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Impressionism and the French
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A DAY IN THE COUNTRY:
IMPRESSIONISM
AND THE FRENCH LANDSCAPE
By Richard R. Brette/l, Scott Schaefer, Sylvie Gache-Patin, and Fran^oise Heillmin
A Day in the Country, with its wealth of exquisite color- plates, is a glorious armchair excursion into the world of the French Impressionists. But it is also a newly opened window on what the great artists who created these masterpieces were trying to achieve.
This is the first volume to approach Impressionist landscapes not merely as exaltations of physical beauty but as modem statements of important principles — artistic and social. The great new network of railroads that expanded the horizons of even the poorest city dweller, and the resulting new interaaions of city and country life, are part of this absorbing chronicle.
Monet, Cezanne, Kenoir, Seurat, Sisley, Gauguin, Manet, Signac, Pissarro — these and other major painters are represented here in works that include the cream of the world-famous collection of French Impressionist landscapes that millions of visitors have enjoyed the femed Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris.
These, together with a magnificent array of works fix)m The Art Institute of Chicago and other important museums and private coUeaions around the world, make A Day in the Country an extraordinarily vivid and varied panorama.
A special essay on the landscape in French nineteenth- century photography makes a significant contribution to the literature on this most enchanting of art subjects.
About the Authors
Richard R. Brettell is Searle Curator of European Painting at The Art Institute of Chicago. Scott Schaefer is Curator of European Painting at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Sylvie Gache-Patin and Fran^oise Heilbrun are Cura- tors at the Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
Index, bibliography. 228 illustrations , including 154 plates in full color
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A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
Impressionism and the French Landscape
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
The Art Institute of Chicago
Reunion des Musees Nationaux
in association with
Abradale Press
Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, New York
Exhibition Itineran':
Los Angeles Counti' Museum of Art June 28-Septemher 16, 1984
The Art Institute of Chicago October 23, 1984-Ianuary 6, 1985
Galerfes Nationales d'Exposition du Grand Palais, Paris February 8-April 22, 1985
Edited by Andrea P. A. Belloli Designed by Dana Le\'^"
Sections III/3, III/6, III/8, and V translated from the French by Michael Henry Heim. Except where noted, all other translations are by the authors of the sections in which they are included.
The Checklist of the Exhibition was prepared by Paula-Teresa Wiens, and the Bibliography by Mary-Alice Cline.
Typeset in Sabon by Continental Typographies Inc., Chatsworth, California.
Display type and initials set in Lutetia by Flenry Berliner's Typefoundry, Nevada City, California.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A Day in the country: impressionism and the French landscape, p. cm. "Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the .^rt Institute of Chicago, Reunion des musees nationaux in association with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, New York." Contributions by Richard R. Brettell and others.
Reprint. Originally published: Los Angeles, Calif.: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1984. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-8109-8097-5
1. Landscape painting, French. 2. Landscape painting— 19th century — France. 3. Impressionism (Art) — France. 4. France in art. I. Brettell, Richard R. II. Los .\ngeles County Museum of Art. III. Art Institute of Chicago. IV. Reunion des musees nationaux (France)
[ND1356.5.D39 1990]
758'.144'0944074-dc20 90-33195
CIP
Front cover: Claude Monet, Flowering Garden, c. 1866 (no. .8);
back cover: Paul Gauguin, The Roman Burial Ground at Aries, 1888 (no. 133)
Illustrations © 1984 Los Angeles County Museum of Art, unless otherwise indicated. Catalogue first published in 1984 by the Los .\ngeles County Museum of Art. This 1990 edition is published by Harry N. .\brams. Incorporated, New York. A Times Mirror Compan\'. .Ml rights reserved. No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced without the written permission of the publishers.
Printed and bound in Japan
Contents
Lenders to the Exhibition
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments
Contributors to the Catalogue
List of Maps
I. Impressionism in Context
II. The Impressionist Landscape and the Image of France
III. A Day in the Country
L The French Landscape Sensibility
2. The Cradle of Impressionism
3. The Urban Landscape
4. Rivers, Roads, and Trains
5. Pissarro, Cezanne, and the School of Pontoise
6. Private and Public Gardens
7. The Fields of France
8. Impressionism and the Sea
9. The Retreat from Paris
IV. Impressionism and the Popular Imagination
V. Appendix: The Landscape in French Nineteenth-Century Photography
Checklist of the Exhibition
Bibliography
Index
Trustees and Supervisors
Richard Brettell and Scott Schaefer Richard Brettell
8 9 10 11 12 13 17 27
Scott Schaefer 53
Richard Brettell 79
Sylvie Gache-Patin 109
Scott Schaefer 137
Richard Brettell 175
Sylvie Gache-Patin 207
Richard Brettell 241
Sylvie Gache-Patin and Scott Schaefer 273
Scott Schaefer 299
Scott Schaefer 325
Franqoise Heilbrun 349
363
368 371 375
Lenders to the Exhibition
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
The Art Institute of Chicago
Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery
The Brooklyn Museum
Cincinnati Art Museum
Ralph T. Coe
The Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester
The Detroit Institute of Arts
Armand Hammer Collection
The High Museum of Art, Atlanta
Indianapolis Museum of Art
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu
The Joan Whitnev Payson Gallery of Art, Westbrook College, Portland
John G. Johnson Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art
Mrs. Lyndon Baines Johnson
Josefowitz Collection, Switzerland
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Musee d'Orsay, Galerie du Jeu de Paume, Paris
Musee d'Orsay, Palais de Tokyo, Paris
Musee Marmottan, Paris
Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh
Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The National Gallery, London
National Gallery of Art, Washington
National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh
Philadelphia Museum of Art
The Phillips Collection, Washington
The Phillips Family Collection
Portland Art Museum
Mr. and Mrs. A. N. Pritzker
The Santa Barbara Museum of Art
The St. Louis Art Museum
Shelburne Museum
Lucille Ellis Simon
Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton
Southampton Art Gallery
Union League Club of Chicago
Hal B. Wallis
Mrs. Arthur M. Wood
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven
Several Anonvmous Lenders
Foreword
It is with great pleasure that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Reunion des Musees Nationaux, Paris, join in presenting A Day in the Country: Impressionism and the French Landscape. This exhibition, which focuses on the development of a mod- ernist vision as it can be observed in the evolution of French landscape paint- ing, brings together a remarkable selection of artworks from all over the world. A unique loan from Paris combined with generous support from The Art Institute of Chicago forms the core of the exhibition. We are deeply indebted to these and the many other lenders for their contributions, without which this exhibition could not have been realized.
In recent years a great deal of scholarly attention has been focused on what might be termed the "geography of Impressionism." Several studies have resulted in the precise identification of the Impressionists' landscape sites and have featured photographs of the painters' motifs side by side with reproductions of their paintings. To date, however, no major international exhibition has been organized to show the range and breadth of Impression- ist landscape and to place it in its broader context. A Day in the Country, which focuses on the iconography of Impressionism as a key to the social, economic, and ideological issues of the second half of the nineteenth century, is intended to fill this gap.
We would like to express our gratitude to Richard Brettell, Curator of European Painting and Sculpture, The Art Institute of Chicago; Scott Schaefer, Curator of European Paintings, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Sylvie Gache-Patin, Curator, Musee d'Orsay; and Franqoise Heilbrun, Curator, Musee d'Orsay, for their contributions to the catalogue and for their work on the organization of the exhibition and the selection of the paintings to be included. We would also like to thank Robert J. Fitzpatrick, Director, Olympic Arts Festival, for his ongoing support of the exhibition. A Day in the Country: Impressionism and the French Landscape has received major support from the IBM Corporation, for which we are extremely grateful. We also wish to thank the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee; the Times Mirror Company, sponsor of the Olympic Arts Festival; the Associ- ation Franqaise d'Action Artistique; and The Consolidated Foods Founda- tion, the latter for its support of the Chicago showing. Finally, we acknowl- edge generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts and from the Federal Council on the Arts and Humanities, which provided an indem- nity to cover the foreign loans.
Earl A. Powell III James N. Wood Michel Laclotte
Director Director Chief Curator
Los Angeles Counry Museum of Art The Art Institute of Chicago Musee d'Orsay
Preface
A Day in the Country: Impressionism and the French Landscape is one of the major cultural components of the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival. Of the more than 120 works on exhibit, roughly one third are on special loan from Paris and are not expected to travel again once they are installed in the new Musee d'Orsay. Thus their exhibition, or- ganized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in collaboration with The Art Institute of Chicago and the Reunion des Musees Nationaux, Paris, pro- vides an extraordinary opportunity- both for the people of California and for hundreds of thousands of Olympic visitors from around the world to view outstanding masterpieces by the major Impressionist artists in a unique context.
The Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee wishes to express its appreciation to the three organizing museums who will host this superlative exhibition and to the Times Mirror Company as the official sponsor of the Olympic Arts Festival. We would also like particularly to thank Catherine Clement, Director, Association Franqaise d'Action Artistique, for her assist- ance in the creation of A Day in the Country.
Robert J. Fitzpatrick
Director
Olympic Arts Festival
10
Acknowledgements
Gratitude is expressed to the following individuals and institutions whose assistance and support have been invaluable in the preparation of A Day in the Country: Impressionism and the French Landscape: Luce Abeles; Hugues Autexier; Andrea P. A. Belloli; Genevieve Bonte; Wallace Bradway; Francois Braunschweig; Peter Brenner; Terry Brown; Mary-Alice Cline; Paula Cope; Corpus Photographique XIX^ CNRS-BN; Merle d'Aubigne; Ma- rie de Thezy; Anne Distel; Tom Fender; Hollis Goodall-Cristante; Gloria Groom Alia Theodora Hall; Katherine Haskins; Michael Henry Heim; Jacqueline Henry Frangoise Jestaz; Robert W. Karrow, Jr.; David Kolch; Anna Leider; William Leisher Timothy Lennon; Antoinette Le Normand-Romain; Francois Lepage; Dana Levy Gerard Levy; Bernard Marbot; Renee Montgomery; John Passi; Sylvain Pelly; Elvire Perego; Jean-Jacques Poulet-Allamagny; Jim Purcell; Larry Reynolds; Christiane, Roger; Anne Roquebert; Josiane Sartre; Samara Whitesides; Paula-Teresa Wiens; Gloria Williams; and Deenie Yudell.
This exhibition and its catalogue are funded by a major grant from the IBM Corporation.
Additional support has been received from the National Endowment for the Arts; the Association Fran^aise d'Action Artistique(Ministere des Relations Exte- rieures); the California Arts Council; and an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.
The exhibition is a part of the Olympic Arts Festival of the 1984 Olympic Games, sponsored by the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee through the support of the Times Mirror Company.
999
11
Contributors to the Catalogue
Richard Brettell r.b.
Curator of European Painting and Sculpture
The Art Institute of Chicago
Sylvie Gache-Patin s. g.-p.
Curator
Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Fran^oise Heilbrun f.h.
Curator
Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Scott Schaefer s.s.
Curator of European Paintings Los Angeles County Museum of Art
12
List of Maps
Maps 3 — 8, all dated 1832, are reproduced courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chi- cago, from Nouvelles Cartes topographiques de la France, which was printed in Paris between that year and 1879 for the Depot de la Guerre.
1 (p. 30): France (Julie Jacobsoti)
2 (p. 31): Paris and Environs (Julie Jacob son)
3 (p. 56): Melun and the Forest of Fontainebleau (detail of sheet 65)
4 (p. 57): Paris and Environs (detail of sheet 48)
5 (p. 80): Bougival, Port-Marly, and Environs (detail of sheet 48)
6 (p. 138): Argenteuil, Neuilly, and Environs (detail of sheet 48)
7 (p. 176): Pontoise and Environs (detail of sheet 48)
8 (p. 274): Trouville and the Coast (detail of sheet 29)
13
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Impressionism in Context
THERE IS LITTLE DOUBT that Impressionist landscape paintings are the most widely known and appreciated works of art ever produced. They have become universal touchstones of popular taste, prac- tically supplanting the work of Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo in the collective imagination of the world. From South Africa to Japan, from Lisbon to Los Angeles, virtually every educated person knows about the landscapes of Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Attendance in the galleries devoted to Monet in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in the Impressionist galleries of The Art Insti- tute of Chicago, in the Meyer galleries of The Metropohtan Museum of Art, New York, in the Chester Dale galleries of the National Gallery of Art, Wash- ington, D.C., and, of course, in the French national museum of Impression- ism, the Galerie du Jeu de Paume, Paris (now the Musee d'Orsay), is truly staggering, and virtually every art museum — both large and small — owns at least one Impressionist landscape painting. The world knows more about France through the eyes of the Impressionists than it does through actual experience of that nation itself. It is undoubtedly true to say that more Ameri- cans— and Japanese — know about the tiny town of Giverny, where Monet lived and worked in his later years, than they do about such economically and artistically important French regional cities as Lyon, Poitiers, or Grenoble.
What dp we learn of France from the Impressionists? The question is, at first glance, an odd one. We are most often taught that one learns nothing from landscape paintings. Impressionist pictures, according to the common wisdom, are meant to be enjoyed, not understood, and most analysts of their meaning — like Arnold Hauser in his superb essay, "Impressionism," in The Social History of Art^ — have treated them as essentially hedonistic works of art in which the world was passively accepted by artists who merely pre-
17
sented it to the viewer for his enjoyment. Impressionist landscapes, for Hauser and many other commentators, are remarkable for their easy acces- sibility, their lack of subject, and their highly individual style. Because this view has dominated both scholarly and popular discourse about Impression- ism, few writers have attempted to discover what might be called its iconog- raphy, preferring to describe the history of its exhibitions or to chart the stylistic development of its key painters. Yet such an iconography surely must exist. The present exhibition — by grouping very well-known paintings nei- ther chronologically nor stylistically, as is usually done, but by subject — is intended to show that there are identifiable Impressionist themes, the mean- ings of which can be analyzed and understood.
The major thesis of A Day in the Country: hnpressionism and the French Landscape is that Impressionist landscapes are saturated with mean- ing and that one needs to know a great deal before one can approach them in all their richness. Like many great works of art, they appear to be simpler than they are. Although they have been explained as naive transcriptions of reality. Impressionist pictures, like the novels of Gustave Flaubert, are studied in their very naivete. The more one reads of the vast secondary, and even vaster primary, literature about France during the period in which the Impressionists worked and lived, the clearer it becomes that their paintings were a central component of French culture, not an isolated, solely aesthetic phenomenon. Because we are so mdebted to Impressionist painting for our own notions of beauty, we owe it to ourselves to understand it — and the movement which produced it — more fully. Since the subject is such an enor- mous one, and so many books, pamphlets, articles, exhibitions, and ephem- era have been devoted to it, one might ask whether there is, in fact, anything more to be learned. We believe firmly that there is and that the line of inves- tigation taken here is worthy of even more extensive examination than has been possible in the creation of A Day in the Country: hnpressionism and the French Landscape.
Landscape painting is an art of selection and balance. When riding on a train, walking along a rural path, or sitting at the edge of a field, one is in the midst of nature. It unfolds in three dimensions and surrounds the viewer, who can never experience it fully. In "seeing" a landscape, one both "chooses" what to see and passively allows nature to act upon one's eyes and subconscious mind. Because of this continuous oscillation between will and passivity, one can never truly comprehend what scientists and painters alike have called the "champ de vision," or "field of vision." In the end, houses are perceived as houses, trees as trees, and roads as roads, and they are not simply colored light acting upon the retina. Certain forms contain powerful mean- ings and associations for individual viewers, others are blander, and each participates (unequally) in a larger abstraction called "the landscape."
Painters, like all observers of nature, are attracted to certain forms and not to others. Some are moved by the chance discovery of the parallel align- ment of a tree and the edge of a house viewed from a particular point on a rural path; entire landscape paintings can hinge on such a fortuitous occur- rence. Others seek out intensely meaningful forms in nature and, by making these forms the "motifs" of their landscape, allow nature to conform pow- erfully to their will. The Impressionists followed both courses. Although many of their pictures appear to be the result of simple transcription, this is not the case. Studies of the landscapes of Pissarro and Monet have shown that each artist altered nature to suit his own requirements. Pissarro moved
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
buildings from one area of the actual landscape to another to achieve picto- rial balance or to insert a meaningful counterbalance to a large tree or a factory. And many of the Impressionists willfully altered the shape, scale, and character of vegetation and topography to add greater variety to their land- scapes as well as to intensify or diminish the importance of certain buildings, figures, or even other vegetation (no. 89). Thus, although none of these art- ists wandered very far from their homes in Normandy and the He de France, they painted landscapes with an astounding variety of moods and meanings.
Most writing about the Impressionists has stressed the modernity of their landscapes. This aspect of their work was very real, as this catalogue demonstrates. Yet the temporal structure of Impressionist landscapes is more complex, both seasonally and historically, than has been supposed. Many paintings represent highly stable, even traditional, worlds (see below, II and III/5), and their creators' evident fascination with rural villages and with the fields of the He de France is surely evidence of their concern for the enduring elements of French civilization. Such images as Monet's grainstacks (nos. 104-112) are, in a sense, landscapes of memory. While actual, they seem at the same time immutable and speak of continuity in the midst of change, of a timeless time.
The preoccupation with change that has been so persistent a theme of writers about Impressionism was certainly important to the painters. Yet time, like form, is an mfinitely complex and variable abstraction, and, if one were to attempt a temporal analysis of Impressionist landscape paintings, one would confront a considerable task. In each painting, there is the time "repre- sented" or referred to in the title. This might be a time of day (midday, after- noon, and morning are the most common) or a season. Most Impressionist landscapes also contain evidence of a "temporality" suggested by the repre- sentation of moving forms — walking figures, gliding boats, rustling leaves, or windblown clouds — each of which aids the viewer in his quest for the momentary structure of time that underlies the cyclical rhythms of days and seasons. As landscape painters the Impressionists were obsessed with history and its action upon the landscape through the works of man. Old buildings stand next to trains and newly constructed factories in their pictures (see below, III/5), and most of the man-made forms serve as referents to historical time.
The first Impressionist exhibition was held in the spring of 1874. Strong memories of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) and the Commune (1871) lingered in France, the national humiliation of one scarcely greater than the sense of shame generated by the other. The nation still was paying heavy reparations to the Germans, and the economy, committed to expensive modernization and industrialization, strained under their burden. Both the cityscape of the capital, Paris, and the landscape of its suburbs were filled with the scars of war next to those of modern development; buildings and bridges under construction vied with those destroyed by war for dominance in the landscape (see below, II and III/3). Change, the impetuous forward motion of history, had, in a sense, stopped in the France of early Impression- ism, and the nation was busy repairing itself and its pride. The awareness of time that one might term the historical consciousness of France was confused during the decades following the Franco-Prussian War, and, as we shall see, the Impressionists' landscapes represent their artists' responses to the am- biguities inherent in the nation's recent history.
That these responses virtually exclude all evidence of this upheaval
IMPRESSIONISM IN CONTEXT
19
and its resulting doubts is surely no accident. The Impressionists' France was a beautiful, a simple, and a prosperous France. Sailboats and barges — float- ing symbols of leisure and commerce — maneuvered its waters (nos. 5, 17). Promenaders and rural workers shared its paths (no. 65). Newly built coun- try houses stood next to farms, and village women washed their clothes across the river from restaurants catering to suburban tourists (no. 14). Impressionist landscapes are either straightforward celebrations of the new or carefully balanced constructions in which traditional elements have been placed together with those of the new age (see below, III/5). Even their mo- dernity is fragile.
In selecting and grouping the works of art for this exhibition, we have chosen not to be doctrinaire in our methods. It would have been easy, for example, to decide that the site represented in each painting should be the most important determinant of subject. In this way, a picture by Monet of the Seine River at the town of Vetheuil would be analyzed as an image of Vetheuil, while another painted by the same painter along the same river at nearby Vernon would fit into an "iconography" of that town. The analysis of paintings by site is certainly not futile; we have learned a great deal from Paul Tucker's extensive examination of Monet's many paintings of the suburban city of Argenteuil.- There are many students of local history in France, such as Rodolphe Walter, who have worked assiduously and with obvious success to identify the sites painted by the Impressionists.
It is clear, however, that the site at which a painting was made is only part of its "subject." In the search for an iconography of Impressionist land- scape, it is also necessary to define certain "subjects" (in this broader sense) common to the work of all the artists. These collective subjects are not always easy to find. In many landscapes, for example, the Seine itself, more than the site at which it was painted, can be called the "subject" of the paint- ing (see below, III/4). Yet even this observation fails to tell us just what such paintings "mean." If we know, however, that the Seine was defined by many writers as the "national" river of France and that one contemporary guide- book writer called it "the great street of a capital with Rouen and Le Havre as its suburbs, the swift passageway that begins at the Arc de Triomphe de I'Etoile and ends at the ocean,"' we can understand the significance of this river as the great national route connecting Paris and its monuments with the rest of France and, ultimately, the world. This knowledge takes us to a further realization: that rivers are like roads, boulevards, streets, and railways in that they form part of a landscape of linkages in which "place" per se is less important than movement (see below, III/4).
The same collectivity of subject can be observed in most other Impres- sionist paintings. When analyzing the many seascapes representing the coast along the English Channel, for example, it is often less significant to know that a picture was painted in Honfleur or Etretat than to realize that sea bathing increased in importance during the latter half of the nineteenth cen- tury in France or that trade with Great Britain was of extraordinary eco- nomic importance for France during the period of the Impressionists. The same kind of general knowledge helps in understanding the urban landscapes of the Impressionists, their faithful recording of village life, and their pictorial devotion to the controlled nature manifested in fields, parks, and gardens (see below, III/6-7).
