Realism And Impressionism In France

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

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If we look at all the bottles in ‘A Bar at the Folies—Bergère’ we shall notice that the treatment of detail here is totally different from the treatment of detail, say, in Millais’s ‘Ophelia’. In his picture Millais looked at each leaf, flower, and branch separately, and set them down separately on his canvas like a sum in addition. But all the bottles in Manet’s picture are seen simulataneously in relation to each other: it is a synthesis, not an addition. Impressionism, then, in the first place, is the result of simultaenous vision that sees a scene as a whole as opposed to consecutive vision that sees Nature piece by piece. Let us suppose, for a moment, that we are staying at a house on the banks of the Seine opposite the church at Vernon. Let us suppose that, having arrived there in darkness the previous evening, we jump out of bed in the morning, open the window, and put out our head to see the view. Monet’s picture ‘The Church at Vernon’ shows us what we should see at the first glance; the glance, that is to say, when we see the scene as a whole, before any detail in it has riveted our attention and caused us unconsciously to alter the focus of our eye in order to see that detail more sharply. Another way of putting the matter is to say that in an Impressionist picture there is only one focus throughout, while in a Pre-Raphaelite picture there is a different focus for every detail. These two methods of painting represent different ways of looking at the world, and neither way is wrong, only whereas the Pre-Raphaelite looks particularly at a series of objects, the Impressionist looks generally at the whole.

This way of viewing a scene broadly, however, is only a part of Impressionism. It was not a new invention, for Velazquez saw and painted figures and groups in a similar way, therefore Impressionists like Whistler and Manet (in his earlier works), who adopted this broad style, were in this respect developing an existing tradition rather than inventing a new one. But a later development of Impressionism which was a complete innovation, was the new palette they adopted. From the time of Daubigny, who said, ‘We never paint light enough,’ the more progressive painters had striven to make the colors in their pictures closer to the actual hues of Nature. Delacroix was one of the pioneers in the analysis of color. When he was in Morocco he wrote in his Journal about the shadows he had seen on the faces of two peasant boys, remarking that while a sallow, yellow-faced boy had violet shadows, a red-faced boy had green shadows. Again, in the streets of Paris, Delacroix noticed a black and yellow cab, and observed that, beside the greenish-yellow, the black took on a tinge of the complementary color, violet. An advertisement issued by a well-known soap firm will have made many readers familiar with the phenomenon of complementary color. The name of the soap was printed in bright red letters on a white paper, and we were asked, after gazing at this steadfastly for a few moments, to look up at a white ceiling, when we should see the name of the soap in green letters. Every color has its complementary, that is to say, an opposing color is evoked by the action of the human eye after we have been gazing at the said color; consequently all colors act and react on one another. Delacroix discovered that to obtain the full brilliance of any given hue it should be flanked and supported by its complementary color. He did not attain to full knowledge; it was left for a later generation to make nicer complementary for a greenish-yellow, an orange-yellow requires a turquoise blue, and so on.

Realism And Impressionism In France (continued)