The brush-strokes you can make with a fat brush are much more expressive. ibid.
Not a single picture survived the first Impressionist exhibition. ibid.
The outdoor art of the Impressionists – their most famous contribution to painting, the stuff we all know and love – was a bitch to paint. Waldemar Januszczak, The Impressionists: Painting and Revolution II: The Great Outdoors
The Impressionists were trying to be true to life. To paint things as they were. To make everyday life a suitable subject for art. Besides, when they started out most of them were famously poor. ibid.
The snow picture became an Impressionist’s speciality. ibid.
Traditional perspective was under attack. ibid.
The Impressionists staying indoors and watching the people was just as important as going outdoors and watching the landscape. Waldemar Januszczak, The Impressionists III: Painting and Revolution: Painting the People
Britain’s influence on Impressionism was crucial. ibid.
Painter after painter deliberately taking on the old masters ... All of them set out to prove that the modern world can be just as monumental, just as heroic and beautiful, as the ancient world. In the end it’s probably the most important of all Impressionism’s revolutionary messages: the present is just as precious as the past. Waldemar Januszczak, The Impressionists IV: Painting and Revolution: Final Flourish
Holland and the Dutch played a big role in the story of Impressionism. ibid.
The eighth Impressionist exhibition of 1886 which unleashed Seurat on the world and transformed Van Gogh turned out to be the last. ibid.
Who is the most mysterious and enigmatic painter I know? … People say Manet invented modern art. Waldemar Januszczak, Manet: The Man Who Invented Modern Art, BBC 2013
Manet’s most notorious picture – Olympia. ibid.
The man [Manet] was a rebel through and through. ibid.
Luncheon on the Grass inspired huge amounts of raucous laughter. ibid.
Impression Sunrise by Claude Monet: the picture which gave its name to Impressionism ... TV proof at last that Impression Sunrise actually shows a sunset. Waldemar Januszczak, The Art of the Night ***** BBC 2011
When one thinks of the Impressionists, one thinks of Paris or northern France. Not the gardens and landscapes of Connecticut, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. But there is a story to be told of American artists learning from a movement in Europe but making it very much their own, and very much reflective of America that at the end of the nineteenth century was undergoing enormous change. The Artist’s Garden: American Impressionism, Gillian Anderson, Sky Arts 2020
The Artist’s Garden: American Impressionism and the Garden Movement was an exhibition that originated at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and then travelled to here: the Connecticut Florence Griswold Museum. ibid.
What brings them together is their interests in gardens and painting outdoors. ibid. Anna O Marley, curator Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts
Gustave Caillebotte, whose personal works were forgotten until recently, was all together a recognized painter and a generous patron of the Impressionist movement.
He was born in 1848 in a very rich family which made its fortune in textiles industry then in real estate business as Baron Haussmann was rebuilding Paris.
Engineer by profession, but also former student of the Fine Arts School of Paris where he studied with Léon Bonnat, he met Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, and Pierre Auguste Renoir in 1874 and helped them organize their 1st group exhibition in Paris this same year ...
In 1875, as he wishes to make his public beginnings as a painter, he submitted a work to the Official Salon which was refused, thus encouraging him to exhibit in 1876, with the aid of Renoir, at the second exhibition of the Impressionist group. His works and in particular the The Floor Scrapers were noticed and appreciated. Consequently he will take part in the subsequent exhibitions of the Impressionist Group. Impressionniste online
Frédéric Bazille’s best-known work, Family Reunion (1867), was a leading example of what is now known as outdoor figural art. The painting was exhibited at the Salon, France’s exclusive state-run art show, in 1869. Family Reunion showed Bazille’s extended family at their country estate, Méric, and exemplified the artist’s use of color and adept depiction of human figures, both hallmarks of the Realist-Impressionist style. The painting was an example of the challenge that faced all Impressionists: how to reconcile traditional figure painting with an outdoor practice. Biography online
Frédéric Bazille’s dazzling paintings demonstrate his mastery of capturing the effects of sunlight on the landscape. In his greatest painting, Little Gardener, circa 1866, he combined both classical and romantic styles. Deep green leaves dance in the foreground, intensifying the impact of a woodland paradise. Ruffled by a light breeze, cheerful flowers evoke joyous emotions, like the tranquillity of a spring morning. Bazille creates a charming scene of serenity and harmony while stressing balance and clarity of outline.
His unique style of painting is characterized by concentration on the overall impression produced by a scene or object and the use of unmixed primary colours and small brushstrokes to suggest reflected light. Bazille was an open air painter, observing nature directly and record fleeting atmospheric effects with his brush. He believed that light was inseparable from the object it illuminated, so to capture the light at a precise moment, he worked from direct observation. Bazille was not aiming simply to illustrate nature’s luminous lighting effects but was inclined toward a more individual interpretation that symbolized a deeper spiritual meaning. History of Painters online
Paradoxically, Gustave Caillebotte was the odd man out among the French Impressionist painters. This in spite of the fact that he was an enthusiastic and effective participant in the group’s activities, and made major contributions to its struggle for recognition and eventual success. Caillebotte not only exhibited his work in five of the group’s eight independent exhibitions held during the 1870s and ’80s, but also made financial contributions that made several of the exhibitions possible. The son of a wealthy manufacturer, Caillebotte was a key early patron of the Impressionists, in the process amassing the remarkable collection that today comprises the core of the holdings of the Musée d’Orsay. He was respected both personally and professionally. When Caillebotte died at the age of just 46, Pissarro wrote to his son Lucien that, ‘he is one we can really mourn, he was good and generous, and a painter of talent to boot.’ Yet Caillebotte was never considered a true member of the inner circle of the Impressionists. Art scholars have long recognized this, but have never fully explained it. Huffington Post online
Cézanne is one of the greatest of those who changed the course of art history ... From him we have learned that to alter the colouring of an object is to alter its structure. His work proves without doubt that painting is not – or not any longer – the art of imitating an object by lines and colours, but of giving plastic [solid] form to our nature. Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, Du Cubisme, 1912
Cézanne: It was the antithesis of the realism that had dominated European art for centuries. Apples, Pears and Paint: How to Make a Still Life Painting, BBC 2014
Cézanne had abandoned the fiction that a painting is a picture into reality. ibid.
My age and my health will never allow me to realise the artistic dream I have pursued all my life. Cézanne: Portraits of a Life, Sky Arts 2020
Cézanne Portraits exhibition 26 October 2017: ‘This is the first exhibition that is dedicated to Cézanne’s portraits.’ ibid. Laurence des Cars, director Musee d’Orsay re London National Portrait Gallery exhibition
Painting endures … I almost forgot to tell you, I was sent another rejection letter. It’s neither new nor surprising. ibid. Cézanne to Pissarro
Paris 24th August 1877: Dear Emile, It seems that a deep depression reigns in the Impressionist camp. They are not exactly making their fortune. We are living in very troubled times. ibid.
I made some progress. Why so late and so laboriously? Is Art really a priesthood that requires the pure in heart who completely surrender themselves to it? ibid. letter to Vollard
Finally he [Monet] turned to the water lily garden which he had made in his grounds ... Total immersion ... I feel therefore I am. Kenneth Clark, Civilisation 11/13: The Worship of Nature, BBC 1969
Among its most beautiful productions are these paintings by Renoir ... Just a group of ordinary human beings enjoying themselves. Kenneth Clark, Civilisation 13/13: Heroic Materialism