Ultimately, the search for the "subject" of a landscape must take us beyond these crucial, but general, issues into an analysis of the paintings
20
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
themselves. Although most landscapes of the Seine have certain underlying common meanings, each embodies the particular attitudes of its painter toward actual stretches of her banks. Therefore, in order to understand an individual landscape, the dominating forms placed in central or composi- tionally crucial places must be named and understood in terms of French experience of the period. It is clear, for example, that a landscape dommated by a lavoir, or v^'ash house, floating in a river (no. 17) has substantially dif- ferent meanings than do similar river landscapes centered on sailboats, res- taurants, or bridges. And, by extension, a landscape given over to a field of poppies (no. 103) has different meanings than one in which a harvested field is dominated by a massive, solitary grainstack (nos. 104-112). Such an anal- ysis of the "motifs" of landscape painting is based essentially upon methods of naming and defining familiar to iconographers, yet it rarely has been applied systematically to landscape paintings, no doubt because forms in the landscape are not read as easily as symbols or emblems.
Although there is no Cesare Ripa for the student of landscape motifs, such sources as dictionaries, encyclopedias, guidebooks, official statistics, real-estate records, novels, and memoirs can help us in our search for the meanings of forms in French landscape paintings. For that reason, a "read- ing" of these misleadingly simple works of art like that outlined here requires a great deal more time in general libraries and archives than in art libraries. One can learn profitably about the real-estate transactions that doomed to development certain bucohc fields memorialized by Monet in the 1870s. ■* One must know about the physiognomy of contemporary boats to under- stand Renoir's Bridge at Argentenil (no. 45), and a knowledge of the changes in rural dwellings of the time helps one to respond intelligently to the bright red and blue roofs which dominate the village in Pissarro's Climbing Path in the Hermitage, Pontoise (no. 66) or Paul Cezanne's Auvers, Panoramic View (no. 69). Yet neither the understanding of the broad cultural associations of certain places nor the naming and analysis of individual motifs in a landscape is sufficient to comprehend the many meanings of a landscape painting.
Such pictures, as they are interpreted in this book, are among modern man's principal attempts to make viable "patterns" of his world, to distill its essential qualities for his own generation and for posterity. For this reason, the "reader" of a landscape painting must be careful not to rely too heavily on the techniques of the traditional iconographer who selects certain forms from the entire picture for intensive analysis. Indeed, landscapes are as much about the arrangement and ordering of the many diverse forms included within them as they are about the meaning of any one — or several — among these forms, no matter how dominant. In fact, writings about landscape painting from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries have repeat- edly made it clear that powerful motifs distract from the homogeneity nec- essary for a painting to achieve its status as a landscape. Students of such paintings could learn a great deal about landscape in this sense from the four generations of modern geographers, many of whom have worked in France, and most of whom have come to understand the world through a process of intensive and detailed analysis of its topography.^" Only these investigators have looked as carefully and patiently at landscape as have its best painters.
There must be no mistake about the ultimate relativity of landscape meaning. When one knows that a thatched peasant dwelling in a picture by Cezanne or Pissarro had widespread associations with the traditional, pre- Revolutionary order of the rural world, one does not know the meaning of
IMPRESSIONISM IN CONTEXT 2 1
the landscapes that contain those dwelHngs. Indeed, it is their placement — in the space of the landscape, along the surface of the picture, in juxtaposition or association with other forms — that must be understood before "mean- ing" can be fully comprehended. When a detached farmhouse dominates a landscape, as in Cezanne's Farmyard at Auvers (no. 70), the meaning of that landscape is very different than when a similar building is either juxtaposed bilaterally with what was in the nineteenth century a newly constructed coun- try house, as in Pissarro's Red House (no. 62), or simply included as one of many forms in a larger view, as in Paul Gauguin's Market Gardens at Vaugirard (no. 74). Considered in this way, landscapes are like sentences or paragraphs in which words create different meanings as they are moved and juxtaposed with other words. A dictionary can give various definitions of a word, but it cannot tell what a specific sentence means. The same can be said for forms in a landscape painting. One could know everything about the construction of grainstacks in the north of France in the nineteenth century and yet know very little about the meanings of Monet's series of paintings with grainstacks as their motifs (nos. 104-112).
A careful reading of landscape titles as they are recorded in the cata- logues of the Impressionist exhibitions tells us that many matters — time of day, season, identification of a building, or even a generic evocation of place — were signified as "subject."*' Certain landscape paintings were exhib- ited with titles that make no mention of their sites, in spite of the fact that we can easily identify a great many of them today. An entire species of landscape titles tells us simply that the painting is a landscape or a view painted in, around, or of a certain place (no. 69). Others spell out a season or time of day, stressing that time is as important to an understanding of the pictures as place (no. 126). Still others tell us that a path, hillside, field, or river bank is the subject of the picture (no. 76). In general. Impressionist landscape titles tend to be intentionally quotidian, as if to discourage us from using them to explain the paintings.
The pictures in A Day in the Country: Impressionism and the French Landscapehave been grouped into nine sections, seven of which (III/2-8) are proper to the subject of the exhibition: Impressionism and the French land- scape. These seven catalogue sections are flanked by an introductory section (III/l) and a "coda" (III/9), each of which serves to contrast certain aspects of Impressionist landscape painting with developments in both earlier and later French landscape painting. The seven central sections are defined in various ways. One, "The Cradle of Impressionism" (III/2), is almost purely topo- graphical and considers collectively the paintings made at the first true Impressionist site: the suburban landscape around Bougival, Louveciennes, and Marly-le-Roi just west of Paris (map 5). None of the other six "core" sections are defined by a single locale, but rather by larger subjects — the city, transportation, the sea, the village, agriculture, ornamental gardens — that link topographically diverse landscapes. In each of these sections, a short es- say discusses major themes; each group of entries attempts to analyze several works of art or individual ones in relation to these themes. The "coda" (III/9) includes works by Post-Impressionist painters. This section serves to remind us that there was a change not only in the style of landscape painting in France — a change that occurred gradually during the second half of the 1880s and first half of the 1890s — but also that the landscapes painted by these younger artists were geographically as well as iconographically removed from those of Monet, Pissarro, and Sisley. Cezanne deserted the He de France for Provence; Gauguin and his camp followers fled to the outer
22 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
reaches of Brittany; and the Neo-Impressionists — Henri-Edmond Cross, Paul Signac (and, eventually, Henri Matisse) — developed a Mediterranean "pastorale" far from the capital on the shores of the Riviera. Some of the interpretations included in these sections remain speculative; much clearly remains to be learned about the subjects and meanings of individual Impres- sionist landscape paintings.
The central catalogue of nine sections itself is "framed" by two long essays, which deal with topics of central concern to the subject of the exhibi- tion. The introductory essay, "The Impressionist Landscape and the Image of France" (II), surveys certain historical and cultural ideas of a very basic kind, a familiarity with most of which is essential to a real understanding of Impressionist landscape painting. Its aims are truly introductory, and there- fore it includes very little discussion of individual works of art. The other major essay, "Impressionism and the Popular Imagination" (IV), follows logically upon the catalogue section because it concerns less the production of than the critical reception to, and marketing of. Impressionism. It treats in some detail the phenomenal rise in worldwide popularity of Impressionist landscape painting. While "The Impressionist Landscape and the Image of France" lays the groundwork for an understanding of the pictures in terms of the culture in which they were produced, "Impressionism and the Popular Imagination" examines the various reasons for their appeal beyond France and beyond the nineteenth century. Finally, an appendix, "The Landscape in French Nineteenth-Century Photography" (V), examines the development of landscape photography in France in the 1800s.
In conclusion, it is perhaps necessary to say just what is meant here by "Impressionism," in the hope of avoiding the usual pitfalls of stylistic defini- tion in modern art history. Whether the style which Pissarro called "scientific Impressionism" and we call "Neo-Impressionism" and even "Pointillism" is really Impressionism is a question that can be debated ad nauseam.^ Our subject — Impressionist landscape painting — is defined as follows: land- scapes painted by artists who exhibited in one or more of the Impressionist exhibitions (that is, between 1874 and 1886) and whose art is generally considered to be central to Impressionism's aims. Although the core oi A Day in the Country: Impressionism and the French Landscape is the paintings of Monet, Sisley, and Pissarro, the exhibition includes an important group of landscapes painted by Cezanne during the 1870s, and both Gauguin and Georges Seurat are well represented. There are also paintings by Vincent van Gogh, Cross, and Signac. While the latter artists are classified today as Post- Impressionists, most of them exhibited in one or more of the Impressionist exhibitions and developed their art in the aesthetic forum created by the Impressionist movement.
— R. B. and S. S.
Notes
1. Hauser, 1951, vol. II, pp. 869-926.
2. See Tucker, 1982.
3. Guide de voyageur..., c. 1865, p. 1.
4. Tucker, 1982, pp. 35-38.
5. See Sauer, 1963.
6. Venturi, 1939, vol. II, pp. 255-271.
7. Rewald, 1980, pp. 512, 514, 518, 533;Pissarro, 1950, pp. 88-120.
IMPRESSIONISM IN CONTEXT 23
II
The Impressionist Landscape and the Imagje of France
WHEN THE Impressionists began to paint the French landscape in the 1860s, they were not alone. Several satirical writers had already counted more landscape painters than tourists or peas- ants in their travels through the French countryside, and the official Salon exhibitions held annually in Paris were all but dominated by French landscapes. Books and manuals about landscape painting for both professional and amateur artists abounded, and if there was a national genre in French art, it was surely landscape. The painters were joined by a legion of printmakers, draftsmen, and popular illustrators in an almost frantic collective attempt to record the national physiognomy.
It is perhaps because the landscapes produced by certain of these painters have become familiar throughout the world that the nationalism of their creators' enterprise has been neglected. We often forget that the Impres- sionists' French landscapes played a small, but real, role in the quest for a viable national identity that preoccupied the French people throughout the nineteenth century. More specifically, paintings by these artists represent a benign, but modern, landscape as defined for, and dominated by, urban dwellers — a countryside in the process of being conquered by a capital city.
In his analysis of the Salon of 1866, the critic Jules Castagnary wrote about what he called "the great army of landscape painters" then invading France. He divided that army into ranks and divisions less by style or imagery than by the region of France or her colonies that they painted.^ For Castagnary, a land-based army was the most appropriate satirical metaphor for landscape painters, and he extended his metaphor to conclude that France maintained its identity and extended its domain by artistic rather than mili- tary conquest. Landscape painting, for Castagnary and many others, was in- timately linked to what the slightly later writer Ernest Renan was to call "the national soul."^
17
It is customary in writing about the history of Impressionism to stress its anti-Academic tendencies and to contrast the seemingly effortless and spontaneous art of Monet and Pissarro with the labored, historicizing concoctions of Jean-Leon Gerome, William Adolphe Bouguereau, and Jules Breton. While there is little doubt that the Impressionists detested the figural confections of their famous contemporaries, the real arena in which they fought for recognition and control was one populated by the landscape paint- ers mentioned by Castagnary. These competitors were much more numer- ous— and collectively more powerful — than the presiding giants of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts with whom Edouard Manet and the others did battle.
Among the many members of Castagnary's "great army," only two painters who were to become Impressionists were included: Monet, who was a "second heutenant," and Pissarro, who was a "captain" in what the critic called "the first corps of the Army of Paris."^ This corps was without doubt the largest and most significant part of Castagnary's fighting force, surpass- ing his four other French corps — those of the west, the south, the center, and the north— in size and national importance, and it became the corps in which the Impressionists had to prove themselves and which they came to dominate by the end of the nineteenth century. In 1866 it was presided over by two artists who have no reputations today: Jean-Alexis Achard and Edme Saint- Marcel. If Castagnary had updated his metaphor a generation later in 1896, the forces would surely have been commanded by Monet with assistance from Pissarro, Sisley, and probably Henri-Joseph Harpignies. There is little doubt that the Impressionists made Castagnary's "Army of Paris" into a major force not only in French, but in world, art.
When one examines maps of France marked with the sites painted by the Impressionists (maps 1-2), the extent of their dependence upon Paris is clear. They chose to paint in places which huddle around the capital or cling to her great river, the Seine. Further, if one were to look at a railroad map of this area, there would be a startling coincidence between the landscape sites chosen by the Impressionists and the stops on the major railroad lines con- structed in France during the middle of their century (see below, III/4). These artists were in many ways unadventurous in their search for landscape sites and evidently placed greater value on direct access to Paris than on the wild beauties of inaccessible natural landscapes. The rugged topography of the Massif Central, the Pyrenees, or the Haute-Savoie is essentially absent from Impressionism. The landscape of Monet and his colleagues was not an escap- ist one far from the haunts of man, the landscape of "silence and solitude" written about by the painter and theorist C.-L.-F. Lecarpentier and preferred by painters of the French Romantic tradition."* Rather, it was a "capital" landscape oriented always to Paris and its tentacular civilization.
Paris occupies a region known for the past eight centuries as the He de France. As a place name, "He de France" is ambiguous and corresponds more to an idea than to any real administrative or political area (today it comprises nine departments, the basic unit of regional administration in France). In fact, the great French historian Marc Bloch refused to define its limits exactly in a famous essay on the area, appealing instead to the French geographer Paul Vidal de la Blache, who called the He de France the "countryside around Paris."^ Meaning hterally "island of France," "He de France" suggests that the territory surrounding Paris is France itself, while the outlying regions are true provinces.
28
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
This notion corresponds closely with another conceit used frequently by French writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who referred to the same region as the "campagne de Paris." This term has even deeper roots than "He de France" and is associated clearly with classical antiquity: the environs of Rome have been known since ancient times as the Campagna. Hence the landscape of the Impressionists must not be considered merely to represent "the country" in a generic sense, but rather the territory controlled by a great capital city. Impressionist landscapes therefore embody in their very subjects the civilization of a city that aspired to be the greatest world capital since ancient Rome. These landscapes fed upon the myth of what was often called "paysage classique," or "classical landscape,"'' in spite of the fact that they do not conform easily to the stylistic norms of French Classical painting.
Rocked by a series of revolutions that were followed by periods of variously reactionary government, France stumbled through the 1800s unsure of herself, her survival as a nation, and her position in a capitalist and industrializing world dominated increasingly by England, Germany, and the United States. The passionate, if ideologically diverse, pleas for national unity made throughout the century in the form of speeches, books, and pamphlets filled with purple prose and verse exhorted the French people to national solidarity. This vast literature was written by intellectuals of every social and economic type, from the aristocratic Baron de Montesquieu, who espoused a connection between nationalism and republican government as early as 1748, to Renan, whose origins were in the working class and who pleaded the case of the "national soul" in a famous speech of 1882.'' Thus in painting their landscapes, the Impressionists were linked to the most pervasive and ideologically diverse political notion of their century.^
The French quest for national unity became especially urgent after the humiliating defeat suffered by France at the hands of Otto von Bismarck's newly united Germany during the Franco-Prussian War. The Parisian land- scapes of the Impressionists were produced precisely when French national confidence was at its lowest point since Waterloo (1815). Their representa- tions of the campagne de Paris must be read in the light of what can best be described as a national identity crisis.' It is surely no accident that French — and specifically Parisian — landscape painting had its greatest efflorescence in the 1870s.
The story of the "conquest" of France by Paris is a long, complex, and difficult one that has been told many times and in many forms. '° Given its most significant modern impetus by the great administrators of France dur- ing the seventeenth century, the nationalization of that country took hold slowly and with considerable difficulty. It should not be forgotten that, as late as 1864, an educator traveling in the Lozere found that the local children did not know they were French and, even more surprisingly, that a majority of Frenchmen during the nineteenth century could not speak "correct" (that is, Parisian) French, using instead one of the regional languages like Breton or Proven<;al." Even in our century, during which French national identity has been accepted firmly both internally and externally, many writers have pleaded for a politics of decentralization, and powerful regionalist move- ments, particularly in Brittany, continue to exist. The struggle between region and nation that has played such a powerful role in modern times interrupted the smooth course of French history during the period of the Impres- sionists.'^
THE IMPRESSIONIST LANDSCAPE AND THE IMAGE OF FRANCE 2 9
ENGLISH CHANNEL
C A II X <P la H e V e i-e Hamy^Hzr'fs^i ^ Rouen
Ryj-en-Bessgi
O T E S - D U - N O R J>^X/1-— 1^
e Faou Sa>ni-Bt:€-uc Samt-Br^c
\ F I N' I S T E R E
R I T T A N Y
NORM A N D Y
Hyeres \
lies O
Radcdel-Es.aque d'Hycres O
^MEDITERRANEAN SEA
Map 1. France.
30
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
Map 2. Paris and Environs.
THE IMPRESSIONIST LANDSCAPE AND THE IMAGE OF FRANCE
31
The national landscape inaugurated in the seventeenth century and constructed through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a landscape of communication through transportation (see below, III/4). As if in support of this idea, the gardens of Versailles, begun by Andre Le Notre for Louis XIV in 1668, were designated as a metaphor for the order and control of France through the mechanism of allees, or roads, and canals.'^ The great parterre with fountains just outside the Hall of Mirrors was — and still is — adorned not with classical deities or military trophies, but with allegorical statues of the principal rivers of France. Although it might seem strange to say, the gar- den landscapes of Le Notre in many ways predicted the landscapes of the Impressionists. His system of straight roads and canals linked the gardens of Versailles to the actual landscape of France, and the symbolic allusions in the sculpture and plantings he arranged to man's control of land, river, and sea were part of an underlying system of nationalist values present in Impression- ist landscape painting as well. The idea of landscape as "useful" nature, as nature tamed and controlled for the benefit of the nation, links the Impres- sionists and the ministers of Louis XIV. Although none of the painters were in any sense royalists, all of them felt themselves to be French to the core. Even Pissarro, a Danish citizen until his death in 1903, wanted to fight for the French during the Franco-Prussian War and expressed a longing to return to France during his self-imposed exile in England during that conflict.
Not surprisingly, the nationalization of France had a profound effect upon the French landscape itself. In the seventeenth century a system of national highways was inaugurated so that travel through the countryside and among provincial capitals was made easier. These roads — raised above the ground for drainage, graded, and lined with rows of trees (fig. 1) — intro- duced a visual unity into the diverse regional landscapes, a unity based upon an image of collective movement and transportation (see below, III/4). This arterial system was joined during the eighteenth century to a network of ca- nals and improved natural waterways utilizing the rivers of France. Of all European nations, France is the best endowed with navigable rivers, and these^together with the canals which served to link them, thus creating an aquatic highway system — became the veins of France as the national high- ways were the arteries. The improvement of both networks continued into the nineteenth century.
The progress of this national system of transport and communication can be traced even in the mapping of France. Inaugurated in the seventeenth century by the Cassini family, the detailed cartographic analysis of the countryside, which clearly recorded roads, canals, rivers, chateaus, towns, and even rural paths, was not completed (by the family's descendents) until the late eighteenth century. It was then replaced by a series of maps called the Nouvelle Carte topographique de la France, made for the Ministere de la Defense and finished only in 1879. This was joined by increasingly detailed, specialized maps concentrating on railroad lines or regions of particular importance to travelers. The nineteenth century was the great age of mass- produced maps, and a study of them makes it clear that the Impressionists were painting a landscape that was widely accessible both m actuality and to the armchair tourist.
This process of unification through transportation was given extraor- dinary impetus in the nineteenth century by the invention of the railroad (see below, III/4). France, like England and the United States, gave herself over fervently to this new mode of transportation. Books and articles about rail-
32 A DAY IN THE COLINTRY
>«?",s
LOUVECIENNES — Routes de Ba:nl.Gc-rniain et de MarJy
Fig. 1. Louveciennes — The routes de Saint- Gennain and de Marly, before 1910. Post- card. Private Collection, Louveciennes.
roads appeared early in the nineteenth century, and, by the middle of the 1800s, the network of train lines was so large and complex that it had utterly transformed the nation. The first short line — between Saint-Etienne and Lyon — was inaugurated in 1828, and the first Parisian line (to Saint- Germain-en-Laye) in the mid-1830s. The government made a national com- mitment to the railroad in 1838 when the Chambre des Deputes under Fran- cois Arago voted to inaugurate separate railroad lines from Paris to Belgium, Le Havre, Bordeaux, Marseille, and Lyon. As the network of private and pub- He train lines increased, a Frenchman could move more quickly, cheaply, and easily from one place to another than ever before. The very accessibility of the countryside made possible by the railroad utterly changed the relationship between urban man and nature. As the century progressed, an increasing per- centage of the French people was able to travel, and it became possible for most provincial Frenchmen to visit the capital. Thus the railroad promoted the nationalization of France more than any law, speech, or idea and certainly more than any other mechanical invention.'"*
The landscapes painted by the Impressionists abound in emblems of national order and solidarity reflecting these changes in the landscape of France. Trains, boats, carts, and carriages move easily on roads and rivers. Newly constructed bridges traverse both natural and man-made waterways. Urbanites stroll down country lanes. Peasants carry baskets of produce to market. Factories puff smoke and steam into cloud-filled skies. Fields of wheat ripen in the sun. All this unthreatening richness and serene beauty is presented as if immediately accessible to the viewer; the paintings' titles most often affirm that we are in the presence of a "real" countryside. Paradise — or something very close to it — has been made actual in these pictures. Yet they must be seen not only in terms of the modern aspects of France's nationalism, but also in terms of what might be called the French traditional world.
Among the principal nationalist projects of the French people during the nineteenth century was the rewriting of French history. When viewed from the vantage point of the post-Revolutionary 1800s, France's history could no longer be described strictly as the dynastic chronicle of her kings
THE IMPRESSIONIST LANDSCAPE AND THE IMAGE OF FRANCE
33
and their wars, advisors, and intrigues. Dominated by Jules Michelet, French nineteenth-century historians came increasingly to reinterpret past events as the history of "the nation" and its people. '^' Michelet's own work was a great nationalist project in which the achievements of ordinary men play an enor- mous role, and in which the French landscape is conceived as a vast natural theater for the actions of her people (see below, III/8).
