Realism And Impressionism In France

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

Various names have been given to this technique. It has been called ‘Divisionism,’ because by it the tones of secondary and tertiary colors were divided into their constituent elements. It has been called ‘Pointillism,’ because the color was applied to the canvas in points instead of in sweeping brush strokes. It has been called ‘Luminism,’ because the aim of the process is primarily to express the color of light with all its sparkle and vibration. This last is the best name of all, because it serves to emphasize the new outlook of the new painters. The tendency before the Impressionists was to regard color from the standpoint of black and white. Thus, in considering a grey, it would have been asked is it a dark grey or a light grey, does it approach black or white? The Impressionists took quite a different attitude and asked whether it was a bluish grey, or a greenish grey, or a purplish grey, or a reddish grey: in a word, not whether it was light or dark, but to which color in the solar spectrum it most closely approached.

To the Impressionists shadow was not an absence of light, but light of a different quality and of different value. In their exhaustive research into the true colors of shadows in Nature, they conquered the last unknown territory in the domain of Realist Painting.

To sum up, then, it may be said the Impressionist Painting is based on two great principles:

1. The substitution of a simulataneous vision that sees a scene as a whole in place of a consecutive vision that sees Nature piece by piece.

2. The substitution of a Chiaroscuro based on the colors of the solar spectrum for a Chiaroscuro based on Black and White.

This new technique, with all the research and experiment which is implies, was not the invention of one man, but the outcome of the life studies of a whole group of men. Most prominent among those who brought Impressionist painting to perfection in theory and practice were Camille Pissaro, Claude Monet, and Auguste Renoir.

Realism And Impressionism In France (continued)