew the work of Joseph Mallord William Turner, acknowledged leader of the English landscape school for sixty years until 1851. Turner depicted atmospheric effects. Fog, the haze at sunset, steam billowing from a locomotive, or a simple cloud became motifs in and of themselves.
His watercolour series entitled Rivers of France commenced a painterly ode to the Seine that the Impressionists would later take up, and included a landscape with Rouen Cathedral that was a predecessor of Monet’s own Rouen Cathedral series.
Professors at the École des Beaux-Arts in mid-19th-century Paris were still teaching the historical landscape based on the ideal models created in 17th-century France by Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain. The Impressionists, however, were not the first to rebel against clichéd themes and to stand up for truth in painting.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir told his son of a strange encounter he had in 1863 in Fontainebleau forest. For whatever reason, a group of young ruffians did not like the look of Renoir, who was painting directly from nature dressed in his painter’s smock:
With a single kick, one of them knocked the palette out of Renoir’s hands and caused him to fall to the ground. The girls struck him with a parasol (“in my face, with the steel-tipped end; they could have put my eyes out!”). Suddenly, emerging from the bushes, a man appeared. He was about fifty years old, tall and strong, and he too was laden with painting paraphernalia. He also had a wooden leg and held a heavy cane in his hand. The newcomer dropped his things and rushed to the rescue of his young fellow painter. Swinging his cane and his wooden leg, he quickly scattered the attackers. My father was able to get up off the ground and join the fight… In no time the two painters had successfully stood their ground. Oblivious to the gratitude coming from the person he had just saved, the one-legged man picked up the fallen canvas and looked at it attentively. “Not bad at all. You are gifted, very gifted.” The two men sat down on the grass, and Renoir spoke of his life and modest ambitions. Eventually the stranger introduced himself. It was Díaz.
Narcisse Virgile Díaz de la Peña belonged to a group of landscape painters known as the Barbizon school. The Barbizon painters came from a generation of artists born between the first and second decades of the 19th century. Almost fifty years separated them from the Impressionists.
The Barbizon painters had been the first to paint landscapes after nature. It was only fitting that Renoir met Díaz in Fontainebleau forest. The young painters of the Barbizon school were making traditional classical landscapes, but by the 1830s this activity no longer satisfied them. The Parisian Théodore Rousseau had fallen in love with landscape in his youth while travelling throughout France with his father.
Camille, or The Woman in a Green Dress, 1866.
Oil on canvas, 231 × 151 cm. Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen.
The Luncheon, 1868. Oil on canvas, 232 × 151 cm.
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main.
According to his biographer: “One day, on his own and without telling anyone, he purchased paints and brushes and went to the hill of Montmartre, at the foot of the old church that carried the aerial telegraph tower, and there he began to paint what he saw before him: the monument, the cemetery, the trees, the walls, and terrain that rose up there. In a few days, he finished a solid detailed study with a very natural tonality. This was the sign of his vocation.”
Rousseau began painting ‘what he saw before him’ in Normandy, in the mountains of the Auvergne, in Saint-Cloud, Sèvres, and Meudon. His first brush with fame was the Salon of 1833, well before the birth of the future Impressionists, when his View on the Outskirts of Granville caused a sensation due to its focus on a mediocre, rustic motif.
A contemporary critic wrote that this landscape “is among the most realistic and warmest in tone of anything the French school has ever produced”. Rousseau had discovered a sleepy little village called Barbizon at the entrance of the forest of Fontainebleau. There he was joined by his friend Jules Dupré and the aforementioned Spanish painter Narcisse Díaz de la Peña.
Another of Rousseau’s painter friends who often worked at Barbizon was Constant Troyon. In the late 1840s, Jean-François Millet, known for his paintings of the French peasantry, moved to Barbizon with his large family. Thus was born the group of landscape painters that came to be known as the Barbizon school. However, these landscape artists only executed studies in the forest and fields, from which they subsequently composed their paintings in the studio.
Charles-François Daubigny, who also sometimes worked at Barbizon, took the idea further than the others. He established himself at Auvers on the banks of the Oise and built a studio-barge he called the Bottin. Then the painter sailed the river, stopping wherever he wished to paint the motif directly before him. This working method enabled him to give up traditional composition and to base his colour on the observation of nature. Daubigny would later support the future Impressionists when he was a jury member of the Salon.
But Camille Corot was perhaps the closest to the Impressionists. He was living in the village of Ville d’Avray near Paris. With characteristic spontaneity, Corot painted the ponds near his house, the reflection of weeping willows in their water, and the shaded paths that led into the forest. Even if his landscapes evoked memories of Italy, Ville-d’Avray was recognisable.
No one was more sensitive to nature than Corot. Within the range of a simple grey-green palette he produced the subtlest gradations of shadow and light. In Corot’s painting, colour played a minor role; its luminosity created a misty, atmospheric effect and a sad,