Yet most French historians were less radical in their aims. For apolo- gists of the old France, both royalists and religious zealots, a study of histori- cal events served to reconnect Frenchmen with their true past, a past which many considered to have been ruptured by the Revolution rather than to have found its climactic moment in that event.'* It was this essentially reactionary use of history that gave impetus to an extraordinary rise in the study of local chronologies and monuments in France during the nineteenth century. The number of historical societies and local museums rose astronomically during this period. Further, these institutions promoted a notion of la France historique, or historical France, that served very clearly as a conceptual framework for contemporary tourism. Pamphlets, guidebooks, and railroad publications were all but obsessed with the monuments of France's past greatness: her chateaus, cathedrals, ruined abbeys, important civic structures, and the like. Most nineteenth-century travel guides were illustrated with plates representing less the landscape than the architecturally — and histori- cally— important locales which gave it significance (fig. 2).
The idea of la France historique fueled the fires of the national land- scape movement, and countless prints and paintings produced in nineteenth- century France record pre-Revolutionary sites about which one could read easily in various contemporary publications.''" The depth of the French national chronicle and the endurance of her people are themes alluded to in countless landscape paintings and prints made by artists varying in fame and quality from Franijois Blin to Jean-Baptiste Corot. Indeed, French landscapes painted in the 1800s, but before the Impressionists, indicate an essentially conservative ideology: in them, France survives and continues rather than changes. Aged forests, medieval bridges, cathedrals, and thatched cottages abound in landscapes painted by artists of the Barbizon school (see below, III/l).
When painting the French landscape, the Impressionists explicitly — and persistently — avoided la France historique. Not until the 1890s did their landscape paintings feature architectural monuments of any age or signifi- cance, and the ecclesiastical structures which dominated so many French towns were often de-emphasized in, or even omitted from. Impressionist paintings of those places. More often than not, Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, and Renoir screened churches behind trees (nos. 13, 19), turned their backs on chateaus, and placed architectural monuments at the very edges of their com- positions (nos. 59, 63—64, 69). Their landscapes — nationalist though they may be — must be read in light of these omissions. Their rejection of such subjects has often been interpreted as a reaction against the Romantic sub- jects of the painters who had dominated the previous generation of French art, and this view is surely correct. Yet one must also see such pictorializing behavior in ideological terms. By rejecting historically important monuments as the central motifs of their landscapes, the Impressionists promoted a self- consciously modern or anti-historical doctrine which suggested that France was a nation that should look forward into the future for her inspiration and not backward at her glorious, if confused, past. One is never reminded that
34
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
Blanche of Castille and St. Louis lived in Pontoise during the Middle Ages when one looks at a Pissarro landscape of that town (see below, III/5), al- though every guidebook written during the nineteenth century dwelled on that very fact. The same applies to Monet's Argenteuil landscapes (nos. 39— 43) and to the many paintings made in the historically significant region around the Chateau de Marly by Pissarro, Sisley and Monet (see below, III/2).
If the Impressionists rejected historical France, they were not so un- equivocal in their avoidance of her rural past. While chateaus of the rich — aristocratic or bourgeois — play a minor role in the iconography of Impres- sionist landscape painting, the modest dwellings of the rural poor are present in quantity, particularly in the work of Pissarro, Cezanne, Gauguin, Armand Guillaumin, and Sisley. (In fact, village scenes with and without figures occur in such abundance that they have been accorded a separate category here [see below, III/5]). When combined with the many hundreds of agricultural land- scapes painted by the same artists and by Monet (see below, III/7), they pro- vide evidence of a sustained investigation of the rural landscape that is as rich and significant as was that of Jean-Francois Millet, Corot, Charles-Franqois Daubigny, and Theodore Rousseau, all Barbizon painters (see below, III/l).
Why did the Impressionists paint so many rural landscapes? The answer is not easy to discover. The tourists and travelers of nineteenth-cen- tury France, while not actively discouraged from visiting villages, were given few reasons to do so. In fact, most writers of the time were active in their dislike of traditional rural civilization. Honore de Balzac, whose novel Les Paysans was published in 1846, treated villages and their inhabitants as unremittingly stupid and narrow, and this view persisted in much of French rural fiction of the period, culminating in the publication of Emile Zola's La Terre in 1890. The novelist Edmond About, who lived near Pontoise and was a friend of Pissarro, went so far as to call the French village "the last fortress of ignorance and misery."'** If cities were sophisticated and, with all their corruptions, central to modern experience, villages were squalid and little more than tribal.
There was, of course, another view. What might be called the rural pastorale was not altogether absent from French letters. George Sand wrote many elegiac rural novels, although even she was acutely aware of the great cultural gap that existed between the peasants of France and her modern urban readers.'' She wrote of the rural world as an antidote to urban civiliza- tion, and her view was shared by many writers. A typical popular text by an obscure physician. Dr. J.-B.-F. Descuret, entitled La Medicme des passions, ou les passions considerees dans lenr[s] rapports avec les maladies, les lois et la religion (1842), was concerned among other subjects with the modern dis- ease of urban ambition. Descuret's cure for this malady was country life, far removed from any city or large town. For him — indeed, for many writers throughout the nineteenth century in France — rural life was healthier and more moral than the life of the city because there were fewer pressures to progress, either financially or socially.-"
In the midst of this dichotomous view of rural civilization, the Impres- sionist artists took pains to chart a middle course; their paintings of the tradi- tional rural landscape illustrate neither Balzac nor Sand. In fact, the one major generalization which can be made about Impressionist rural images is that they are resolutely mundane. Absent, for the most part, are the grand moments of the agricultural season, the violent storms followed by delightful
Fig. 2. A. Normand (French), Neiv Railroad Line from Paris to Dieppe, from Pontoise to Gisors; Section between Pontoise and Gisors, n.d. Lithograph. Bibiiotheque Nationale, Serie Topographique, Va95, vol. IV, no. B16871.
THE IMPRESSIONIST LANDSCAPE AND THE IMAGE OF FRANCE
35
Fig. 3. Jean-Frangois Millet (French, 1814-
1875), Spring, 1868-73. Oil on canvas. 86 x
111 cm. Musee du Louvre, Paris. Photo:
Musees Nationau.x.
calm, that formed such a basic part of the rural iconography championed by Millet (fig. 3). Instead, the rural landscapes of Pissarro, Gauguin, Guillaumin, and Cezanne are rich in ordinary visual incidents, each patch of cabbages, each pile of faggots, each roughly textured stone wall having been carefully observed and transcribed. The message of these pictures is clear: rural life was continuing to exist even in the modern world. Pissarro's rural workers walk stoically across the railroad tracks in Railway Crossing at- Patis, near Pontoise (no. 53); Cezanne's Bend in the Road (no. 72) represents a village almost outside time.
The ideological underpinnings of this admission of rural life into Impressionist iconography can be understood most easily if contrasted with the notion of la France historique. The Impressionists demonstrated a clear preference for what might be called humble history, a history of the people, rather than the institutions, of France. When considered collectively, these paintings suggest a belief in both the essential value of the French population and the fact that the nation's civilization stands upon a rural base. In like fashion, Michelet's Le Penple (1846) is a portrayal of the French people in toto; it begins with an evocation of the peasant going to church on Sunday. Surely the strictly Republican notions of Michelet — and of the Impression- ists— accord well with the spirit of revolution in France. As the great modern French geographer Daniel Faucher has said, French history is "a long, accu- mulated history of our soil." For him,
France has always been a rural nation and the labors of her fields have given her both equilibrium and prosperity throughout the centuries. ...Her cities have been the centers of her greatest and most brilliant achievements, but they are nourished by the silent workers of her fields.-'
Indeed, Impressionist landscapes are virtually always peopled. Whether there are figures lolling in gardens or walking down paths, houses
36
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
set confidently in the fields or at the edge of cliffs, the human presence is always felt. We know that an empty field painted by Monet was planted and will be harvested by men (no. 103), and a deserted barnyard rendered by Cezanne is like a stage set before the play has commenced (no. 70). Theirs is most often a psychologically comfortable landscape, and the viewer rarely feels lonely because he is rarely alone.
In this way as well, the Impressionists' landscape — and we might call it a social landscape — is almost everywhere at odds with the landscapes pre- ferred by the Barbizon school. Although there are peasants and vagabonds in paintings by Corot, Narcisse Virgile Diaz de la Peiia, and others, they are most often tiny and distant from the viewer, ignorant of his presence. He is — by implication — different from them. And many other landscapes — particu- larly those of Rousseau — are unpeopled. When in the Barbizon painters' for- ests, the viewer is far from civilization in a natural world of gnarled trees, rugged rock formations, and deep, hidden pools (fig. 4). Descriptions of these landscapes — particularly by the eloquent critic Theophile Thore — stress the isolation of the viewer in a silent landscape. Moved by a small picture by Corot, Thore wrote the following passage:
It has at first the air of a confused sketch, but presently you feel the air gentle and almost motionless. You plunge into the diaphanous mist which floats over the river and which loses itself far far away in the greenish nuances of the sky at the horizon. You hear the nearly imperceptible noises of this quiet piece of nature, almost the shivering of the leaves or the motion of a fish on the top of the water.--
There are very few Impressionist landscapes that could support such a description.
Being alone in the midst of nature was often given pantheistic mean- ings in nineteenth-century landscape descriptions; the viewer was thought to become a better or more moral person through his contact with isolated na- ture. He was able to think clearly, to rid himself of petty social concerns and vanities, to restore his spirit. As if in support of this idea, landscape painters like Corot, Daubigny, or Antoine Chintreuil were described as simple, moral people by their earliest biographers, and the time spent alone with nature, far from the haunts and commerce of man, was considered to be the reason for their goodness. In this way, nature was conceived as a world apart from man, as an equivalent, in a sense, of the modern concept of wilderness or virgin nature: the place of God.
The Impressionists had a completely different concept of nature, as can be seen in their writings. They used the word frequently in their letters. To paint "before nature" for an Impressionist painter was not to wander for hours until one was alone in a landscape with no hint of the presence of man. Rather, it was to stand squarely in the easily accessible world and to paint it. These artists' idea of nature was the totality of the visible universe, a positivist view in which man and his works were seen as an integral part of a natural whole. Trains, boats, figures, factories, houses, fields, trees, piles of sand, machines — virtually every kind of form visible in the France of their time can be found somewhere in their landscapes. For Thore, Sand, and many intellec- tuals of mid-century France, nature was the world apart from man and his corruptions. For the Impressionists, nature was everything one could see.
Thus, in pursuing their own notion of naturalism, the true Impression- ists avoided the isolated parts of France. They virtually never painted moun- tains. They refused to travel far to seek out the "sublime," preferring an inte-
THE IMPRESSIONIST LANDSCAPE AND THE IMAGE OF FRANCE
37
Fig. 4. Theodore Rousseau (French, 1812-
1867), Clearing in the Forest of Fontaine-
bleau, 1848-51. Oil on canvas. 142 x
197 cm. Musee du Louvre, Paris. Photo:
Musees Nationaux.
grated, balanced world in which various forms complemented one another. As such, the origins — whether conscious or not — of their landscapes are classical, and again the comparison between the campagne de Paris and the Roman Campagna must be made. Like Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain in the seventeenth century, like Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, Corot, and Jean- Victor Bertin in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Impressionists conceived of the landscape as man's domain. It is no accident that the elderly Pissarro, for example, looked to Claude and the great French tradition as his major sources.-^
Without doubt the center of modernism in France was Paris. The cit>- not only accepted the industrial world and the future it would bring to humanity, it reveled m it. International exhibitions propagating the strength and inventiveness of French modernism took place in 1855, 1867, 1878, 1889, and 1900, and each embraced technolog>- and its parent, science, as fervently as possible. Trains, tractors, and machines for making clothes, bread, sugar, indeed almost everything, were exhibited and published widely in the popular press, with the result that nineteenth-century Frenchmen knew — or could know — almost as much about what was then new technol- ogy as Americans can today.
The will to project into the future and thus to alter man's relationship to his past was an extraordinary feature of French nationalism in the nine- teenth century. There is no greater proof of this than the rebuilding of the capital and its suburbs (see below, III/3). Based upon the urban planning projects of Napoleon I, the process of modernizing Paris was a priority of every government in the 1800s, reaching extraordinary heights during the Second Empire (1852—70), when a coherent cit\' plan was created. Vast areas of the old city of Paris were leveled to the ground and rebuilt. People were forced out of neighborhoods which had stood for centuries, and large areas were carved out for new railroads, boulevards, and parks. It is probable that
38
A DAY IN THE COLrNTRY
no other city in history has so totally — and violently — transformed itself in so little time. Indeed, destruction occurred at such a level during the Second Empire that it almost seemed as if the city was at war with itself — as then happened during the Commune. When walking in Paris today, we see the results of these labors — results which seem to us to have been worth all the effort — but we can forget too easily that Paris and its environs were being simultaneously destroyed and rebuilt with immediate human consequences throughout the period of the Impressionists.
The literary work that really exemplifies the modernization of Paris and its suburbs was written by Flaubert's boyhood friend Maxime du Camp. Published in six hefty volumes between 1869 and 1876, just as the Impres- sionists were codifying their own pictorial attitude toward modern France, the book is entitled Paris, ses organes, sa fonction, et sa vie dans la seconde moitie du XIX siecle. Its analysis of the city was so different from that offered by any previous writer that its novelty can scarcely be overemphasized. Most earlier authors had treated Paris as a luxury center, the capital of world cul- ture, of the fine arts, and of the good life. The vast majority' of books about the city, whether novels, travel guides, memoirs, or histories, either waxed poetic about its monuments, restaurants, entertainments, and shops or con- demned it for its profound, if luxurious, decadence. If the campagne de Paris was conceived of as a classical landscape, the Rome most often equated with Paris was Rome just before the advance of the barbarians. Du Camp reversed all this with a book which tells the reader how the city worked and about its systems of transport, sewage, telegraphic communication, post, canals, mar- kets, and so on. The city for Du Camp was an enormous, quasi-organic machine which functioned because of the logic of its various organs and sys- tems of exchange. Its history was of little interest to him — it had already been written, he thought — and its culture less something willed by its people than the direct result of the conditions of life imposed upon these inhabitants by the machine of the city itself. If Napoleon III and his minister Baron Georges- Eugene Haussmann had attempted to rebuild Paris more or less from the ground up, Du Camp was their unofficial apologist in prose. For him, a city that worked properly was worth all the pain and destruction necessary to make it function efficiently.
What is fascmatmg about the pamtmgs of Paris and its local and sur- rounding landscapes by the Impressionists is that, while we see the positive results of Baron Haussmann's labors, we very rarely see the destruction that led to them. Manet painted vacant lots on the rue Mosnier, Pissarro a con- struction site near Louveciennes, and Monet a bridge in Argenteuil being re- constructed after the Franco-Prussian War. Yet these paintings are remark- able chiefly because they are so rare in oeuvres which are among the largest in the history of art. More often than not, we see the new world of trains, straight roads, boulevards, boats, parks, fields, and factories as if these forms had always been in the landscape. There are few scars on the earth, few wounds of newness to be seen. Again, the selectivity of the Impressionist vi- sion must be remarked upon. It should be clear that Impressionism can be interpreted essentially as a healing art, an art which accepted the modern world easily and gracefully, as if rejecting, paradoxically, its very newness.
Perhaps the most important modernizing change that occurred in the nineteenth century and that affected landscape painting was the widespread increase in travel. Although an important percentage of this travel can be called tourism and related to the mapping of France and building of rail-
THE IMPRESSIONIST LANDSCAPE AND THE IMAGE OF FRANCE
39
roads, as we have seen, as well as to a general increase in the amount of leisure time made available to working people, a great deal of the movement that took place throughout the country — especially into and out of Paris — was commercial. The extraordinary increase in barge traffic changed the character of the Seine dramatically, and large train yards were constructed in the capital and its major industrial suburbs for the loading and unloading of livestock, machine tools, food, clothing, and any other goods coming in and out of the city.
Commercial travel — the movement of goods and services — was more often pictured by the Impressionist artists and their friends than is commonly supposed, but less railroad than barge transport, particularly along the Seine. Pissarro, Cezanne, Sisley, Guillaumin, and Monet followed the leads of Johann Barthold Jongkind, Daubigny, and others who painted the industrial ports of Paris, particularly the Quai de Bercy in the eastern part of the city, as well as the port at Rouen and the immense channel ports of Le Havre and Douai. Pissarro even painted the peniches, or barges, that moved to and fro on the smaller Oise, which ran between the Seine and the system of canals in the industrially prosperous north of France. The motorized gnepes a vapeiir, or tugboats, and the barges seen in many Impressionist paintings of the industrial sections of the Seine were common sights on the river. If one wanted to create an exhibition devoted to shipping and river transport in France during the second half of the nineteenth century, one could do it with paintings by the Impressionists alone.
Yet the kind of travel that is most important for an understanding of Impressionism is tourism. It is curious — and unfortunate — that a major his- tory of tourism in France has never been written, in spite of the vast bibliog- raphy and the huge mass of archival material available to researchers. One slim book, Gilbert Sigaux's Histoire de tonrisme (1965), makes a stab at this topic, which lies at the heart of Impressionism. The most valuable recent study of tourism. The Town's? by Dean MacCannell (1976), analyzes this phe- nomenon and its effects on human behavior as the key to an understanding of modernism and its peculiar forms of consciousness. The organization of lei- sure time away from home, the sightseeing of the tourist (fig. 5), has been brilliantly analyzed by MacCannell, and his identification of the tourist as the Everyman of modern culture lends even greater credence to the notion that the tourist-based landscape of Impressionism has a modernist/populist ico- nography.
Tourism in France had existed for centuries before the railroad, and the excellence of the French highways was noticed often by eighteenth-cen- tury English tourists, many of whom drove through France on their way to Italy as part of the Grand Tour. The first widely accessible tourist guide avail- able to such people was written by a German named Flans Ottokar Reichard and published in French in 1793. Entitled Guide des voyageurs en Europe, this book was filled with practical information about inns, roads, restau- rants, and routes and assumed that the tourist would see what he wanted and ask the necessary questions about local sights of the natives. It was, in fact, the peasants in their local costumes who were the principal curiosities for late-eighteenth-century travelers, and Reichard's guide was illustrated with plates of picturesque individuals in regionally varied finery.
Reichard's book was the beginning of a flood of literature, some of which was similarly narrow in focus, but a great deal more of which gave out information about local history, sights, side trips, population statistics, art
40 A DAY IN IHE COLINTRY
Uc;;ill dc Oh. DtSP.'L ^\>jr Lull r-, ,,.1-1
Fig. 5. Jules Despres (French), Gathering the Grapes at Argenteuil, n.d. Lithograph from L'lllustration, 1877, p. 337. BibUotheque Nationale, Serie Topographique, Va95, vol. I, no. B16056.
history, and the like. By the middle of the nineteenth century, tourist guides had become so bulky and so filled with densely printed prose that they resem- bled almanacs or encyclopedias more than the handy pocket guides envi- sioned by Reichard. The informed tourist, guidebook in hand, became a stan- dard feature in France and much of the rest of Europe during this period. When we look at landscape paintings produced at the time, we must never forget that they were painted by men and women who must be thought of as tourists, armed with information about everything they saw.
The landscape the Impressionists visited and painted ran along the English Channel from Deauville to Etretat, down the Seine from Le Havre to Paris and out again along the train route mto the environs of the capital (maps 1-2, 4). This landscape was a discovery of the nineteenth-century tourist; many of the small towns, villages, and hamlets on the beach, along the Seme, or in the He de France sported hotels, inns, and restaurants, most of which were built and opened in the 1800s especially for such visitors. In fact, the area was almost a tired one by the 1860s and VOs, when the Impression- ists began to paint it in earnest.-"* Pissarro, on visiting Rouen in 1883, was struck by the number of views of this small provincial capital that had already been painted, drawn, and printed by earlier artists and was aware of the fact that his own renderings inevitably would be compared with the familiar prints by and after such artists as Richard Parkes Bonnington and J. M. W. Turner."
Due to the enormous advances in mass-produced printmaking, the number of illustrated publications increased dramatically in the nineteenth century, and, for the first time in the history of Western man, a large percent- age of the population was what we today call visually literate. Many mass- produced images were travel views (fig. 6), and a considerable number of French artists made their living as travel illustrators. The drawings they made
THE IMPRESSIONIST LANDSCAPE AND THE IMAGE OF FRANCE
41
^
Fig. 6. Provost (French), The Inauguration of
the Bougival Bridge, November 7, 1858, n.d.
Lithograph. Bibhotheque Nationale, Serie
Topographique, Va78, vol. I, no. B6763.
i\iI<;iit.\iio\ liL t^-'\
were most often rapidly executed notations which were turned into finished views with standard buildings and figures by professional printmakers in Paris, with the result that such illustrations tended to have a suspicious same- ness of appearance. Yet, in spite of their relative inaccuracies, these popular topographical prints existed in such quantit}' that virtually every person in France was aware of the look of the rest of the country.
If the artists who illustrated travel books were, with certain notable exceptions, untalented, the men and women who wrote the texts for such publications were considerably more gifted as a group. Writers from Sten- dhal, who published Memoires d'lin toiiriste in 1838, to Jules Claretie and Victorien Sardou wrote brilliant descriptive analyses of the towns, land- scapes, villages, and rivers of the north of France. The landscape descriptions written by the great masters of French realist fiction during this period were not only widely accessible, but of superb qualit)'.-'' Essays in mass-circulation journals as well as separately produced travel guides included discussions of the beauties of landscapes, the "meanings" of rivers, and the poetics of ham- lets. Authors, many of incredible refinement, tested their sensibilities en face de la motif, directly confronting their subjects almost as if they were pamters. Indeed, they wrote much better prose about actual landscapes than about landscape paintings, and the literature produced for tourists tends, in general, to be more interesting to read today than contemporary art criticism. There are countless passages in which the writer urges painters to depict a particu- lar landscape. Hence the artist acted as an alter ego or extension of the tour- ist. One anonymous author of the Guide de voyagetir siir les bateaux a vapeur de Paris au Havre{c. 1865)exhorted the paintersof France to travel the Seine, there to discover "all these delicious landscapes, all these islands, all these cliffs."-" On occasion the coincidence between a descriptive text in a guide- book and an Impressionist painting is so close that one can scarcely believe that the painter had not read the guide. 'VCTiile many earlier landscape paint- ers had considered themselves to be hermits, vagabonds, or itinerants, then, the Impressionists adopted the persona of the tourist.
