IMPRESSIONISMa different way of seeing

Middle of the 19th century, France

•The Académie des Beaux-Arts dominated French

art•Historical subjects, religious themes, and portraits

were valued (landscape and still life were not)

•The Académie preferred carefully finished images

that looked realistic when examined closely.

•Color was somber and conservative.

•Traces of brush strokes were suppressed.

Middle of the 19th century, France

•The Académie des Beaux-Arts dominated French

art•Historical subjects, religious themes, and portraits

were valued (landscape and still life were not)

•The Académie preferred carefully finished images

that looked realistic when examined closely.

•Color was somber and conservative.

•Traces of brush strokes were suppressed.

• Some younger artists painted in a lighter and brighter manner.

• They were more interested in painting landscape and contemporary life than in recreating historical or mythological scenes.

• Each year, the Salon du Paris jury rejected their works.• A group of young realists, Claude Monet, Renoir, Sisley,

and Bazille, Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, and Armand Guillaumin became friends and often painted together.

• They gathered at the Café Guerbois, with the slightly older Edouard Manet as a respected leader.

BEGINNINGS

• In 1863, the jury rejected Manet's The Luncheon on the Grass

• After Emperor Napoleon III saw the rejected works of 1863, he decreed that the public be allowed to judge the work themselves, and the Salon des Refusés (Salon of the Refused) was organized.

• While many viewers came only to laugh, the Salon des Refusés drew attention to the existence of a new tendency in art and attracted more visitors than the regular Salon.

• Critic and humorist Louis Leroy wrote a scathing review making wordplay with the title of Claude Monet's painting Impression, Sunrise derisively

titling his article The Exhibition of the ImpressionistsThe term quickly gained favour with the public.

It was also accepted by the artists themselves

BEGINNINGS

Violating the rules of academic painting:

•Freely brushed colors that took precedence over lines and contours.

•Realistic scenes of modern life.

•Often painted outdoors (a plen air). Previously, still lifes and portraits as well as landscapes were usually painted in a studio.

•They portrayed overall visual effects instead of details.

•They used short "broken" brush strokes of mixed and pure unmixed color—not blended smoothly or shaded, as was customary—to achieve an effect of intense color vibration.

•Pure impressionism avoids the use of black paint (they use the complementary colors to get greys)

•An art of immediacy and movement, of candid poses and compositions, of the play of light.

CHARACTERISTICS

Claude Monet, Woman with a Parasol

Cassatt Mary At the Theater

Claude Monet, graystacks

Sorolla

• Born 1863 in Valencia, Spain

• He married Clotilde García del Castillo, whom he had first met in 1879, while

working in her father's photography studio.

• At 18 he went to Madrid to study the masters at museo del Prado.

• At 22 obtained a grant which enabled a four year term to study painting

in Rome.

• A long sojourn to Paris in 1885 provided his first exposure to modern

painting.

JOAQUÍN SOROLLA

”The Nereids”

“Café en Paris”

• His style is a special kind of impressionism: “Luminismo” (bright light)

• Besides Sundays, he would work six to nine hours a day, often standing in the full glare of the sun dressed in a suit.

• The basis of Sorolla's faultless technique was the drawings skills that he had learnt in his childhood.

• Sorolla painted very, very fast. "I could not paint at all if I had to paint slowly," he once said. "Every effect is so transient, it must be rapidly painted.“

• Most of his pictures were painted in from four to six mornings, many in one or two.

SOROLLA the artist

• Sorolla did not have a set idea of how a painting would turn out before he started, preferring to build up the composition as he went along.

• In the studio Sorolla would sometimes use a palette the size of a grand piano lid and 3 foot long brushes to allow him to stand back from his painting.

• Brush work is loose and bold.

• At the first years he focused mainly on the production of large canvases of orientalist, mythological, historical, and social subjects, for display in salons and international exhibitions in Madrid, Paris, Venice, Munich, Berlin, and Chicago.

SOROLLA the artist

“Another Marguerite”Gold medal at the National Exhibition in Madrid

First prize at the Chicago International Exhibition

The Mediterranean light

“The net”

“The happy day”

“The fishing nets”

“The boat builders”

“Ruins of Buñol”

“Javea, Alicante”

“The return from fishing”Salon du Paris

And they Still say Fish is Expensive! 1894

• An even greater turning point in Sorolla's career was marked by the painting and exhibition of Sad Inheritance

• The subject was a depiction of crippled children bathing at the sea in Valencia, under the supervision of a monk.

• The polio epidemic that struck some years earlier the land of Valencia is present, possibly for the first time in the history of painting, through the image of the two affected children.

• The painting earned Sorolla his greatest official recognition, the Grand Prix and a medal of honor at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1900, and the medal of honor at the National Exhibition in Madrid in 1901.

• At the same time, a series of preparatory oil sketches for Sad Inheritance were painted with the greatest luminosity and bravura, and foretold an increasing interest in shimmering light and of a medium deftly handled.

The beach

• The exhibit at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900 won him a medal of honour and his nomination as Knight of the Legion of Honour.

• Within the next few years Sorolla was honoured as a member of the Fine Art Academies of Paris, Lisbon, and Valencia, and as a Favourite Son of Valencia.

• In England met  Archer Milton Huntington, who made him a member of The Hispanic Society of America in New York City, and invited him to exhibit there in 1909.

• Sorolla spent five months in America and painted more than twenty portraits.

Portraits• Formal portraiture was not Sorolla's genre of preference, because it tended

to restrict his creative appetites.

• But portrait commissions proved profitable, and the portrayal of his family was irresistible.

Sometimes the influence of Velázquez was

uppermost.

Sometimes he wanted to compete with his friend John Singer

Sargent

Mr. TaftPresident of the

USA

The Vision of Spain

• Archer M. Huntington in Paris and signed a contract to paint a series of oils on life in Spain to be installed in the Hispanic Society of America.

• Would range from 12 to 14 feet in height, and total 227 feet in length (fourteen large panels in all).

• The major commission of his career, it would dominate the later years of Sorolla's life.

• Sorolla painted all but one en plein air, and travelled to specific locales to paint them at each site painting models posed in local costume.

• He completed the final panel by the middle of 1919.