The effects of tourist travel were widely debated during the Impres- sionist period. In 1876, for example, the year of the second Impressionist exhibition, a modest young painter named Emile Michel gave a lecture to the Academic Stanislas with the rather grand title "Du paysage et du sentiment
42
A DAI' IN THE COUNTRY
de la nature a notre epoque." Although not particularly novel, his thesis was clearly defined: that modern, urban man, living in crowded and changing conditions far from his rural origins, needed frequent periods of rest in the country and that landscape painting could provide temporary relief for the desperate urbanite. Michel was acutely conscious of the fact that modern France — in what he called "our age" — was very different from historical France. Most of these differences he lamented; he detested technology and the resulting material progress of man, whom he called "a docile servant of machines."'-'^ Yet he was more willing than most conservative critics to under- stand that nature and country life helped to restore an equilibrmm to indus- trial man, and he correctly interpreted the rise of both rural tourism and landscape painting as a direct result of the changes wrought on society by industrialism and urban modernism.
Michel saw the countryside painted by the Impressionists — about whom he did not know in 1876 — as a hideous, modern countryside, and he wrote of Paris as a great animal devouring nature. It is certainly no accident that virtually every "ruined" landscape he mentioned was painted by the Impressionists: the coasts destroyed by beach towns, the fields scarred by train tracks, and the suburbs polluted by factories. By comparing Michel's prose and Monet's paintings, one can see instantly that where the former hated modernism and retreated to the unspoiled countryside near the forest of Fontainebleau to escape it, the latter accepted it with utter equanimity. For Michel, tourism was an element of modernism to be feared, though he acknowledged the necessity of escape from the city; for Monet, tourism was an essential way of life. A day in the country — boating, eating, walking, reading, or just sitting — was a profoundly social experience for Monet and his colleagues. We have already referred to the populated world of the Impressionists, and we can see now that it was most often populated with the tourists despised by reactionaries like Michel.
By the middle of the nineteenth century there were almost as many kinds of temporary visitors to the countryside as there were natives. The ur- ban elite, whether aristocrats manque or bourgeois, kept large country estab- lishments and lived, or attempted to live, like grand seigneurs, surrounded by servants, tenants, sharecroppers, and whatever other subservient populations they could afford or control. Others, middle-class people, built small country properties, which they used on weekends and for summer vacations.-^ In fact, the huge increase in the construction of country residences during this period went hand in hand with a rise in private gardening (see below, III/6). Whether one possessed an enormous "park," as did Monet's friends and pa- trons the Hoschedes, or rented a small country property with an enclosed garden, as did Monet, Pissarro, and Manet, the cultivation of an ornamental flower garden was a priority. Books and magazines devoted to private gar- dening were produced throughout the period of the Impressionists. Some, like the Almanach du jardinier amateur, which commenced publication in 1870, catered to a middle-class audience, while others, like the luxurious Al- bums du paysagiste pour I'arrangement des pares et des jardins (1875), were written for the rich. This literature served to guide the Parisian in his creation of a temporary garden landscape for enjoyment on weekends and during the summer months. Here, too, the Impressionists followed the lead of what one might call the tourist class.
Yet for the vast majority of urban petit bourgeois or working-class Frenchmen the country was accessible only for short periods of time. One
THE IMPRESSIONIST LANDSCAPE AND THE IMAGE OF FRANCE 43
could rent a small property for a week or a month, stay in a hotel for a week- end, or, most commonly, go to the country for a single day. This latter activ- ity, charming and easy as it might appear in the paintings of the Impression- ists, was not very socially elevating. Indeed, the day trips of many of the more lowly characters in French Realist and naturalist novels figure significantly in such narratives. Rural tourism came to be considered a social equalizer.
Tourism became even easier and cheaper as the century continued and the number of train lines increased. With greater competition among the var- ious private firms offermg transport, fares were lowered, and people of very limited means could easily afford a day trip out of Paris by the middle of the Second Empire. Indeed, statistics indicate that the 1850s were the great dec- ade of railroad construction in the environs of Paris, and conventional trains were joined by such inventions as the omnibus americain, or horse-drawn trolley (fig. 37), and other rail vehicles. Many of the private and semiprivate rail lines produced their own promotional material, and an entire species of travel literature arose to appeal to their newly defined clientele (see below, III/4).
Perhaps the most important item of this new genre was the series of guides called Les Chemins de fer illustres. Produced for mass circulation, the guides cost as little as 25 centimes and could he purchased either singly or in sets. Each guide consisted of a four- to eight-page booklet covering a single train line (Paris to Argenteuil, Paris to Pontoise, or Paris to Fontainebleau, for example). Each included a linear rail map marked with the major roads near the stations and a text describing the railroad line itself, its history, and its construction, as well as the major sites to be seen from it. The text also alerted the tourist to the beautiful rural walks and historical sites one could see after leaving the train and mentioned restaurants and inns, where appropriate.
Les Chemins de fer illustres appeared twice a month beginning in 1858, and many celebrated authors, including Alexandre Dumas fils and Claretie, wrote for it. It inaugurated a type of publication that was widely copied by private railroads and transport companies. Many promotional schemes rather like those used to lure people onto airplanes today also were widespread in the nineteenth century. Tourists could take advantage of such special arrangements as group or weekend rates, tickets with unlimited use for short periods of time, and the like, and ordinary Frenchmen came increas- ingly to see the world through the eyes of the writers hired by Les Chemins de fer illustres and its competitors.
The first important general guidebook to the environs of Paris was written by the greatest nineteenth-century popular travel writer in French, Adolphe Joanne. His guidebook Les Environs de Paris illustres, organized on the basis of the newly developed railroad lines, was first published in 1856 and appeared in numerous later editions before being substantially rewritten and enlarged in 1872. If there is one book that proposed to systematize French tourism in the period of Impressionism, it was Joanne's guide. Writ- ten in clipped, efficient prose, his book tells the tourist about everything from village fairs to local eateries. It urges the intrepid traveler to take rural walks, describing how long they will take and the major sites to be seen. It talks about ruined abbeys, beautiful views, neglected public gardens, and hidden hamlets. It includes complete schedules of train arrival and departure times and of fares. So full of information is Joanne's guide that it would require a lifetime to complete the many diverse tours it describes.
44
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
¥ig. 7. Renoir, Path through Tall Grass, fjC, *^' ^"i^'^tj^ "^"^ c. 1876-78. Oil on canvas. 60 X 74 cm. •^ -T^r^lr ■■ -^'^^^ Musee d'Orsay, Galene du Jeu de Paume,
Paris. Photo: Musees Nationaux.
What is fascinating about this book — and many others written before and after it — is that rural tourism was presented to their readers almost as a gourmet is presented with a wonderful dinner for consideration. There were the "main courses," major sites like Versailles or the view of Paris from Le Notre's terraces at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Yet a perfect day in the country required visual hors d'oeuvres and desserts as well, and Joanne provided the tourist with suggestions for delightful promenades that would take him away from the "significant" monuments. Nothing was too humble to be examined by Joanne; he led Parisians up steep hillsides in anticipation of noteworthy vistas or through narrow rural paths to catch glimpses of grand chateaus.
Joanne's landscape — and the landscape of all writers and illustrators of French- tourist literature — was a quintessentially public landscape. The tourist — whether on a train or a country path — was traversing a landscape which belonged, in a sense, to every Frenchman. Although this does not seem remarkable to us today, one must remember that travel was not only cum- bersome and difficult before the middle of the 1 800s, but that it also required passports and identity papers. Absolutely free movement for people of all social classes throughout the landscape (fig. 7) was something essentially new in this period. The fact that the French conquered their own countryside as tourists and landscape painters with such determination demonstrates the extent of their pleasure in this new freedom. Additional obstacles in their way were the travel restrictions imposed upon them during the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune. These factors must be remembered when we look at the delightfully accessible landscapes of the Impressionists or read the entic- ing prose of the guide literature which calls us out into the country.
The freedom to go where one wanted, to wear what one wanted, to
THE IMPRESSIONIST LANDSCAPE AND THE IMAGE OF FRANCE
45
eat out-of-doors, to be seen with whomever one wished — all these freedoms were extolled time after time in travel literature. If the idea of an entire life spent in a provincial town or county seat has been considered a form of self- imposed imprisonment by French writers since Balzac, a day or even a month in the country, spent in the company of one's dearest friends from Paris, has been treated with considerably greater enthusiasm. Flaubert celebrated the charming, if temporary, glories of the publisher Jacques Arnoux's country residence in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Cloud in L'Education sentimentale (1869), but disparaged the charms of the provincial hometown of his hero. If one felt confined in the tightly ordered provincial society of Nogent, one could be truly liberated in the transplanted urban society of Saint-Cloud.
These freedoms of a country tourist were not universally admired, however. Indeed, the countryside frequented by urban visitors came increas- ingly to be seen as a place of sexual license, immorality, and intrigue. One travel writer, Emmanuel Ducros, in a charming book called Chemin de fer (1884), described with great care and subtlety the processes of seduction that took place in a train compartment, quoting a delightful song about a "con- versation with the eyes" that took place in a one such "padded cell." And the ever-moral Guy de Maupassant wrote scathingly in his novel La FetJime de Paul (1880) about the goings-on, sexual and financial, at the popular restau- rant in Bougival painted by virtually every one of the Impressionists, La Grenouillere (The Frogpond) (no. 14). Such literary passages were not at all rare during the second half of the nineteenth century and contrasted in every way with the notion of the countryside as a place of moral rejuvenation that was equally common during the period. The fact that Zola set the dramatic murder from his first major novel, Therese Raqiiin (1867), not in Paris, where the characters lived, but in the countryside, tells us a great deal about the actuality of vice imported to the suburbs. One writer of the time went so far as to say that the railroad and rural tourism had ruined the basic fabric of French society by weakening the bonds of regional and family life.^'' As we have seen, this negative view of the countryside, common enough in lit- erature, is rare in Impressionist painting.
Although the connections between painting and the railroad are mani- fold and fascinating, strangely enough there is not a single major book or essay which deals clearly and specifically with these issues. Perhaps the most amusing — and, in a sense, important — discussion of trains and art in nine- teenth-century France takes place in a satire by Etienne Baudry illustrated by Gustave Courbet and called Le Camp des bourgeois (1868). In a chapter entitled "Le Destinee de Tart" a group of fictitious characters discusses the problem of the placement of works of art in a modern, urban world. Their major contention is that the bourgeoisie cares little for its aesthetic property and that modern, urban man has less and less time to go to museums (an observation that has turned out not to be true!). The solution to this apparent conundrum is proposed by Courbet himself: to place works of art in train stations, which will become not only "temples of progress," but also "temples of art."-' He recommends filling the huge, empty walls of waiting rooms with paintings that will instruct or educate the mass audience which comes there rather than to museums. For Baudry, the train had so utterly altered the mod- ern world that it was necessary for artists to reconsider the relationship between their works and the new public defined by mass transit.
If Baudry wrote about the train station as the new temple of art, other writers were obsessed with the effect of rail travel upon the human body and
46
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
IMPRESSIONS [' compression:: DC VOYAGE.
Fig. 8. Honore Daumier (French, 1808-1879), Impressions and Compressions of Travel ("Ah, misericordia, we are all lost!" "Eh! It's simply the train starting up again... as soon as the machine goes forward, the passengers go back ward... everyone knows that!..."). Litho- graph from The Railroads, 1853, pi. 9 (first state). Armand Hammer Foundation. Photo: Armand Hammer Foundation.
its senses. While the volume of written evidence about the effect of speed on man is vast, two recent books, Marc Baroli's Le Train dans la litterature franqaise (1969) and Wolfgang Schivelbusch's Railway Journey (1979), treat the subject admirably. It was clear to early railway passengers that the phys- ical conditions of the railroad car as well as the speed and linearity of railway travel affected one's perception of the countryside and one's state of mind. The Goncourt brothers wrote in a fascinating manner of the vision of a rail passenger as a series of sensations/images/impressions perceived in rapid succession by an individual viewer who was forced into a continuum of time and space by the train itself.^- Speed, it was thought, changed one's relation- ship to place and to the landscape as a world of substance through which one could move and which one could touch (fig. 8).
There are countless passages in contemporary travel guides that develop in specific contexts this idea of the dislocation of time in space pro- duced by railway travel. Louis Barron, who traveled in the He de France in the 1880s and published his book Les Environs de Paris in 1886, made frequent mention of the contrast between one's perception of a place from a moving train and that obtained from a stationary or pedestrian viewpoint. As he crossed the Oise River on a train heading for Pissarro's town of Pontoise, for example, he made that contrast explicit: "One perceives a rapid and striking vision of a gothic, indeed almost oriental, city, and that image evaporates as the train stops at the totally modern edge of a small provincial town. What a strange contrast!"'^ The train's rapid motion allowed Barron to create in his imagination an image, which, while derived from the facts of the landscape, was not true to it. As is clear from this particular description, the town of Pontoise seen from the train was considerably more interesting than the town seen from within.
Claretie, in his book Voyage d'un Parisien (1865), wrote of the rela-
THE IMPRESSIONIST LANDSCAPE AND THE IMAGE OF FRANCE
47
tionship between the way in which a landscape was perceived from the train and the way in which a landscape painter treated nature.
Let us not disparage the straight line; it has its own particular charm. The country- side when perceived from the track of a train looks like it would if painted by an artist who proceeds, as did the great masters, to let us see only the large masses. Don't ask him for details, but for the whole ensemble in which there is life.^"'
The countryside seen from the window of a train, for Claretie and many other writers, was an artistic countryside, then, lacking the stray details that would distract from what he called the "ensemble" of a landscape. His read- ers, simply by taking a train outside Paris, could "see" like artists.
The fact that texts of this type were so common in this period must not be forgotten in a consideration of French landscape pamting. Artists also rode the trains in and out of Paris, as we have seen, and it is highly unlikely that they were unaware of the many allusions to train travel and painting made in the popular literature. To say that this material influenced them is perhaps too strong. It is correct, however, to point out the affinities between the view of the countryside reported by train travelers and the paintings by their contemporaries, the Impressionists. The landscapes painted by these artists in which trains puff away in the distance must have had two possible meanings to contemporary train riders. First, the train acted as an emblem of, or symbol for, the modern world of tourism. Second, the viewer was re- minded of the conditions of perception that occurred while riding a train.
This last point is important because it raises the issue of the train as a symbol of progress, modernity, and change. Zola, in his novel La Bete humaine (1890), made the train itself (the "human beast") the "hero" of his novel. Zola's human characters fed, fixed, and ran the beast, giving their lives over to its rhythms, its moods, its demands. The Impressionists, particularly Monet, were clearly susceptible to the train's iconological power. Indeed, the latter's paintings of the 1870s, culminating in the great series of paintings of 1877-78 representing the interior of the first Gate Saint-Lazare (nos. 30- 32), served as a major source for Zola's later prose (see below, III/3— 4).
It is interesting and not irrelevant to point out that the great anarchist- philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, in his posthumously published book Dn Principe de I'art et de sa destination sociale (1865), realized that machines themselves must enter the realm of art and suggested that motors be represented as perfectly and completely as possible. He called for a proper representation of the railroad train with the following words:
In the locomotive, the motor is contained in the apparatus that puts it into motion; it is that condition which gives to the machine its formidable appearance and makes it truly representative of all machines. It is itself in every sense: its gigantic proportions, its roaring and its effect of panting, the smells of its furnace, its speed.... '^
Although many photographers and illustrators worked to record the train as the symbol of the two conditions of life thought essential to modernity' — speed and change — few important painters except Monet accepted such a challenge (see below, 111/3-4).
The words "speed" and "change" occur over and over again in French writing, both popular and self-consciously literary, of the nineteenth century. Attitudes toward these seemingly inevitable conditions of modern life were predictably varied. The very frequency of their use together with the fact that many writers worried about the velocity of change indicates that concern
48
A DAY IN THE COLINTRY
over modernity and its ramifications was almost universal. Whether one embraced it, as did Monet and Zola, or looked at it vt'ith jaundiced eyes, as did Pissarro and Flaubert, the modern, urban world, the world of progress, seemed to be moving forward at a rapid and uncontrollable rate. The Impres- sionists painted many aspects of that world, surely knowing, as literate, if not highly educated. Frenchmen, that they lived on the cusp of time. Their paint- ings indicate to us that they kept one foot on each side of what seemed then to be the moment of transition between history and contemporaneity, between a world whose patterns were clearly defined and one through which one moved by instinct, unsure of the future. If their paintings project a certain air of complacency, almost an inevitability, this quality was achieved with dif- ficulty, indeed was wrung from a landscape in transition. In fact, when Impressionist pictures are considered in the context of their time, the concep- tual or philosophical confusion of nineteenth-century Frenchmen seems per- haps to be the clearest signal to us from a landscape in transition that was really not so different from our own.
— R. B.
Notes
1. Castagnary, 1869, pp. 3-4. I.Snyder, 1964, p. 9.
3. See Castagnary, 1869.
4. Lecarpentier, 1817, p. 25.
5. Bloch, 1971, p. 15.
6. Bioch, 1912-13, p. 325.
7. Snyder, 1964, pp. 9-116.
8. See Gellner, 1983.
9. K. Varnedoe, work in progress. 10. Zeldin, 1977, pp. 3-85. ll.Ibid., pp. 3-21.
12. See Gravier, 1942.
13. V. Scully, work in progress.
14. See A. Joanne, 1859.
15. Kohn, 1975, pp. 46-75.
16. Bretteli, 1977, pp. 28-38.
17. See Worcester Art Museum and The American Federation of Arts, 1982.
18. About, 1864, p. 155.
19. See particularly her introduction to Franqois le cbanipi (1846).
20. Zeldin, 1973, p. 91. 21.Faucher, 1962, p. 181.
22. Thomson, 1891, p. 29.
23. Pissarro, 1950, p. 500.
24. See Worcester Art Museum and The American Federation of Arts, 1982.
25. Bretteli and Lloyd, 1980, pp. 33-36.
26. See Bart, 1956; Poinet, 1916.
27. Guide de voyageur..., c. 1865, p. 1.
28. Michel, 1876, p. 15.
29. See Daly, 1864-72.
30. Giffard, 1887, p. 314. 31.Baudry, 1868, p. 289.
32. See Baroli, 1969.
33. Barron, 1886, p. 565.
34. Claretie, 1865, p. 316.
35. See Proudhon, 1865.
THE IMPRESSIONIST LANDSCAPE AND THE IMAGE OF FRANCE
49
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The French Landscape Sensibihty
IN THE OPENING DECADES of the nineteenth century, landscape painting underwent a long, difficult, and bloodless revolution. This process even- tually led to the development of Impressionism, which, as we have seen, actually had roots deep within the tradition of French landscape painting (see above, II). In 1800 and 1818, respectively, the painter Valenciennes and his student Jean-Baptiste Deperthes had written valuable theoretical and practical treatises on landscape in an attempt to raise this genre from its then rather lowly position within the artistic hierarchy of acceptable subject mat- ter. This was not too difficult, in fact, since other types of pictures — specifi- cally, history paintings — had become arcane and difficult to decipher. As a result, well before the Impressionists began to paint, landscape, because of its relative ease of comprehension as well as its scale and attractiveness, had become a desirable commodity. The theoretical interest in it, combined with a demand on the part of a new and ever-increasing audience for art, provided the necessary basis for its popularity.
By the mid-1 830s, landscape so dominated other painting genres that the influential periodical U Artiste could proclaim with confidence that "landscape is truly the painting genre of our time."^ By the '50s, landscape painting had become the second-most-purchased type of art acquired by the State. In his review of the Salon of 1857 Castagnary cited the decline of his- tory painting in favor of landscape with some pleasure, for he felt, along with many others, that it was the most important subject of art.- It is clear from the number of landscapes produced, exhibited, and sold that Castagnary had his finger on the pulse of his time. Although the Ecole des Beaux-Arts contin- ued its vain attempt to resuscitate the failing body of history painting, by the 1870s the Barbizon painters had been so successful that the fledgling artists who later were to become the Impressionists could look to them to inspire hope for similar pecuniary results (see below, IV).
53
Fig. 9. Nicolas-Antoine Taunay (French,
1755-1830), Landscape with an Aqueduct,
1810. Oil on canvas. 45.7 x 53.3 cm.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photo:
LACMA.
As early as the seventeenth century, French theorists and critics had divided landscape into two sub-categories. The more acceptable to the Academie des Beaux-Arts and to wealthy patrons of this period was the "he- roic" landscape, which depicted a specific event and thus demonstrated the erudition of the artist as well as (and perhaps more importantly) that of the buyer The other category, which had a considerably longer and stronger life span, was the "rural" landscape, which merely illustrated a scene discovered by the artist in nature, and which was intended in turn to stimulate an emo- tional response similar to his on the part of the viewer In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the heroic or historical landscape in the grand manner as conceived by Claude and Gaspard Dughet was raised to a position of preeminence. This does not mean, of course, that other types of landscape were not pursued. In fact, by 1850 the rural type had come to dominate the field.
The subject of a landscape, then, was of the utmost importance. It affected the place of an artist's work in the Academic hierarchy and deter- mined the final appearance of a painting. According to Roger de Piles' Course de peinture par principes (1708), a forerunner of Valenciennes' and Deperthes' texts, the two different strains of landscape required by their na- tures different qualities of finish. The heroic, being the more important, had to be worked up to a high degree of completion, resulting in an extremely polished, smooth surface (fig. 9). The rural landscape, being of lesser impor- tance, did not require this level of finish, but could maintain instead a sketchier, more lively appearance, rather like that of a preparatory modele, or sketch. It was this lack of finish in rural landscapes as well as the conception behind them that proved attractive to later generations of painters and theo- rists. Interestingly enough, it was the rough surface of Impressionist paintings that most provoked the ire of contemporary critics, however (see below, IV).
Valenciennes' 1800 text, entitled Elements de perspective pratique, os-
54
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
Fig. 10. J.-B.-C. Corot (French, 1796-1875), Seine and Old Bridge at Limay, c. 1870. Oil on canvas. 40.7 .x 66 cm. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photo: LACMA.
sified this bifurcated response to landscape and was adopted instantly as a handbook for landscape painters throughout the nineteenth century. In fact, even Pissarro recommended the book to his son as a guide to the fundamen- tals of painting. Although this may not have been the only inspiration for French artists' choice of sites to paint, it is nonetheless significant that it was Valenciennes who suggested that they search river banks, in France instead of in Italy (he mentions the Seine and Oise by name), as well as the forest of Fontainebleau, for new motifs to inspire different visual effects. In such locales, he said, the artist could capture his own emotional response to virgin landscape in sketches made en plein air, out-of-doors at the site. It was under- stood, of course, that such sketches were to be thought of only as studies for use later in working up larger paintings, which were finished in the studio. Deperthes, Valenciennes' student, reiterated these ideas in his 1818 book, Theorie du paysage.
In the end, it was Deperthes, along with Marcel Guerin; Antoine- Chrysostome Quatremere de Quincy, Secretaire perpetuel de I'academie; Comte de Vaublanc, Ministre de I'interieure et de la decentralisation; and others who were influential in having the Academie institute a Prix de Rome for landscape painting in 1817. Although it was awarded only every four years and was granted exclusively in the category of heroic or historical land- scape, those whose concern had been the elevation of the lowly genre of land- scape painting felt that they had succeeded, and in no small measure. The very first Prix de Rome in this category was awarded to Achille-Etna Michallon for his 1817 Detnocritus and the Abderitans (Ecole des Beaux- Arts, Paris), whose title places it squarely in the category of heroic landscape. The Academie, no doubt, felt secure that this new prize assured a continuity with the moral-minded subjects of the other awards. This concern becomes more comprehensible when one sees it in the context of the contemporary historical situation. The Salon of 1817 was the first to follow the restoration
THE FRENCH LANDSCAPE SENSIBILITY
55
Map 3. Melun and the Forest of Fontainebleau.
of the Bourbons under Louis XVIII. More than anything else there was a conscious attempt on the part of the newly reinstalled monarchy to weave back together the great traditions of French history and art, which had been rent apart since the Revolution. Ignoring the sociological as well as the artis- tic changes which had occurred in the 28 years since 1789, the official artistic community sought to encourage the earlier tradition of historical landscape.
Deperthes' belief that landscape, and most particularly rural land- scape, would attract those who were uneducated, who responded emotion- ally and not intellectually, may have made the political and artistic arbiters of the Second Empire apprehensive. In 1863 Comte de Nieuwerkerke, Superi- eure des beaux-arts under Napoleon III, fearing the growing interest in this most democratic of genres, abruptly eliminated the Prix de Rome for land- scape painting and proceeded to reform the entire structure of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts as well as Salon procedures. This same year saw the Salon des Refuses, the beginning of the end of the artistic hierarchy as it had been known.
The growing interest in landscape painting could not be halted, how- ever. Indeed, in 1869, the Academic began to grant, albeit privately, a new prize in this genre. Every two years the Prix Troyon (contributed by the mother of the great animal-painter Constant Troyon) was to be awarded to a worthy artist. Now, however, there were no iconographical stipulations — neither a theme nor figural staffage of any kind was required. Pure landscape, already a success with both patrons and artists, was finally given official sanction. By 1868 Zola, in a review of the Salon of that year, could pro- nounce definitively that "classical landscape [was] dead, murdered by life and truth."'
During the nineteenth century, as has been mentioned, a great many French artists took to the out-of-doors. They chose to render unidealized views of what lay before them, in the hope of capturing, in a casual way, the genius of a specific place. In this sense they opposed themselves to the formal- ity of their more traditionally inclined predecessors. No longer concerned with depicting scenes which took place in ancient Greece and Rome, they chose specific places in France as their sites (fig. 10).
This nationalistic interest in specific locales was developed initially by Millet, Theodore Rousseau, Corot, Daubigny, Courbet, and others. But, al- though these painters tramped the uncultivated woods to the southeast of Paris (map 3) and the rough rocks of the English Channel (map 4), they were urban men, seeking what they believed the cities could no longer offer. They were men who found themselves in an increasingly mechanized world — art- ists who grew up and lived in a period when industrialization was making its greatest advances. In effect, their retreat from the urban centers, especially Paris, to a world uncontaminated by suburbanization, railroads, and the gen- eral development of industry was in every sense an escape to what they be- lieved to be a better world (see above, II). In the end, then, just as with history painting's artificially composed, self-contained, and intellectually self-refer- ential views of the Roman Campagna peopled by mythological or historical figures, French landscape painting at mid-century also sought to represent a golden age on canvas, but one of the relatively recent national past (fig. 11).
As plein-air painters, the Impressionists were most like Corot and Daubigny in the way they sought to depict the landscape they discovered having stepped off a train, coach, or boat. The conciliatory nature of Corot's
56
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
Map 4. Paris and Environs.
and Daubigny's paintings — unlike the more confrontative modes ot Courbet and Millet — proved attractive to the Impressionists of the 1860s and '70s. Although the sense of preoccupation with the landscape was the legacy of the entire Barbizon group, in the areas of composition and overall mood only the complacent appearance and desultory atmosphere of certain paintings by that school were acceptable to, and adopted by, the new generation. On a technical level, however, Courbet's work was also of interest; his technique of thick impasto applied with a palette knife also influenced Monet, Pissarro, Cezanne, and — in a more limited way — Sisley and Renoir, most of whom Courbet met in person in the 1860s.
Corot and Daubigny contributed in other than philosophical ways to the artistic formulation of early Impressionism. Corot's early attempts to resuscitate the classical compositions of Dughet and Claude, though trans- formed by him by the 1850s into a peculiarly personal idiom, were admired by the Impressionist painters. Daubigny sought to aid them through his per- sonal connections with the artistic establishment. In addition, the freedom with which his own later works were executed reveals a painter of an older generation in sympathy with younger artists.
Overlaid onto the Barbizon artists' rigid compositions, interest in di- rectly observed nature, and heavy use of impasto and palette knife were the recent researches of Jongkind and Eugene Boudin into an even more pro- found pictorial literalism. Combining these elements with an intensified pal- ette of pure color, the Impressionists consciously prepared the way for some- thing totally new. However, the melancholy which pervades their early pictures betrays a tinge of emotionalism which they seemed able to eradicate only gradually. Their interest was in reducing the subjective interpolation of
THE FRENCH LANDSCAPE SENSIBILITY
S7
Fig. 11. Corot, Forest at Fontainebleau,
1847. Oil on canvas. 90.5 x 129.5 cm.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photo:
Museum of Fine Arts.
the moods of man onto his surroundings, in eliminating the reflection of human feelings m nature seen, for example, in works by the Barbizon painter Diaz (fig. 12). They took the Barbizon landscape, then, and cleared it of its more overtly Romantic associations, of its subjective morality. They brought to it a degree of objectivity that had existed before only in sketches painted directly from nature. These are the most significant differences between the Impressionist landscape and its predecessors.
The art of the Barbizon painters had sought to rally aesthetic forces to protest the disappearance of untouched nature and the decline of the "noble peasant" as a result of the industrialization and urbanization of France. The Impressionists, on the other hand, as we have seen (see above, II), found only beauty and wonder in those aspects of modernization that were totally alter- ing urban and rural life. The Impressionists accepted with equanimity man and his physical effect on the landscape. For example, although one of Monet's first paintings. Landscape ivith Factories (1858-61; Private Collec- tion, Paris) is a small depiction of a factory, just a few years later he was painting the Saint-Simeon farm near Honfleur (a favorite site in Normandy of the Barbizon painters) with the same degree of interest and a similar degree of detachment (nos. 4-6). Because man and his works were thought of as an integral part of nature, they were considered equally worthy of depiction.
Monet's work at Honfleur serves to remind us that, in spite of the considerable philosophical differences between them and the Barbizon art- ists, the Impressionists' early sites were the very same ones which the Bar- bizon painters had begun to frequent in the 1840s and '50s. Tourists and Parisian weekenders had discovered them as well (see above, II). By the time Monet (fig. 13), Frederic Bazille, Sisley, and Renoir had followed Courbet, Daubigny, and Jongkind to the Normandy coast, Sainte-Adresse, Le Havre, Trouville, and Etretat had been so developed for tourism that the press could poke fun at their current state. Henry James, as Parisian correspondent to the
58
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
Fig. 12. Narcisse Virgile Diaz de la Pena (French, 1807-1876), Landscape, c. 1850. Oil on canvas. 31.7 x 41.9 cm. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photo: LACMA.
New York Tribune, wrote on August 26, 1876, of the crowded beaches on the coast of Normandy: "From Trouville to Boulogne is a chain of what the French call bathing stations, each with its particular claim to patron- age....each weans you from the corruptions of civiHzation, but. ..lets you down gently upon the bosom of nature.'"* In this description of Etretat, James hit on the very reasons for the continuous middle-class flight from the city.
Urban dwellers also sought the virgin forest of Fontainebleau and the small towns of Barbizon, Marlotte, and Chailly-en-Biere that edged its bor- ders. Although artists had come to the forest as a refuge from city life early in the century, by the 1860s it had become a seasonal retreat for all. Hotels and inns existed in every hamlet to absorb the myriad urban visitors. So common, in fact, had the escape to Fontainebleau become that, hke the beaches, it could be mentioned in print as an instandy recognizable tourist refuge. The tourist in Fontainebleau became a common topos in contemporary literature. Flaubert's L'Education sentimental has its hero, Frederic Moreau, take the demimondaine Rosanette to Chailly-en-Biere and Marlotte, with guidebooks in hand, to check off the trees and views described. In fact, the two tourists even espy a painter in a blue smock beneath a tree, presumably capturing his motif on canvas.
While the earlier generation of landscape artists had come to Nor- mandy and Fontainebleau to depict the French landscape for the first time, in isolation, and as an escape from the city, the Impressionists came not to dis- cover the new, but to record the known; not alone, but as part of a crowd. While it is true that in the 1870s and even in the '80s they sought to render specific places under specific conditions, by 1892 — in the words of the critic Georges Lecomte — they had begun gradually to "[withdraw] themselves from reality and [make] compositions far from nature, in order to realize a total harmony."' This is not so very far from Castagnary's 1863 definition of naturalism, which embraced a group of artists who had turned almost exclu-
THE FRENCH LANDSCAPE SENSIBILITY
S9
Fig. 13. Monet, View of the Coast at Le
Havre, 1864. Oil on canvas. 40 x 66.5 cm.
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Photo:
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
-yv^^:^*:^^.
sively to painting landscapes that dealt in no way with the social, psychologi- cal, or political problems of the day. "^ The Impressionists had absolved them- selves of the responsibility to illustrate or to use representational color laid over a perspectival foundation of whatever sort (see below, III/8).
The elimination of the historical, the anecdotal, and the sentimental from Impressionist pictures of the 1870s and '80s does not mean that these artists were iconographically indifferent, however. Just as with the lack of finish, it was the effrontery to established expectations about a given genre that caused critics to be outraged and the public to be scandalized over the exhibition of their paintings (see below, IV). The Impressionists' lack of con- cern for the highly finished and varnished surfaces of Academic paintings, as well as their disregard for traditional subject matter, were viewed as an attack on the forms of art that the government — through the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Salon — condoned and, more importantly, supported. In its efforts to save traditional painting with identifiable subject matter and slick surfaces, which was created in amazing quantity (there may have been over 100,000 pictures produced during the second half of the nineteenth century), the State took a position of opposition to Impressionism, although, given the artists' fitful record of Salon acceptances, this opposition, while vocal, was not of a single mind. Even at the end of the century, there were those who still la- mented the popularity of the new landscape painting. Philippe de Chenne- vieres, Conservateur at the Musee de Luxembourg from 1863 to 1873, lived in anticipation of the passing of the plein-air school of Monet and the rest. The great landscape tradition of the past, he wrote in a letter to the landscape painter Charles-Frederic Henriet, eventually would be revived and France would see a return to expression, invention, and composition in art — charac- teristics which, he felt. Impressionism lacked.^ Plein-air painting as practiced
60
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
by Monet and the other Impressionists finally did succumb to the passage of time. But the new school of landscape painters looked back less to the past of Henriet and de Chennevieres than forward in the spirit of the avant-garde.
— S. S.
Notes
1. L'Artiste, 1836, p. 25.
2. Castagnary, 1892, vol. 1, pp. 2-48.
3. Zola, 1959, p. 133.
4. James, 1952, pp. 198,200.
5. Lecomte, 1892, p. 58.
6. Castagnary, 1892, vol. 1, pp. 105-106, 140.
7. Henriet, 1896, pp. xvii-xviii.
THE FRENCH LANDSCAPE SENSIBILITY 61
1. Claude Monet
Beach at Honfleur
(Le Bord de la mer a Honfleur),
1864-66
In the summer of 1864 Monet and Bazille set off from Paris by steamboat down the Seine for Honfleur on the Nor- mandy coast where Monet's parents, residents of Le Havre, had a summer house at Sainte-Adresse (nos. 4—6). Soon after their arrival, Bazille wrote to his mother from the rooms they had rented in the center of Honfleur:
It took us a whole day to get here because on the way we stopped in Rouen [to see the Cathedral and the Museum].. ..As soon as we got to Honfleur we looked around for landscape subjects. They were easy to find because this country is a paradise.'
Beach at Honfleur was begun very late in the summer after Bazille had re- turned reluctantly to Paris to pursue his medical studies. Monet stayed on, con- tinuing to meet and work with Boudin and Jongkmd. This painting of the Cote de Grace with its distant view of the Hos- pice lighthouse and the hospital of Honfleur may actually have been painted with Jongkind in attendance — a view of this same site can be seen in two watercolors by him, one of which is dated September 6, 1864 (Mr. and Mrs. James S. Deeley, New York, and Private Collection). Of all Monet's paintings of the harbor, jetty, and town of Honfleur executed during this period, however, Beach at Honfleur is the only depiction of this particular view. More than 20 years later, Seurat chose the same site for a landscape (Alfred Beattv Collection, Dublin).
It is probable that Monet began his painting from nature, but there is no doubt that it was worked up later in the studio. The carefully applied, short, loaded strokes of paint that so success- fully capture the flickering coastal light and enliven the entire surface of the can- vas make it clear that the picture was completed in a comfortable environ- ment. In fact, in Bazille's painting (Pri- vate Collection, France) of the studio he shared with Monet until January 1866 at 6, rue de Furstenburg in Paris, Monet's Beach at Honfleur may be the picture shown in the center of a wall of figure studies and landscapes; however, the cloud formations, six silhouetted sail-
boats, and single figure (presumably a fisherman in a blue smock or blouse de travail, a kind of uniform adopted by workmen at this time) of Monet's fin- ished canvas are absent. This suggests that Monet may have brought Beach at Honfleur to completion some two years after he had commenced it.-
NOTES
1. The Art Institute of Chicago, 1978, p. 166.
2. Although D. Wildenstein (no. 41) accepts un- equivocably that Monet's painting is depicted here, one cannot rule out the possibiht)' that the work may have been by Bazille himself. That x\\o artists could choose to depict the same motif from the same point of view is shown over and over again in paintings by the Impressionists. This would not, however, nullif)' the argument presented here that Monet's painting was com- pleted later in the studio and not en plein air.
2—3. Edouard Manet
Departure from Boulogne Harbor
(Sortie du port de Boulogne),
1864-65
Moonlight over Boulogne Harbor
(Clair de lune sur le port de Boulogne), 1869
Boulogne on the north coast of France proved to be attractive to Manet as well as other Parisian tourists. His arrival there sometime during the summer of 1864 gave him the chance to experiment within the tradition of marine painting. Of all the pictures of this type that he completed. Departure from Boulogne Harbor seems the least dependent on reality. Although one could cite the strong influence of Japanese prints evi- dent in the picture's high horizon line and flat, smooth application of paint, a comparison of this painting with Manet's other marine subjects almost leads one to believe that the painting is either a sketch or simply a canvas record- ing his experiences away from the actual- ity of the site. Departure from Boulogne Harbor may have been the painting ex- hibited at the 1865 Salon (as no. 8) or in 1867 (as no. 40, Vue de mer, temps calme). Its total abstraction provides lit- tle visual evidence of Manet's trip to Boulogne, however. As with The Battle of the Kearsage and the Alabama (Phila- delphia Museum of Art), which was ex- hibited at the dealer Cadart's shop in Paris in July 1864, it is unclear whether Manet painted Departure from Bou- logne Harbor from life.
62
A DAI' IN THE COLINTRY
No. 1. Claude Monet
Beach AT HoNFLEUR, 1864-66
THE FRENCH LANDSCAPE SENSIBILITY
63
No. 2. Edouard Manet
Departurje from Boulogne Harbor, 1864-65
64
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
No. 3. Edouard Manet
Moonlight over Boulogne Harbor, 1869
THE FRENCH LANDSCAPE SENSIBILITY
65
The painting's horizontality is em- phasized by the relatively unmodulated blue-green of the calm sea, which oc- cupies three-quarters of the picture sur- face. The black boats with their cor- responding black sails add an ominous note to the seemingly straightforward scene. Through these various sailboats, a strange, apparently ironclad vessel powered by steam chugs diagonally up across the painting's surface, leaving a whitish-green wake which creates the only sense of movement into depth on the canvas. This picture carries the art- ist's disregard for traditional perspective to extremes; the painting is, in fact, with- out time or place.
A more realistic picture, albeit a portentious and mysterious one, is Moonlight over Boulogne Harbor of 1869. Manet had returned to the coast in this year, staying for two to three months at the Hotel Folkstone near the quay. From his window on the second floor of the hotel he recorded the day's activities; his subjects ranged from the Departure of the Folkstone Boat (Philadelphia Museum of Art) to this depiction of the local fishmongers whose white bonnets are illuminated by the moonlight as they prepare the night's catch for the morning market. The black shapes of the dock workers and fishermen are silhouetted, like the masts of the ships, against the brightly lit horizon. Although Manet was certainly inspired by the events seen out of his window, this scene was most certainly observed through a "filter": his experience of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings such as the fantastic nocturnal scenes of Aert van der Neer, a picture by whom Manet himself once owned.
4. Frederic Bazille
Beach at Sainte-Adresse
(La Plage a Sainte-Adresse), 1865
5-6. Claude Monet
Terrace at Sainte-Adresse
(Terrasse a Sainte-Adresse), 1867 The Beach at Sainte-Adresse (La Plage de Sainte-Adresse), 1867
Bazille and Monet came to Honfleur not only because of Monet's filial devotion, but because the great Barbizon painters
had come to work at this very place: the Saint-Simeon farm outside Honfleur and its surro.unding woods, coasts, and towns. Bazille's Beach at Sainte-Adresse was based heavily on Monet's painting of the same site (1864; The Minneapolis Institute of Arts) and was conceived, along with a landscape of Saint-Sauveur (Bazille's father's farm near Mont- pellier), as overdoor panels in response to a commission from the artist's uncle, M. Pomie-Layrargues, for his house in Montpellier. To render his view of Le Havre, the next town along the coast south of Sainte-Adresse, Bazille simply enlarged Monet's painting at the right and reduced its highly reflective light to a rather more sober one created by a lowering sun; the sense of scale which Monet found so difficult to capture is here brought into harmony. However, unlike Monet, Bazille did not paint sur le fnotif, that is, at the site; his painting was based on Monet's smaller picture and undoubtedly was executed in the studio. In fact, on the left over the stove niche in Bazille's painting of that studio can be seen a landscape painting by himself which may have been placed there to inspire him in creating these room decorations.
Monet returned in the summer of 1867 to Sainte-Adresse — the vacation haven of the bourgeoisie of Le Havre and of tourists from Paris — to visit his family and to paint. Terrace at Sainte-Adresse depicts members of his family seated on the terrace above the English Channel. Monet's father is shown seated wearing a white straw hat and looking toward the sailboats and Le Havre two kilome- ters away. The horizon line is populated by all manner of seagoing craft: small boats with sails furled are seen close to the harbor and town, boats with full sails trimmed can be seen further away, and steamships and large rigged ships pass the Cap de la Heve on their way into the Channel. Seen in the lowering sun of a late summer day are the kinds of subjects Monet preferred to depict — the sea, the middle class at leisure (Sainte-Adresse had been "created" by tourism), and cul- tivated gardens (see below, III/6 and 8). As critic and collector Theodore Duret pointed out in 1878, in Monet's pictures "you won't find any cattle or sheep. ..still less any peasants. The Artist feels drawn toward embellished nature...."'
That same summer Monet depicted the beach at Sainte-Adresse just south of this terrace. The same three-sailed boat seen above the parasol held by Monet's distant cousin, Jeanne-Marguerite Lecadre, in his painting of the terrace has here come closer into Sainte-Adresse. Other pleasure boats with and without sails are shown both moored and in use. Monet has contrasted a group of local fishermen with a man and young girl seated at the water's edge and dressed in bourgeois fashions; undoubtedly they are tourists. The man watches some of the distant boats through a spyglass. Ho- tels can be seen at the left on the edge of the high ground before it slopes to the beach.
No site, no activity was too mun- dane for Monet to set down on canvas during these visits to his family during the summer months between 1864 and 1867.
Note
l.Nochlin, 1966, p. 30.
7—8. Frederic Bazille
Landscape at Chailly (Paysage a Chailly), 1865 The Forest of Fontainebleau
(Foret DE Fontainebleau), 1865
Bazille and Monet, while students (with Sisley and Renoir) in Charles Gleyre's Paris studio, spent the Easter holiday of 1863 in the forest of Fontainebleau in order to paint from nature. Exactly two years later, Monet returned to Chailly- en-Biere, one of the more important towns situated just at the edge of the for- est, southeast of Paris, a few kilometers from the smaller town of Barbizon. Sisley and Renoir were also in the vi- cinity, staying in Marlotte. Monet wrote to Bazille in Paris to join him. Bazille took the 59-kilometer train journey from the Gare de Lyon and joined Monet at the Hotel du Lion d'Or near Melun sometime at the very beginning of the summer. In the surrounding forest they painted in the open air. In fact, for Bazille it was the last time he would paint at Fontainebleau; his only plein-air paint- ings done after this were executed in the south of France, near his family's Montpellier estate (no. 79).
66
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
No. 4. Frederic Bazille
Beach AT SArNT*ADRESSE, 1865
THE FRENCH LANDSCAPE SENSIBILITY
67
No. 5. Claude Monet Terr,^ce at Saintt-Adresse, 1867
68
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
'.{Mirf t-noriir^'^ '
No. 6. Claude Monet
The Buch at Sainte-Adresse, 1867
THE FRENCH LANDSCAPE SENSIBILITY
69
Chailly-en-Biere and Barbizon are less than two kilometers apart on the western edge of the forest. Rousseau painted there in the late 1830s and by mid-century Charles Jacques and Millet had actually moved to the latter hamlet. Even today there are no railway lines to either town although they are both on an important post road from Paris. A visitor traveling by train to either place from the Gare de Lyon would disembark at Melun (45 kilometers from Paris) or Bois-le-Roi (51 kilometers from the city). In the immediate vicinity of both towns are two of the most popular of the sites so often recorded by landscape artists: the stand of oaks at Bas-Breau (with its famous Bodmer Oak) and the Gorges d'Apre- mont. Bazille and Monet knew these sites intimately, having seen them in paintings and having had with them their guidebooks by Claude-Frangois Denecourt and Joanne (see above, II), which provided (in handy octavo vol- umes) a point-by-point tour of the forest, with important landscape features indi- cated by blue and red markers. With these guides, and in the company of the various artists whom the two young men came to know there, Monet and Bazille saw and painted some of the major sites of the forest in the summer of 1865.
Landscape at Chailly and The For- est of Fontainebleau, then, represent Bazille's last artistic attempts to record the landscape of the He de France. And, as in his previous efforts, his debts to the great masters of the Barbizon landscape are evident. At this time Monet was working on studies for his large Lun- cheon on the Grass (Destroyed), with Bazille posing for several of the figures; the painting itself was completed in their Paris studio in 1866. Bazille's own con- cern was more with landscapes like those illustrated here as well as with a painting of Monet recuperating from an accident (Musee d'Orsay, Galerie du Jeu de Paume, Paris). It must have been particu- larly exciting for the artists to have Courbet come to watch them work as well as introduce them to Corot.
These two landscapes by Bazille rely less on the works of his acknowledged masters in the genre than on his own ability to capture the summer light as it played across the foliage and rocks of the
forest. In fact, Landscape at Chailly has the appearance of having been begun and completed totally sur le motif. It has all the informality and brilliance of a Co- rot sketch of 40 years earlier and reveals an artist of great confidence and ability, capable of carrying off a similar under- taking on a larger scale. The painting possesses the vibrant luminosity for which Monet had begun to strive the previous year at Honfleur. The Forest of Fontainebleau, on the other hand, reveals a constant awareness of a great Barbizon landscape formula which Bazille emulated. His palette here is dark, and the quality of flickering light is less insistent and certainly less dependent on reality than in Landscape at Chailly. Bazille's reliance on the work of Corot and Diaz is evident in The Forest of Fon- tainebleau. The two paintings together reveal an artist at a crucial moment, as he moves away with assurance in new, and as yet unexplored, directions from a dependence on his artistic ancestors.
9. Camille Pissarro
The Banks of the Marne in Winter
(BORDS DE LA MaRNE EN HIVEr), 1866
Critics of the Salon of 1866, in which this early river scene was shown, were struck, as we are today, by the mundane quality of the scene Pissarro had chosen to depict. The simple field, long road, and barren farm near his home in La Varenne-Saint-Hilaire on the Marne River (across from Chennevieres-sur- Marne) just southeast of Paris struck a particular aesthetic chord and prompted some favorable comment in the contem- porary press. Although the painting may have been finished in the Paris studio to which the artist had had access since 1864, by January 1866 Pissarro had moved with his family to La Roche- Guyon on the Seine just north of Paris, on the way to Rouen.
In spite of the fact that the 1866 Salon was the first in which Pissarro did not state his association with his teacher Corot and the Barbizon school, the painting obstinately betrays a debt to the latter. Corot's earlier dark palette as well as his extraordinary ability to create a
palpable yet inexorable framework for his landscapes are evident here. Al- though one can still feel a tension between the Barbizon painters' concern for the conveying of a particular mood (here quite naturally heightened by the season depicted), and Pissarro's belief (echoed by his Impressionist colleagues) in a totally natural and objective point of view, the balance is clearly tipping here in favor of the latter aesthetic. The paint- ing's power comes from Pissarro's on- going experience of the work of Courbet. But while the facture reveals the former's awareness of the latter's use of the pal- ette knife, it was combined here with the medium-reduced pigments of Daubigny in an attempt to achieve a flatness of stroke and effect combined with a sense of pure, but dull, color. To point out Pissarro's heritage, however, in no way mitigates his great originality even at this stage of his career.
10. Alfred Sisley
Avenue of Chestnut Trees at La Celle-Saint-Cloud (Allee de chataicniers pres de la Celle-Saint-Cloud), 1867
Sisley worked in his studio in Paris until 1870. The subjects of his paintings dur- ing this period show that he traveled and worked in and around the capital and the areas near the towns of Barbizon and Fontainebleau. His Avenue of Chestnut Trees at La Celle-Saint-Cloud was shown in the Salon of 1868. It was painted at La Celle-Saint-Cloud, six- and-a-half kilometers from Saint-Cloud to the west of Paris in the township of Marly-le-Roi. Situated between Bougival and Vaucresson on the Paris — Saint- Germain-en-Laye railroad line, the Allee de Chataigniers was considered the most interesting of the three woods which sur- rounded the tiny town of La Celle with its population of 560. When Sisley vis- ited the area to paint in 1866-67, the Allee was owned by Napoleon III (per- haps one of the reasons why Sisley was able to show his picture at the Salon in 1868).
By the early nineteenth century Saint-Cloud had become a very popular Parisian holiday refuge, easily accessible by train and steamboat. Paul Huet, one
70
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
No. 7. Frederic Bazille Landscape at Chailly. 1865
THE FRENCH LANDSCAPE SENSIBILITY
71
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No. 8. Frederic Bazille
The Forest of Fontainebleau, 1865
72
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
No. 9. Camille Pissarro
The Banks of the Marne in WrNTER, 1866 (detail on p. 52)
THE FRENCH LANDSCAPE SENSIBILITY
73
of the important artists associated with Barbizon, recalled that Saint-Cloud was "that enchanting place one talks about when in Italy."' The April 18, 1874, issue of La Vie Farisienne encouraged readers who liked long, beautiful walks in the country to visit the area as often as possi- ble. And, according to Augustus J. C. Hare's Days near Paris (1888), "true Parisians of the middle class have no greater pleasure than a day spent at Saint-Cloud."-
This painting shows Sisley's reliance on Barbizon artists such as Rousseau, Courbet, Diaz, and Daubigny. It was Daubigny who advocated Sisley's being approved by the Salon jury. Twenty-eight years earlier Rousseau had submitted a painting entitled Avenue of Chestnut Trees (Musee du Louvre, Paris) to the Salon of 1839, and it had been rejected. Although Rousseau's painting depicts the Chateau de Souliers near Cerizay in Poitou and not Saint-Cloud, the concep- tion of the two pictures is close enough to suggest that Sisley knew Rousseau's picture. The enclosing forest of full- leafed trees depicted by the former pro- vides a brilliant pattern across the entire surface of his canvas. The deeply satu- rated colors on a dark ground reveal his dependence on Courbet's landscapes of the early to mid-1860s, such as his in- numerable depictions of the Puits Noir. So, too, does the deer crossing the road at the center right — a motif which some of Courbet's new patrons demanded be included before they would purchase his pictures, in order to provide a focus or sense of relative proportions. Corot's painting of the same period as the Sisley work. The Sevres Road (1864; The Baf- timore Museum of Art), depicts a contig- uous site and also may have been an inspiration. Sisley's work, however, is much more timid than Courbet's; the former's technique relies less on the latter's palette knife than on Corot's later, more personal, liquid application of pigment, which allowed for few hard edges: one object effortlessly blends into another. Sisley's treatment never approx- imated Corot's lyrical fantasies, how- ever; his work remains impersonal and firmly wedded to the reality of the place depicted.
Notes
l.Miquel, 1962, p. 34.
2. Hare, 1888, pp. 11-12.
11. Alfred Sisley
Village Street of Marlotte (Rue du village a Marlotte), 1866
Although the training in landscape of Sisley, Monet, Bazille, and Renoir in Gleyre's Paris studio was limited and the studio closed down in March 1863 due to the master's ill health, the four men remained friends, traveling and painting together when they could find the time. In fact, in 1865 Renoir and Sisley went to Marlotte, a town of less than 100 peo- ple near Moret on the Loing River, just southeast of Fontainebleau, at the invita- tion of Renoir's friend Jules Le Coeur, who had a house there. Monet and Bazille went to Chailly-en-Biere at the very edge of the forest of Fontainebleau. The train from the Gare de Lyon would have taken under two-and-a-half hours to travel the sixty-five-kilometer dis- tance. Although there was no train to Marlotte, it was a short coach ride or walk from the Bois-le-Roi station to Chailly-en-Biere.
Marlotte and Chailly were not so far apart that the four men did not occa- sionally see one another. For example, Renoir recorded their dining together at mere Anthony's inn in a large painting, At the Inn of Mother Anthony (1866; Nationalmuseum, Stockholm). Renoir and Sisley remained in the area, spending the fall and winter of 1865 at Marlotte, after Bazille and Monet had returned to Paris. According to Joanne's guide, Marlotte was frequented almost exclu- sively by landscape artists. The Gon- courts described it as "the chosen birth- place of modern landscape."'
Village Street of Marlotte was one of Sisley's two entries for the Salon of 1866. A modest painting, it bears close relationships to works by the Barbizon painters that Sisley so admired, espe- cially those of Jules Dupre and Corot. Dupre's emotional attachment to his subject matter, however, seems to have been eradicated in Sisley's painting, which shows the beginning of a kind of objective detachment from the scene depicted. The gray-gold light of early fall reveals the starkness of a mundane cor- ner of the small village. Only the blue- smocked peasant chopping wood on the right breaks the stillness of the aban- doned street. Note 1. Goncourt and Goncourt, 1971, p. 73.
12. Eugene Boudin
On the Beach at Trouville (Scene de place a Trouville), i860
Although Boudin initially based his own paintings on those of the Barbizon paint- ers, whose work he exhibited in his fram- ing and stationery shop in Honfleur, he quickly found his own metier painting en plein air in and around the towns on the Normandy coast. He felt that landscape artists could achieve an honesty and "vividness of touch" only by "painting outside, by experiencing nature in all its variety, its freshness."' Combining this concern for the out-of-doors with a depiction of fashionable contemporary society, Boudin's beach scenes added a wondrous dimension to the expanding genre of landscape. In fact, the artist became rather sensitive, indeed defen- sive, about his chosen subjects:
...those middle class people who are stroll- ing the jetty at the hour of sunset, have they no right to be fixed upon canvas, to be brought to our attention. ..these people who leave their offices and cubbyholes?-
Boudin's On the Beach at Trouville encapsulates Charles Baudelaire's con- cerns for painting "modern life," dis- cussed at length in his article for Le Figaro, "Peintre de la vie moderne." For both the painter and the author moder- nity was "the ephemeral, the fugitive, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable."' In Boudin's paint- ings, all these aspects are combined with the verisimilitude in which the artist delighted. Here, chicly dressed middle- class people are enjoying a day at one of the great resorts on the Normandy coast. Boudin has enlivened the flat coastal set- ting, created in a facture finely filtered through the experience of paintings by Courbet, whom he had met and escorted around Le Havre the previous year. The horizontality of the beach and sky (which occupies three-quarters of the picture) is enlivened by a controlled dis- position of figures across its surface and by carefully placed patches of pure color. The whites, blues, and reds of the figures provide a lively counterpoint which ani- mates the canvas in a way totally unique to Boudin.
Notes
l.Rewald, 1980, p. 38.
2. Ibid.
3. Baudelaire, 1970, p. 13.
74
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
No. 10. Alfred Sisley
Avenue of Chestnut Trees at La Celle-Saint Cloud, 1867
THE FRENCH LANDSCAPE SENSIBILITY
7S
No. 11. Alfred Sisley
Village Street of Marlotte. 1 866
7e
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
No. 12. Eugene Boudin
Os THE BtACH AT TrOUVILLE, 1860
THE FRENCH LANDSCAPE SENSIBILITY
77
The Cradle of Impressionism
THE Seine winds in long, meandering loops west of Paris, skirting the hills at Sevres and pushing into the Parisis plains near the village of Asnieres. It then swoops back to Argenteuil and runs a straight course until it arrives at Bougival, where it bends again, discouraged by the rising terrain that runs from that small town to Saint-Germain-en- Laye. Nestled in these softly contoured hills are the villages of Bougival, Louveciennes, and Marly-le-Roi (map 5).
The landscape in and around these villages was truly the cradle of Impressionism. Here, in the summer of 1869, Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro worked together for the first time at rendering the same outdoor view and began to forge the shared, informal, plein-air aesthetic of Impressionist land- scape painting. If — as Arnold Hauser and many students of the movement have long maintained — Impressionism was an urban art form, born around the tables of the Cafe Guerbois in Paris during the second half of the 1860s, it was in the suburban countryside west of the capital that the notions of mod- ern painting discussed in Paris were first tested. The place names of this re- gion— Bougival, Louveciennes, Voisins, Port-Marly, Saint-Michel, and Marly-le-Roi — appear over and over in the tides of the paintings we have come to associate with the beginnings of Impressionism.
Monet moved to Bougival with his mistress, Camille Doncieux, and their son, Jean, in June 1869. Renoir spent that summer in nearby Ville- d'Avray, a favorite locale of Corot's, but came frequently to visit both Monet in Bougival and his own mother and grandmother, who owned a house at 1 8, route de Versailles in Louveciennes. The two painters worked together inten- sively during September, when their great series of landscapes of the Seine along the He de Croissy were painted (nos. 13-14). It is possible that Monet
79
Map 5. Bougival, Port-Marly, and Environs, i- fi^e&.
and Renoir had come to this region to join Pissarro, who may have moved from Pontoise — where he had hved for several years — to Louveciennes as early as the fall of 1868, but who was definitely in residence by May 1869 (fig. 14). The Pissarro family rented part of a large house called the Maison Retrou at 22, route de Versailles, and Monet stayed with them during Decem- ber 1869, when he and Pissarro worked together just as Monet and Renoir had done earlier (nos. 15—16). Sisley may have visited them that winter and definitely moved to a house on the rue de la Princesse in the hamlet of Louve- ciennes called Voisins in the summer or early fall of 1870. In the end, of all the painters Sisley was the most faithful to this area. Renoir was there scarcely more than a month, and Monet left after less than six months. Pissarro lived in Louveciennes for nearly a year and a half, but Sisley returned again and again from 1870 until at least 1878. For this reason, the majority of the paintings in this section are by him.
Why did the Impressionists come to this particular area? The villages southwest of Paris near the forest of Fontainebleau had been claimed long before by the Barbizon school. Chintreuil and a group of his friends had colo- nized the charming, hilly region near Igny and Bievre, southwest of Paris. Daubigny had moved to Auvers, northwest of the capital, where he was vis- ited by Daumier, Corot, and many others. And Corot and his students had claimed the landscape just west of Paris near Ville-d'Avray, Sevres, and La Celle-Saint-Cloud. Indeed, landscape painters tended more often than not to colonize the countryside in groups, as if to guard themselves from "the na- tives," and the Impressionists were no exception. For this reason, the land- scapes painted by them around Bougival and Marly have a collectivity of both style and subject.
The Impressionists' reasons for their choice of sites were never clearly
80
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
stated, but it is not terribly difficult to guess what the attractions of this Fig. U. Pissarro, Winter Landscape, 1869.
particular area would have been. First, Bougival is only 17 kilometers from O'' °n canvas. 38.3 x 46.3 cm Walters Art
\ • 1 • J J ij 1 ■ u • -.u- TA - i ™ Gallery, Baltimore. Photo: Walters Art
the capital — indeed, one could reach it on the train within liJ minutes rrom q^]^^/
the Gate Saint-Lazare. Second, it was well known enough among mid-cen- '-
tury landscape painters — particularly Celestin Francois and Charles-Fran- Fig. 15. Renoir, La GrenonHlere, 1869. Oil qois Nanteuil — that one could feel comfortable working there. And third, it on canvas. 66 x 81 cm. Nationalmuseum, was already famous. Gerard de Nerval had extolled its charms as early as Stockholm. Photo: Nationalmuseum. 1855 in his Promenades et souvenirs, saying that, by living in nearby Saint- Germain-en-Laye, "one has the resources of the city, and one is almost com- pletely in the country."' And Emile de La Bedolliere, in his famous book Histoire des environs de nouveau Paris, published in the early 1860s with illustrations by Gustave Dore, treated the town of Bougival as an artists' colony, mentioning the hordes of artists and writers who "come together each year in Bougival."-
In 1867, just two years before the arrival of Monet and Renoir, the novelist Victorien Sardou was asked to contribute an essay on the environs of Paris to a vast guidebook, Paris Guide par les principaux ecrivains et artistes de la France, which was published in connection with the "Exposition Uni- verselle" in Paris during 1867. His offering, entitled "Paris en Promenade — Louveciennes, Marly," commenced with this resounding paragraph:
Are you an intrepid hiker?... Does the bright sunshine invite you into the fields? And do you want to get to know the most picturesque and the richest region in all the environs of Paris, one [that is] justly praised? If so, get up early in the morning and go to Bougival, and, after a big lunch on the banks of the river, proceed to Marly-le-Roi by the road through Louveciennes, the route of schoolboys.'
There are countless ways in which Sardou's delightful text leads us directly "into" the Impressionist paintings we know so well today. Certain phrases, sentences, and even entire paragraphs evoke the landscapes of Sisley, Pissarro, and Monet, almost as if Sardou's prose was written after — rather than before — the pictures were made. Particular roads — the rue de la Princesse on which Sisley lived and from which he painted so many land- scapes, for example — are mentioned lovingly by Sardou. The painters almost seem to have been illustrating his observations of the river's banks, of the
THE CRADLE OF IMPRESSION'ISM
81
^vft^
'^:>^5fb
Fig. 16. Jules Pelcoq (French), At La Grenouillere, n.d. Woodcut from Le Monde
illnstre, 1868.
play of light and shade along a hillside, and of the houses on the slope near Louveciennes. Pissarro's Vietv of Loiiveciennes (1869; The National Gallery, London) could be coupled with the following passage from Sardou's text:
On one side, grape arbors; on the other, a hollow abounding in greenery; in front, houses lost in the foliage. ..and, crowning it all, the beautiful arcades of the aque- duct, which give the landscape a grand, Italian air. In sum, the most wonderful arrival in the country that one can find! Wherever you turn your eyes, the lines of the terrain fold in harmonious undulations with the most beautiful contrasts of light and foliage. Everywhere there are space, fresh air, country smells, and the great silence made up — I don't know how — of a thousand sounds that result from the freedom of the sky, the vigor of the wind, the calls of the birds,. ..all of which tell you clearly: "Here is a true village! You can enter.. .take off your clothes if you are hot. ..sing if you are happy.. .you will offend no one in this place!""*
This very freedom and the ease of living in such places as Bougival, Louveciennes, and Marly clearly appealed not only to the Impressionists who spent time in these places, but also, as we have seen, to their countrymen who came from Paris for the summer, a weekend, or the day (see above, II). In fact, these charming villages were not simple rural settlements, but rather subur- ban communities in which many Parisians owned country residences and from which others commuted to work on the train and omnibus. Their inhabitants were not — strictly speaking — villagers; they were not traditional peasants, small shopkeepers, or farmers. Indeed, much of the real estate in this region was owned by absentee landlords who had little expectation of economic gain from this ownership and who possessed either large country residences with considerable grounds or small houses perched precariously on small parcels of land. Statistics indicate clearly that such people swelled the villages durmg the summers and on weekends while the population of permanent residents of Bougival, for instance, actually declined from 2,316 in 1868 to 2,086 in 1878." The "weekenders" hired local people as servants and companions, and some of them owned small restaurants or commercial
A DA-l IN THE COLTNTRY
Figs. 17-19. Henri Bevan (French, b. 1825), The Machine de Marly; Aqueduct at Louveciennes; Pool at Marly, all 1870. Albumen prints from glass negatives. Each 12.5 X 16.5 cm. Private Collection, Paris. Photos: Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
THE CRADLE OF IMPRESSIONISM
83
businesses. There was also a considerable population of truck gardeners who provided fruit and vegetables on a small scale to the Parisian gentry as well as to the central markets in Paris, Les Halles. In the very diversity of their econo- mies and their dependence upon urban civilization, these suburban villages were quite different from the "peasant" villages around the forest of Fon- tainebleau or in the Vexin plains near Auvers painted by members of the school of Pontoise (see below, III/5).
The two most important — and most often represented — sites in the landscape around Bougival in the mid-nineteenth century were the Seine around the restaurant called La Grenouillere near Bougival (no. 14) and the park of the ruined Chateau de Marly at Marly-le-Roi (see above, II). Each of these sites was a powerful symbol for Frenchmen — the first, of the possibility of unrestrained "rural" leisure made accessible by train travel (fig. 15), and the second, of the greatness of the French past. La Grenouillere was men- tioned in every Second Empire and early Third Republic (1870-1940) guide to the environs of Paris as a delightfully noisy — and more than occasionally rowdy — place to eat, swim, boat, and drink that was both inexpensive and easily accessible from Paris. La Grenouillere literally floated on the Seine, and one could rent boats and small bathing houses in which to change clothing and enjoy oneself. Popular prints roughly contemporary with the period of the Impressionists illustrate the charms of the place. For example, one from the mass-circulation periodical Le Monde illustre of 1868 (fig. 16) shows a group of rather vulgar — and probably somewhat drunk — people cavorting in the water near the restaurant. Another, from the Illustrated London News of 1875, is somewhat less satirical and indicates clearly that the fame of this small place had already spread to England. La Grenouillere was among a handful of places around Paris that were known to practically everyone who lived there; it was the Moulin de la Galette of the suburbs.
The most notable aspect of La Grenouillere during the nineteenth cen- tury was its immorality. It was a place in which people from various social classes could meet in utter anonymity, unafraid of the prying eyes of friends or neighbors. For that reason, and because of the quantities of alcohol con- sumed and the rounds of dressing and undressing before and after swimming, La Grenouillere came to be associated with prostitution and loose morality, as the prmt from Le Monde illustre makes clear. The lengthiest and most fascinating proof of this association is a vivid, if somewhat prim, passage from Maupassant's novel La Femme de Paul:
One senses there, even through one's nostrils, all the scum of the world, ail the most distinguished riffraff, all the moldiness of Parisian society: a melange of pretenders, ham actors, lowly journalists, gentlemen guardians, worm-eaten speculators, debauchers, decayed bon vivants; thronged among all the most sus- pect of people, partly known, pardy lost, partly acknowledged, and partly dishon- ored, crooks, petty thieves, purchasers of women, captains of industry with distin- guished airs, who seem to say: "Anyone who treats me like a rascal will get busted!"
The park of the Chateau de Marly, the favored country retreat of Louis XIV, was the opposite of La Grenouillere in every way, at once grander and quieter. Praised most fervently in the nineteenth century by Sardou, the park had been designed by Le Notre in the late seventeenth century as part of the great aquatic system that brought water from the Seine up the hills by way of the tnachine de Marly, a series of huge water wheels only just rebuilt
84
A DAY IN THE COLINTRY
by Napoleon III (fig. 17), through the aqueduct also designed by Le Notre at Louveciennes (fig. 18) to the great storage pools at the Chateau de Marly (fig. 19). These eventually fed the fountains of Versailles. The chateau and its numerous outbuildings had been destroyed during the Revolution, and nine- teenth-century visitors to the park walked through a silent, deserted land- scape which spoke as poetically of the failure of the aristocracy as of its bril- liance. The massive Baroque garden scheme lent a distinctly aristocratic character to the landscape around Port-Marly, Louveciennes, and Marly-le- Roi. The route de Versailles, on which both Pissarro and Renoir lived, for example, had been designed as a royal road for the carriages which took the court from Saint-Germain-en-Laye to the Chateau de Marly and on to Ver- sailles. Its straight, tree-lined character was at odds with the crooked paths and huddled roofs of the village of Louveciennes, which it passed. The aque- duct, painted by Pissarro and Sisley (The Aqueduct of Marly [1874; The To- ledo Museum of Art]), dominated the landscape from Bougival to Saint- Germain-en-Laye. Thus the paintings by Pissarro and Monet of the route de Versailles (no. 15) and by Sisley of the machine de Marly, the aqueduct, and the pools at Marly-le-Roi (no. 21) are unimaginable without Louis XIV and his planners (see above, II).
The album of an important amateur photographer, Henry Bevan, who lived in Louveciennes in the 1860s and '70s, casts an interesting light on the subject matter of paintings made at precisely the same moment by the Impressionists (see below, V). Called Photographies, Louveciennes et Bougival par Henry Bevan, the album, made in 1870 and still in the collec- tion of Bevan's family in France, was a private attempt to record all aspects of the landscape in and around which another family, the Mallets — to which Bevan was related by marriage — and their friends maintained large country properties. In many ways Bevan was an archetypal "new" inhabitant of the Louveciennes region. He was wealthy, having recently married one of the heiresses to a banking fortune; he lived in a large compound owned by his wife's family in the newly built-up region near the Place de TEurope in Paris; and he commuted on weekends back and forth to Louveciennes. He had learned to photograph in the 1850s and was already an excellent technician when he began his series of photographs of the "cradle of Impressionism." He certainly knew the great photographic critic Francis Wey, who also kept a
Figs. 20-21. Bevan, Residence of Horace Mallet; The lie de Croissy: La Grenouillere, both 1870. Albumen prints from glass nega- tives. Each 12.5 x 16.5 cm. Private Collec- tion, Paris. Photos: Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
THE CRADLE OF IMPRESSIONISM
85
Figs. 22-23. Bevan, Port-Marly; Banks of
the Seine, both 1870. Albumen prints from
glass negatives. Each 12.5 x 16.5 cm. Private
Collection, Paris. Photos:
Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
house in Louveciennes and had written perceptively about landscape photog- raphy in the 18505." It is unlikely that Bevan knew any of the Impressionist painters personally — he was wealthy enough that his circle would most probably not have overlapped with theirs. Yet he surely saw them as he prowled through the landscape they were painting in search of photographic motifs. What is surprising, therefore, is the extent to which "his" Louveciennes and "theirs" differed.
Bevan's photographic album begins with — and had its social roots in — the country residence of his father-in-law, the great banker Horace Mal- let (fig. 20). Dominating its immense, exotic gardens on a slight rise, the mas- sive, commanding dwelling of three floors had a large, recently built addition. Later plates in the book show its gardens, beautifully clipped and main- tained, and the country residence of Bevan's sister-in-law. Mile. Mallet, who owned a slightly less imposing dwelling with its own garden and a wonderful orangery. Then come two photographs of the superb garden of a M. de Bourrevilles. Fully eight of the twenty-eight landscape photographs in this book represent the private properties of wealthy landowners from Paris.
Clearly, this is not the kind of landscape subject painted by the Impres- sionists. Indeed, Sisley, the only painter who did include several of the large country properties of Louveciennes in his painted landscapes, usually showed them as they could be seen from public roadways, sitting comfortably in the middle grounds of their landscapes.^ In the end, one must conclude that there was a social and economic gulf between the photographer Bevan and the Impressionist painters, his exact contemporaries, and that this gulf in itself caused their differing responses to the same landscape. The walled gardens of the haute bourgeoisie were not open to the Impressionists in those years.
Bevan did wander outside the carefully maintained compounds of his family and friends, however, and, on these wanderings, made landscape pho- tographs of sites that could equally have been — or that were — painted by the Impressionists. For example, he photographed La Grenouillere, perhaps the only site depicted by the photographer, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, aitd Sisley. But Bevan's carefully labeled view (fig. 21) shows us the restaurant from the Bougival side of the river, and we see it as merely one element in a spacious river landscape. It was the river that was important to Bevan, not La
86
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
Grenouillere, and he made a number of other photographs of the Seine that demonstrate this interest (figs. 22-23). These photographs come closer to the paintings of the Impressionists than any others by Bevan and provide evidence of the deep affection for the national river that was shared by them all (see above, II, and below, III/4).
In spite of this particular rapprochement, the photographer's and the painters' landscapes of the Seine are different in every way. Bevan, like many good tourists of his day, traveled with guidebook in hand and was interested in significant historical monuments. He lovingly photographed the churches at Louveciennes and Bougival (fig. 24), both of which were virtually never portrayed by the Impressionists (see above, II), and carefully documented the remains of the great park of the Chateau de Marly. This latter landscape, historically the most important in the region, was practically ignored by the Impressionists. In the end, the vast majority of Bevan's photographs have an "important" subject which embodies his own values — wealth, religion, and commerce. The Impressionists persistently avoided such motifs, implicit or explicit, preferring to follow the lead of painters like Corot and Daubigny and to search out beauty where one would least expect to find it. Their early landscapes pamted in the "cradle of Impressionism," diverse as they seem, are almost aggressively ordinary, and they are as important for what they omit- ted as for what they contain. More often than not, the painters denied the motifs photographed by Bevan in their early paintings, turning their own backs to them (no. 21), screening them behind trees (nos. 13, 19, 72), or simply organizing compositions so that they are just to the left or right of the view included in the frame (nos. 59, 63-64, 69) — a view that is intentionally mundane.
— R. B.
Fig. 24. Bevan, Church in Bougival, 1870. Albumen print from glass negative. 12.5 x 16.5 cm. Private Collection, Paris. Photo: Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
Notes
1. See de Nerval, 1855.
2. de La Bedolliere, early 1860s, p. 85.
3. La Croix (ed.), 1867, vol. II, p. 1455.
4. Ibid., pp. 1456-1457.
5. A.Joanne, 1881, p. 167.
6. In the Bulletin of the Societe Fran^aise de Photographic and in La Lumiere.
7. There is only one case of correspondence between the country-house photographs of Bevan and the landscape paintings of the Impressionists, and that involves a photograph by Bevan called Luciennes, Property of M. de Bourrevilles and a painting by Sisley entitled The Duck Pond at Louveciennes (1873; Private Collection). Although their compositions are different, their subjects and points of view are the same. Perhaps Sisley was given permission to enter the park of M. de Bourrevilles to paint a landscape that IS otherwise unique in his oeuvre. We can feel secure in saying that Bevan knew M. de Bourrevilles and that his photograph was made as a record of their social connections.
THE CRADLE OF IMPRESSIONISM
87
13. Claude Monet
The Bridge at Bougival
(Le Pont de Bougival), 1869
Monet seems already to have been paint- ing in Bougival by June 1869. The first of his Bougival canvases to be sold, The Bridge at Bougival is among the largest, most traditionally composed landscapes he painted during 1869—70. For his mo- tif, Monet chose the small bridge from the He de Croissy in the river to the town of Bougival that had been inaugurated on November 7, 1858 (fig. 6). He con- centrated his attention less on the archi- tecture of the bridge itself than on the spatial relationship between the unpaved road across the bridge to the town be- yond and the road leading down to the river. One would have seen such a land- scape at the end of a day at La Grenouil- lere, just as one was returning to Bougival to catch the train to Paris.
The composition of this painting was conceived along strictly geometric lines and relates, in this way, to such ear- lier paintings as the Terrace at Sainte- Adresse (no. 5). The painting is divided in half both vertically and horizontally, and the horizon line was placed exactly one third of the distance from the bot- tom of the painting. The trees, fences, and figures were each carefully posi- tioned to make the space of the land- scape totally legible. This composition has its most important antecedents in the paintings Corot made at nearby Ville- d'Avray,^ and one can point to any of a number of examples known to Monet. Perhaps the closest is the famous Yille d'Avray, The House of Cabassud (1865— 70; Musee du Louvre, Paris), but even this comparison reveals the extent to which Monet was more insistent in his application of rigid structural principles.
Like many landscapes which record the humble sites of the He de France, this one has no true subject. Monet was care- ful to balance the various elements of the landscape so that one would not domi- nate the others and did not include a sin- gle historically important form. Indeed, he positioned himself so that the spire of the church in Bougival, the only archi- tecturally remarkable form in the land- scape (fig. 24), was screened by the trees. In his de-emphasis of this church, an important local monument, Monet not only projected his own ideolog>' onto the landscape, but also indicated clearly that
he was not interested in creating a topo- graphical picture dependent upon an architecturally unique building to give it a "sense of place" (see above, I— II).
Monet sold this picture in 1870 to the dealer pere Martin, who supported both him and Pissarro; it was not pub- lished until 1921 nor exhibited until 1949 (see below, IV).
Note
l.Seitz, 1960, p. 82.
14. Claude Monet
Bathing at La Grenouillere
fL£s Bains de la Grenouillere), 1869
Monet worked actively with Renoir (fig. 15) on a group of paintings of La Grenouillere during August and Septem- ber. Monet himself referred to the two he did as "miserable sketches,"' in spite of the fact that he signed them (probably later) and that one of them (The Metro- politan Museum of Art, New York) was in the collection of no less a connoisseur than Manet. This latter painting has long been an icon in the history of Impres- sionism and has been published in- numerable times m juxtaposition with Renoir's painting of the same subject (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm). Both these compositions are centered on a cir- cular swimming platform known as "Le Camembert" and connected both to the shore of the He de Croissy and to the floating restaurant.
Unlike The Bridge at Bougival (no. 13), the subject of Bathing at La Grenouillere is essentially without precedent. There are no major pictures by Corot, Daubigny, or Courbet that re- late to it, and it comes closest icono- graphically to beach pictures painted by Monet's teacher and mentor, Boudin, on the north coast (no. 12). Both Monet and Boudin approached the subject of bathing with a fair degree of primness and from a distance.
This painting has a considerably more informal and aaive composition than its counterpart in New York. Painted from the restaurant platform it- self, it shows a raised wooden walkway in front of which is a delightful still life of rowboats waiting to be rented and behind which are changing rooms, also for rent. Again, as was most often the
case during the Bougival period, Monet divided the composition vertically and horizontally into halfs and thirds, and important forms were anchored to this structure (no. 13). In this way, the world's constant flux — of reflections, moving boats, jostling figures, and rus- tling trees — is held in check, and there is a sense of activity arrested and con- trolled by the artist (see above, I). There are many parallels between the depictions of La Grenouillere in popular prints and Monet's paintings, parallels which indicate that the prints (fig. 16) acted as a collective — if indirect — source for both his and Renoir's render- ings. However, the boldness and rigor of Monet's touch as well as the strongly geometric division of the picture surface are his own, and his pictures of the float- ing restaurant can be contrasted in every way with those of Renoir. For the lat- ter— as for the popular illustrators of the time — the "landscape" of La Grenouillere was essentially a "human- scape," a populated realm in which the artist gave himself over fervently to the description of moving figures. Whereas Monet's thickest, most confidently applied painted marks represent streaks of light reflected in the water or glisten- ing on the wet sides of wooden boats, Renoir's brush lovingly caressed his fig- ures. Anonymous as they are, they have their own actualits- which transcends the landscape in which they move; none are mere staffage figures. On the other hand, Monet's figures merely participate in the spectacle of a lighted landscape, a land- scape without a hierarchy of forms to be interpreted by the painter. The world of bourgeois leisure was painted by him as a unified, vibrating field, as the "field of vision" so often discussed in contem- porary texts about light and human sight. In fact, one thinks less of popular illustrations when one confronts these paintings by Monet than of the lyrics of a famous popular song about Bougival quoted by de La Bedolliere:
Of the sun, of the air, of the water
That God brings me
In this luminous picture
In which my view is full,
I always see
Green fields in front of a blue sky.-
NOTES
1. Wildenstein, 1974-79, vol. I, p. 45.
2. de La Bedolliere, early 1860s, p. 87.
\ DAY IN THE COLINTRY
No. 13. Claude Mcnet
The Bridge at Bougivai^ 1869 {detail on p. 78)
THE CRADLE OF IMPRESSIONISM
89
15. Claude Monet
Versailles Road at Louveciennes —
Snow
(Route A Louveciennes — effet de
NEICE), 1869-70
Monet made two paintings of the route de Versailles in the winter of 1869-70 while staying with the Pissarro family. Their house is clearly visible in this, the more important of the two composi- tions, as the large dwelling on the left side of the street. The Pissarros rented part of this house between the autumn of 1869 and the outbreak of the Franco- Prussian War, at the beginnmg of which they fled from the environs of Paris to safety in Brittany. Pissarro himself worked on several paintings of the street during the same winter. One composi- tion closely related to Monet's Versailles Road at Louveciennes — Snow, and with the same title (Walters Art Gallery, Bal- timore), was purchased from the dealer pere Martin by the Baltimore collector George Lucas in January 1870 (see below, IV). This suggests that Monet's painting might also date from the last months of 1869. In fact, it may record the great snowstorm of 1869 which took place in December and was written about voluminously in the newspapers. Record snowfalls and cold temperatures caused many deaths and forced closure of the Seine in certain sections. This painting, which records the effects of that winter on a "royal road" lined with large and comfortable houses, is less an image of desolation than one of comfort and domesticity in the midst of winter.
Literature about the origins of the Impressionist movement in the region of Bougival and Louveciennes customarily has stressed the importance of the rela- tionship between Monet and Renoir at La Grenouillere in the summer of 1869 while downplaying or even dismissing the important relationship between Pissarro and Monet later in that yean This superb canvas makes it clear that both friendships were equally beneficial and significant. Pissarro's major land- scapes from the years before 1869 are strongly composed village scenes painted at midday. Great as they are, they reveal the artist's debt to Corot and to the clas- sical landscape tradition in which the careful arrangement of forms rather than
the evocation of forms in time (or weather) is of paramount importance. Monet, on the other hand, had learned from Boudin and Jongkind the secrets of a kind of landscape painting in which time — of the day, of the seasonal cal- endar— played across and changed the forms of nature. Here, he seized the mo- tif of the street with a directness and simplicity that recall his earlier Rue de la Bavolle at Honfleur (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). Yet in Versailles Road at Louveciennes he painted snow — what Renoir was later to call "the leprosy of nature"' — as it received and reflected the dull light of a winter day. The picture is alive with pinks, mauves, pale yellows, and manifold beiges, all of which Monet manipulated to enliven the whites and mixed off-whites of the snow itself.
While Monet was working on this canvas and the related Road at Louveciennes, Fallen Snow, Sunset (1874; Private Collection), Pissarro began a series of paintings of the same road — at different times of the day, in different seasons, and from different directions — that illustrates clearly the effect of his friendship with Monet. Al- though not conceived to be exhibited as a group, Pissarro's canvases were the first careful e.xamination of the temporal structure of a "constant" landscape in the history of art. It is surely no accident that these landscapes about time are cen- tered not on a building, a tree, or a hill, but on a road, along which passed the men, women, and children of Pissarro's dav. This series represents a landscape seen in passing, and it might be said that it would not have been executed had it not been for Monet, who gave his older colleague the necessary push to make him a true Impressionist landscape painter.
Note
1. Rewald, 1980, pp. 341-351.
16. Camille Pissarro
Landscape at Louveciennes (Autumn) (Le Paysace aux environs de Louveciennes [Automne]), 1869-70
This monumental landscape was prob- ably begun in 1869, shortly after Pissarro moved to Louveciennes and established close contact with Monet.
The painting was finished in 1870, per- haps before Pissarro's departure for Brit- tany in July and his eventual trip to Eng- land in December. Both the composition and the patchy, rugged facture indicate that he had just seen such paintings by Monet as The Bridge at Bougival (no. 13) and even the pair of paintings of La Grenouillere (no. 14). When seen in con- trast to the village landscapes of similar dimensions that Pissarro had painted during the previous two years at Pon- toise, this picture appears both more complex and more informally struc- tured. Gone are the rectangular areas of paint that interlock to form a rigorous geometry. Instead, walls, roofs, win- dows, leaves, furrows, manure, plants, figures, and paths are woven together to form a closely modulated texture of overlapping brush strokes. It is as if Pissarro had been released from an aes- thetic prison by his exposure to the work being done by Monet and Renoir, and, in spite of the fact that his desire to struc- ture his painting geometrically remained, it was mitigated in this monumental, decidedly Impressionist canvas by an abandoned recording of a "field of vi- sion" with all its complexity and richness.
Pissarro's motif in this painting is a group of kitchen gardens behind a row of small mid-nineteenth-century houses on what was then called the rue des Creux and is today the rue du Marechal Joffre in Louveciennes. Little more than a village path along which humble dwellings had been constructed since the seventeenth century, the rue des Creux contrasted in every way with the royal route de Versailles, which ran roughly parallel to it and on which the painter lived (no. 15). Where the latter was a wide, paved artery linking Louveciennes with Marly-le-Roi and Versailles, the former was unpaved, unimportant, and without a destination other than the fields themselves. It linked Louveciennes only with the land. Pissarro could reach the site of this landscape after a three- minute walk from his own house down the small path visible at the front of the painting, then, as now, called the rue du Pare de Marly.
Unlike Monet and Renoir, Pissarro retained a dogged affection for the tradi-
90
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
No. 14. Claude Monet BATHrNG AT La Grenouillere, 1869 (detail on pp. 2-3)
THE CRADLE OE IMPRESSIONISM
91
'4k
No. 15. Claude Monet
Versailles Road at Louveciennes — Snow. 1869-70
92
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
No. 16. Camille Pissarro
Landscape at Louveciennes (Autumn), 1869-70
THE CRADLE OF IMPRESSIONISM
93
tional landscape of the rural poor, the majority of Louveciennes' year-round residents. He did not depict the imposing country residences of the nouveau riche — pictured in the distance in works by Sisley' — nor are we given a glimpse of the palatial summer houses built by the aristocracy throughout the region during the eighteenth century, the most famous of which was the chateau built by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux for Mme. du Barry in the hamlet of Voisins. Here, in- stead, we see a simply dressed woman, if not a peasant then a housewife or ag- ricultural worker, in the midst of an utterly mundane landscape. She is carry- ing a bucket and chatting with a young boy — her son? — dressed as a rural la- borer, but carrying his school satchel over his shoulder. While we can easily imagine that she inhabits one of the humble dwellings in the background with her husband and family, the satchel of the boy, tiny and discreet as it is, refers to education and to the expanding lit- eracy— and ambition — of France's rural youth. While Pissarro was celebrating rural France, Monet and Renoir were painting their glorious celebrations of urban leisure at La Grenouillere (no. 14; fig. 15). Although the difference between these two modes may appear to be im- mense, both were equally important components of early Impressionism. The boy's satchel is as powerful a symbol of modernity and freedom as Monet's floating restaurant.
Note
l.Daulte99, 100, 144.
17. Camille Pissarro
Wash House at Bougival
(Le Lavoir, Bougival), 1872
This richly detailed view of the Seine at Bougival has traditionally been titled Le Lavoir, Pontoise and has been thought to be a representation of the smaller Oise River near the town of Pontoise, to which Pissarro moved in the late spring of 1872. In fact, comparison with firmly documented pictures by Sisley' as well as with contemporary photographs of the Seine at Bougival by Bevan (see above, III/2) make a correct identification of the site possible. The misidentification, triv- ial as it might appear, is significant
because this painting reveals the indus- trial aspect of modernization in this re- gion, an aspect missing from most paint- ings of the area by Pissarro's colleagues. Even Sisley, who painted exactly the same landscape three years later (no. 23), omitted the smokestack from the small factory at the left, as if to de-emphasize the building's industrial nature.
Wash House at Bougival makes an explicit visual comparison between handwork and the work of machines. The composition is centered on a float- ing washing facility in the Seine where local women would pay a minimal sum to wash their clothes directly in the river. Presumably, the woman leaning on the tree at the left of the painting is waiting her turn, and her presence, as well as her direct gaze at the viewer, gives greater reality to the hand labor of the silhouet- ted women already in the washing facility. Directly behind them and further along the river is a small factory with its chimney smoking discreetly, and behind it, the village of Bougival. It is autumn or winter; the trees are bare and the barges move slowly up the river under the unmodulated light of a gray day. If this pamting has a subject, it is the delicate balance between man and machine in a changing landscape, recorded with im- mense concentration and refinement.
The painting is startling when one considers that it does represent Bougival, but not the Bougival of Sardou, of the painter Fran^ais (see above, III/2), or of Monet and Renoir. It is difficult when looking at the picture to realize that La Grenouillere (no. 14) was no more than 100 yards from this landscape, on the right. Indeed, Pissarro, in his only painted representation of the restaurant (traditionally called The Oise at Pontoise [1872; Location unknown]), included it only as a flimsy building at the right of a balanced composition, the other half of which was dominated by the same fac- tory we see at the center of Wash House at Bougival. Neither 'of these paintings shows us a landscape that conforms to any common notions of rural beauty, nor do they express clearly the modern, na- tionalist desires of Pissarro's France (see above, II). That they were made before and after the disastrous days of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune,
respectively, tells us that certain of Pissarro's anxieties about the modern world played the role of social and aes- thetic constants in his work during a period of rapid political change.
Note
l.SeeDaulte 159-160.
18. Camille Pissarro
Landscape near Louveciennes (Paysage, Louveciennes), c. 1875
Although traditionally dated 1875 and called Paysage a Pontoise, this picture was painted near Louveciennes, prob- ably in 1870, but possibly during Pissarro's second campaign in that re- gion during 1871 and early 1872. Its facture and its palette, which tends toward browns and greens, bear little relationship to those of Pissarro's paint- ings of 1875, many of which were painted with a palette knife and have bright, high-keyed palettes. Although the group of farm buildings chosen as the central motif of Landscape near Louveciennes has not been identified, and the resolute flatness of the site makes it difficult to place near that town's hilly environs, three paintings securely datable to Pissarro's Louveciennes period represent the same buildings.' Of these. Landscape near Louveciennes is closest to the awkwardly titled Path in the Field ivith a Garden Gate at the Right (1871; French and Company, New York).
As we have already seen, Pissarro's representations of this region, in their frank acceptance of the traditional rural landscape, contrast with those of his col- leagues. However, this painting, centered on a collection of farm buildings prob- ably built earlier in the century, is not strictly bucolic. Indeed, Pissarro has included a construction site in the fore- ground of the picture where a new build- ing, perhaps a country house, perhaps another farm building, is being built. His insertion of this image of change undercuts the viewer's easy, pleasurable response to the rural landscape as a re- treat from progress and urbanism.
Note
1. Pissarro and Vcnturi 83, 126, 190.
94
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
No. 17. Camille Pissarro
Wash House at Bougival, 1872
THE CRADLE OE IMPRESSIONISM
95
No. 18. Camille Pissarro
Landscape near Louveciennes, c. 1875
96
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
No. 19. Alfred Sisley
First Snow at Louveciennes, c. 1870-71
THE CRADLE OF IMPRESSIONISM
97
19. Alfred Sisley
First Snow at Louveciennes (Premieres Neices a Louveciennes),
C. 1870-71
If this picture was in fact painted during the winter of 1870 in Louveciennes, it re- lates closely to the famous winter land- scapes of the same region by Monet and Pissarro. The earliest of these were most likely begun late in 1869 (no. 15) and finished in 1870. We know, however, that Sisley moved to Louveciennes dur- ing the Commune, and it is more likely that this painting was made in the winter of 1870-71 with Monet's and Pissarro's earlier landscapes in mind. It is even pos- sible that Sisley saw the many paintings by Pissarro left in his house in Louve- ciennes when his family fled hastily to Brittany m 1870 (see above, III/2). Yet whatever its true relationship to the win- ter landscapes by his friends, First Snow at Louveciennes is among the most mas- terful works in this genre of the early 1870s.
For his motif Sisley chose the small road called the rue de la Paix, which led into the village of Louveciennes from the hamlet of Voisins, where he lived. There are no remarkable buildings included; indeed, the bell tower of the small church at Louveciennes is screened by the trees at the left (see above, 1II/2). This land- scape, like those already mentioned of Monet and Pissarro, is a celebration of what was, in fact, a small road which was "enlarged" by Sisley to cover most of the picture's foreground. The humble seventeenth- and eighteenth-century stone and stucco buldings of the village huddle in a picturesque jumble at the end of the road. Only the clearly articulated plane of the house at the left gives strength to the middle ground. There is a delicate tension created by the contrast between the densely concentrated village and the spreading, spacious arcs of the road; the composition invites us to look at a small village from the perspective of the world "beyond" it.
20. Alfred Sisley
The Seine at Bougival
(La Seine a Bougival), 1872-73
"Totally accessible as it is, you will leave unwillingly the banks of the river [at Bougival], so charming, so luminous, so
verdant...."' Sardou, who wrote those delightful words in his 1867 guide to Paris and its environs (see above, 111/2), surely must have been describing the part of the Seine painted early in the 1870s by Sisley. In this and another ver- sion of the composition (National- museum, Stockholm), Sisley painted the river in one of its few unspoiled reaches near Paris. Here, there is nothing but water, trees, and sky. No boats ruffle the placid waters. No newly built country houses disgorge noisy swimmers and boating parties into the water. The river is even tranquil enough that water plants grow along its banks at the left. This river-scape harks back to those of Dau- bigny, who worked near and far away from Paris on scenes of equivalently e.x- quisite natural beauty.
It is difficult to imagine when look- ing at this painting that the Seine near Bougival was actually a busy waterway, along which hundreds of barges and steamboats passed on their way to the increasingly industrialized river ports of Argenteuil, Courbevoie, and, of course, Paris. Just behind Sisley, as he faced the He de Croissy looking downstream, was not only the town of Bougival with its barge-filled banks, but also the great machine de Marly (fig. 17). Knowing its location, a Parisian of Sisley's day would have found this intimate and bucolic painting all the more poignant because of the fragility of the landscape it depicts in contrast to the liveliness of that upon which the artist turned his back.
Note
1. La Croix (ed.), 1867, vol. II, p. 1455.
21. Alfred Sisley
Watering Place at Marly
(L'Abreuvoir de Marly), 1875
The tiny town of Marly-le-Roi was Sisley's territory. Avoided by Monet, Re- noir, and even Pissarro, it clustered around the edges of the great Pare de Marly (see above, III/2). Although Pissarro lived no more than a ten-minute walk away from Marly-le-Roi, if he went there, he failed to paint it. On the other hand, there are at least 30 paintings of the town recorded in the Sisley literature, and others will undoubtedly come to light.
Marly-le-Roi was important less for its appearance in the last half of the nine- teenth century than for its history. The many guidebooks to the environs of Paris written in the second half of the nineteenth century make it clear that one visited Marly-le-Roi not simply because it was charming, but because it was the site of the Chateau de Marly. Both Sardou and Joanne expatiated in elegant prose upon the life of the court there during the seventeenth and early eigh- teenth centuries and contrasted that world with the charming, but humble, village which managed to survive after the court left. Sardou, after describing Le Notre's brilliant gardens at the height of their glory, made this contrast perfectly clear by stating: "One single pool from the side of the second parterre remains: the women from Louveciennes and Marly come there to wash their clothes".'
It is just that pool that Sisley painted in Watering Place at Marly. His painting is not a royal landscape, nor is it a nostal- gic look at a great architectural ruin in the midst of its decadence. Rather, it is a celebration of the ordinary beauties of the He de France on a fresh, cool summer day. Surrounded by an unpaved road which swoops into the foreground, the pool dominates the left half of this and another landscape of 1875 by Sisley (The Pool at Marly, Snow [Private Collec- tion]). It is most emphatically not the central motif of the landscape. Indeed, Sisley was just as captivated by the clouds, the light playing on the white plaster houses, and the shadows that dappled the road as he was by the remains of the great pool itself. Because of its historical importance, most visitors to Marly would have preferred to view the pool from the town, looking into the forest of the Pare de Marly, as Sisley him- self did while painting in the dead of winter in 1875.- More frequently, how- ever, he turned his back on that charm- ing and verdant landscape, choosing in- stead a view which exuded a maximum amount of nervous energy- as light played actively across many diverse forms.
Notes
1. La Croix (ed.), 186"^
2. Daulte 152, 154.
1464.
98
A DAY IN THE COLIKTRY
r
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h^^A^U',
No. 20. Alfred Sisley
The Seine AT BouGivAL, 1872-73
THE CRADLE OF IMPRESSIONISM
99
.■i^it
No. 21. Alfred Sisley
Watering Place at Marly, 1875
100
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
No. 22. Alfred Sisley Streetin Louveciennes, 1872-73
THE CRADLE OF IMPRESSIONISM
101
22. Alfred Sisley
Street in Louveciennes
{La Route a Louveciennes), 1872-73
Sisley either retained for a long period the house he rented in Voisins in 1871 or rented it repeatedly for several years after that. (Because he rented the prop- erty, his name was never registered in the official cadastral records, and it is there- fore impossible to trace his movements exactly.) It is difficult to fix his undated paintings of the area in time because he, like Pissarro, returned to his motifs through the years. Street in Louve- ciennes has traditionally been dated to 1875 because of its relationship to another landscape, A Street in Louve- ciennes at Evening Time (Private Collec- tion, Paris), depicting the same motif that was signed and dated in that year by Sisley himself. However, the carefully controlled facture and tightly ordered composition suggest a date earlier in the decade, perhaps nearer to the time when Sisley first moved to the Louveciennes region.
One of the artist's favorite motifs in the 1870s was the rural cafe or restau- rant. This picture represents the Cafe Mite in Voisins very near the painter's house. Sisley painted this restaurant from the other direction in 1874 {A Road in Louveciennes [Private Collec- tion, Paris]) and it has been identified by Daulte as the painter's home for several months of that year.' His decision to paint such buildings repeatedly has clear precedents in seventeenth-century Dutch art, in which rural inns and taverns were frequently chosen as the locus for land- scape compositions. Numerous passages in both rural guidebooks and publica- tions about landscape painting by writ- ers from Alfred Sensier to Henriet cele- brated the food and conviviality of rural inns. Landscape painters lived, ate, and drank in such places, often decorating the walls as payment to a generous owner. A day in the country was not complete unless one dined well at an inn, generally for a price significantly lower than at a comparable restaurant in Paris.
Note
1. Daulte 149.
23. Alfred Sisley
The Seine at Port-Marly, Piles of
Sand
{La Seine a Port-Marly — tas de
sable), 1875
This commanding landscape was painted at nearly the same place on the river where Pissarro had stood to paint Wash House at Bougival three years ear- lier (no. 17). The building to the far left of this composition is the factory — with its smokestack omitted — on which Pissarro had centered his composition. Sisley painted two other landscapes from the same spot in 1875,' one of which includes the smokestack.
The Seine at Port-Marly, Piles of Sand is rare among Sisley's landscapes — indeed, among Impressionist landscapes in general — in its attention to the dredg- ing of the Seine. More than any other Impressionist, Sisley was fascinated by the complexity of river life. Less inter- ested in pleasure craft and their pas- sengers than his friend Monet (nos. 39- 43), Sisley preferred to render the eco- nomically important boat life of the Seine — from ferries to flat barges and motor tugs. In this painting the shipping lanes in the middle of the river are being dredged by men in small boats; the piles of sand at the side of the river were intended for sale to building contractors and gardeners. The poles in the river were used to tie the boats as they arrived from the dredging area, and the men working in the boats in the middle ground of Sisley's painting are lowering buckets into the river. Interestingly, these boats are not markedly different from the rowboats available to be rented for pleasure in the foreground of Monet's Bathing at La Grenouillere (no. 14); this may indicate that such craft had varying seasonal uses. A contemporary land- scape photograph by Bevan (see above, III/2) also includes the piles of sand (fig. 23).
As if to mitigate against our "read- ing" this painting as a simple document of river life, Sisley chose a brilliant and unusual palette. In fact, it may have been the bright, almost turquoise color of the water as it contrasted with the yellow- beige of the sand that attracted Sisley to
the subject initially. Yet, for all its beauty, this is a difficult landscape, in which we can observe a pre-industrial working population struggling to control the river and keep it navigable. The painting proves very clearly that pictures of this region, the cradle of Impressionism, must be understood as pictorial medita- tions upon the modernization of France (no. 16).
Note
1. Daulte 177-178.
24. Alfred Sisley
The Seine at Port-Marly
(BORDS DE LA SeINE A PorT-MaRLy), 1875
Sisley painted this unproblematically ru- ral landscape on the banks of the Seine near Port-Marly, where he went many times in 1875 and 1876. The small boat in the foreground of this picture is filled with sand dredged from the Seine in order to keep its channel open for the extensive commercial barge traffic between Le Havre and Paris. On the basis of this motif the picture could al- most be paired with the identically sized Seine at Port-Marly, Piles of Sand (no. 23), where similar boats negotiate the river. In fact, it is likely that The Seine at Port-Marly was painted from a spot very near that at which Sisley stood to paint the other picture. Instead of directing his attention down the river here, to render it as a spacious highway of water, Sisley adopted a planar compositional strategy, representing a group of farm buildings on the island running down the center of the Seine between Bougival and Port- Marly. The viewer seems almost to be floating, and the painting can be inter- preted as a stable view perceived from a watery vantage point. Thus it has prece- dents in Daubigny's Boat Trip (1862) and in many paintings by Monet made from his floating studio at Argenteuil (nos. 39-43).
This composition calls to mind the opening pages of Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale, in which the young hero pursues the alluring Mme. Arnoux on a boat to Paris, observing all the while the inaccessible beauties of the traditional
102
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
4
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ip^-
i
i^-
No. 23. Alfred Sisley
The Seine at Port-.Mablv, Piles of Sand, 1 875
THE CRADLE OF IMPRESSIONISM
103
landscape. Like Flaubert, who preferred bourgeois subjects, even in the provinces, Sisley rarely painted such a completely rural subject as this detached farm, gravitating instead toward suburban landscapes with country houses, rural paths, orchards, and outdoor res- taurants.
Interestingly, The Seine at Port- Marly was signed and dated twice by Sisley. When he finished the painting he signed it at the lower right corner. After- wards its first owner, Comte Doria, had it placed in a smaller frame, probably to pair it with another painting of slightly narrower dimensions. At this point Sisley re-signed the painting so that his signature would appear clearly to the viewer.
25. Alfred Sisley
The Versailles Road, Louveciennes {La Route de Versailles), 1875
As we have seen, the route de Versailles, a popular motif of Impressionist paint- ings, was constructed as part of Le Notre's vast scheme for transporting water from the Seine to the gardens of the Chateau de Marly and, eventually, Versailles (see above, III/2). By 1700 the road had become the major route connecting the town of Port-Marly with Versailles. It was heavily traveled throughout the nineteenth century, and both Pissarro and Renoir lived on it for short periods of time. There are Impres- sionist representations of virtually all aspects of the road: houses, trees, rural inns, and travelers seen from every imag- inable viewpoint in every season and at many times of day. Indeed, the route de Versailles is to the Impressionist iconog- raphy of roads what the Seine is to its iconography of rivers (see above, II and below, III/4).
In this gentle summer landscape Sisley chose to emphasize the enormous chestnut trees which bordered the route de Versailles at irregular intervals. Originally lined on both sides with trees, the road was heavily built up in the 1800s, and many of them were cut down to be replaced by dwellings. In the paint- ing two majestic trees tower over the tiny
inhabitants and the informal group of houses in the middle ground. Their fo- liage, pruned to prevent lateral growth which would impair the view of the road, seems almost to tremble in the breeze of a hazy day.
26. Alfred Sisley Flood at Port-Marly
(LTnondation A Port-Marly), 1876
Flood at Port-Marly is the largest — and finest — of three identically composed versions of this subject, the first of which, identically titled (Private Collec- tion, Paris) was painted in 1871—72. The chance to make architecture appear to dissolve by surrounding it on all sides with atmosphere and water was clearly irresistible to Sisley, and, after experi- encing the flooding of the Seine in 1872, he returned to Port-Marly for a pro- tracted period in 1876. In that year, not only did he paint six landscapes repre- senting the flooded river, but he also painted the landscape before the flood- ing commenced (as if to form a narrative sequence).
What is fascinating about these paintings is that they are so peaceful. The viewer feels none of the danger or despair of a real flood and is, instead, captivated by the play of light in the sky and water that surround the Restaurant a Saint-Nicolas. The flood seems almost a usual occurrence, as if it were taking place in Venice rather than suburban Paris.
Both the calm and the clarity of Sisley's flood landscapes can be con- trasted in every way with paintings of the same subject by French artists of the pre- vious generation. The most famous example, Huet's Flood at Saint - Cloud (1855; Musee de Louvre, Paris), was purchased by Napoleon III for the Musee de Luxembourg and was there- fore widely available for study. Sisley's mundane, but poetic, flood paintings, like those by Pissarro (for example. The Inundation, Saint-Ouen-l' Aumone [1873; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston]) lack the dramatic intensity of their iconographical prototypes in Romantic art.
104
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
No. 24. Alfred Sisley
The Seine at Port-Marly, 1 875
THE CRADLE OF IMPRESSIONISM
105
No. 25. Alfred Sisley
The Versailles Road, Loitveciennes. IS. 5
106
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
No. 26. Alfred Sisley Flood at Port-Marlv. 1876
THE CRADLE OF IMPRESSIONISM
107
.^^Y
The Urban Landscape
LA Vie Parisienne, an operetta by Jacques Offenbach, opened to re- sounding popular success at the Palais Royal on the eve of the "Ex- position Universelle" of 1867 (see above, II). Both operetta and exhibition celebrated what was then known as the "new Paris." The libretto of La Vie Parisienne, by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halevy, was an inspired inventory of the city's charms, extolling in verse her boulevards, parks, cafes, theaters, monuments, and, of course, her river, the Seine. One of the operetta's characters, a former servant, takes advantage of the "Exposi- tion Universelle" to become a guide to Paris. "It is my business," he announces, "to take foreigners 'round the city and show them all the beauties of the capital." 1
In fact, all Paris was "on show" in the second half of the nineteenth century. The series of well-timed industrial exhibitions (fig. 25) was designed to reveal "new Paris" to the world at large. Writers Victor Hugo, Sand, Du Camp, and Michelet, among others, sang the city's praises in the Paris Guide of 1867; Manet, the arch-modernist, devoted a special canvas to that year's exposition (fig. 25). During this period the Impressionists investigated the physiognomy of "new Paris" in a sweeping series of canvases.
What was "new Paris?" As we have seen, the ancient capital of France was essentially rebuilt during the 1800s under the direction of Baron Haussmann (see above, II and below, III/3). Its population swelled with a stream of provincial and international immigrants, more than tripling between 1800 and 1870. The near suburbs were annexed to Paris in 1860.- Sanitary services were improved, and a comprehensive urban plan was creat- ed during the Second Empire. Hundreds of thousands of buildings were sys-
109
tematically demolished to make way for the tree-lined boulevards which formed a transportation network resembling the neat allees in classical French gardens (see above, II). The major monuments of Parisian civiliza- tion— the Hotel de Ville, Notre-Dame, the Tour Saint-Jacques, and even the Louvre (no. 84) — were detached from the fabric of the cir\', redesigned and rebuilt to serve as symbolic links between the glories of the French past and her modern destiny. Indeed, Offenbach's La Vie Parisiemie was set in a shift- ing city. Both photographs (see below, V) and popular illustrations of the period reveal the extent of the destruction necessitated by the sweeping trans- formation which led to the creation of "new Paris."
In the midst of this supremely transitory cit}', the Impressionists seized upon those aspects that were utterly novel. Their Paris was truly an urban landscape, a mechanical and impersonal world in which the background predominated over the figures. Ignoring the narrow and tortuous streets of the old cit\', the traditional Paris celebrated in prose by Hugo and Balzac and in images by Corot, Honore Daumier, and Charles Meryon, the Impression- ists set their easels in the windows of newly constructed hotels, or apart- ments, and made paintings of railroad stations (nos. 30—32), boulevards (nos. 33, 35), and parks (no. 84). Their city was grand and enormous, less a set of intersecting neighborhoods than a sweeping landscape inhabited by multitudes of people. The changing seasons in this landscape were indicated by the trees which lined the boulevards and filled the parks.
The urban landscape of the Impressionists, like their suburban land- scape, had its own peculiar geography. The painters were obsessed with cer- tain areas and ignored others. They painted the streets and boulevards around the Gare Saint-Lazare, combed the banks of the Seine, and moved around the Louvre and its garden, the Tuileries. They climbed the hills of Montmartre and the Trocadero (no. 27) to gaze on the c\t\ as it stretched along the vast plain created by the Seine. Their landscape therefore had rec- ognizable centers, and, for all its scale and grandeur, the Paris they depicted was only a small portion of the actual cit\-. It was confined almost exclusively to the Right Bank and especially to the city's northwest quadrant. While the greatest small parks — the Tuileries and the Pare Monceau — were lovingly painted by Manet, Monet, and Pissarro, the sublime Pare aux Buttes Chaumont, landscaped by Adolphe Alphand and set m a large working-class area, was ignored by the Impressionists. While the Louvre was painted count- less times, Notre-Dame, the Arc de Triomphe, and the Place de la Concorde were avoided. Indeed, as was the case with the Impressionists' renderings of other locales in France, the tourist sites, the places marked prominently in each guidebook, are conspicuous for their absence in the Paris the artists painted (see above, II and