18 thoughts on “Week Four – Impressionism or Post-Impressionism”
Artist: Oscar Claude Monet
Monet was a French painter who was the “father” of Impressionism. His work was actually given this name as an insult from a critic because his work focused more on light and form than on the realistic nature of the painting. His love of the outdoors was enhanced by Eugene Boudin, who was a landscape artist and introduced him to outdoor painting. Monet attempted suicide in the Seine River because of the financial pressure placed on him after the birth of his first son, but soon after caught a break when he gained a patron for his work. Monet was a troubled soul who struggled with depression and anger management issues, which lead him to destroy many of his own pieces of work out of frustration. After his first wife passed away, he had an affair with another woman who he then married after the death of her former husband. They lived in Giverny, where the landscape served as an inspiration to some of his most successful paintings.
Van Gogh was virtually poor and unknown as an artist throughout his lifetime. He was born in 1853 in the Netherlands and died at the age of 37 shortly after he shot himself in the chest. In 1873 he worked in a Gallery in London and proposed to his land lady’s daughter. When she rejected him he threw away all of his beloved books except his bible and decided to devote his life to God. He then got fired from the Gallery for telling discouraging customers from buying the paintings, saying they were worthless. He suffered mental illness and had a tragic love life. He is famous for cutting off and offering his ear to a prostitute named Rachel. He completed more than 2,100 works and is one of the most renowned painters in the world today.
Pierre- Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)
Renoir was a French artist who helped to bring about the development of the impressionist style. Growing up his family was in the working class and as a young boy he worked in a porcelain factory. His drawing talents are said to have been developed from painting the patterns on fine china. Later in life after rejections from several salon juries Renoir in addition with Monet, Sisley, and Pissaro the group of artists mounted the first impressionist exhibition in 1874. Renoir’s children and grandchildren also entered into the industry of arts mainly in filmmaking.
“Luncheon of the Boating Party” 1880-1881
I like the way the artist captured a narrative and sense of moving flow throughout the painting. Highlights and choice of color keep your eye on the painting.
Degas was a French painter and sculptor and is considered to be a major component of the Impressionism movement. He was born in Paris to a wealth family with a father who allowed Degas to set up an art workshop in their house. Despite having a much different style than other Impressionist artists of the time, he was a very active organizer and proponent of the movement. He had innovating composition and successfully captured emotion in much of his work.Degas believe that “the artist must live alone, and his private life must remain unknown,” resulting in a perceptibly boring life. In the 1870’s, Degas became strongly anti-Semitic, cutting off ties with all of his Jewish friends and models. Degas had enough money to paint what he wanted, which increasingly became the ballet. In ballet he saw the ideal place to observe fast motion and the opportunity for space composition allowed by the large stage.
Paul Cezanne was a prominent French Post-Impressionist painter. His modern style and technique was misunderstood for many years. Paul Cezanne used heavy brush strokes during his early years and thickly layered paint onto the canvas. His work was often considered violent but later in years he began to change his style. He worked mostly with landscapes and loved the challenge of drawing from nature.
Toulouse-Lautrec was a French painter and illustrator, and is among the most well known Post-Impressionist artists. He spent most of his time in Paris, but showed his art in other prominent cities in Europe. Toulouse-Lautrec’s life was short and full of illness, disabilities, and health issues. His limited ability to participate in physical activities steered Toulouse-Lautrec in the direction of creating art. His paintings used thick strokes with exaggerated colors to create his forms. I love his use of color in his sketch, Seated Dancer in Pink Tights, because the orange and blue complementary colors make the dancer stand out on the page. The contrasting styles of line used also add a new dimension to the piece. Toulouse-Lautrec’s visible marks and lack of color blending makes his work, and other Post-Impressionist work, very visually interesting and engaging.
Camille Pissarro (1830-1903)
Pissarro was a Danish-French painter part of the Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist movements. He gathered together and encouraged many of the Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painters including Seurat, Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin and was seen as a father figure to many of them. His work portrays nature and life as it appeared, without “artifice or grandeur,” which was revolutionary for the time. His subject matter was village life and the natural world leading Pissarro to work outside while he painted. Something interesting about Pissarro is that he married his mother’s maid and they had seven children together. Pissarro was known for his wisdom and counsel, which helped him spur on the Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist movements by inspiring some of the great artists of that time. A piece of his that I thought was beautiful is “Hyde Park, London” shown below.
As a Russian–Israeli modern/post impressionistic artist, Afremov works mainly with a palette knife and oils in most of his works. He has a unique style that is visually appealing due to his use of color and motion. In his early works, he was inspired by Dali, Picasso, Modigliani and Chagall. Interesting fact: much of his work is available and has become known online; he self-promotes and sells his paintings exclusively on the internet. His work is also described as being politically neutral (as well as colorful) but I wanted to mention this because it might be due to his heritage and personal life. Afremov dealt with a lot of discrimination because of his background and lived in places where he was unable to paint freely. In the early 1900s. he worked with mainly watercolors and acrylic before finding his current and most well-known media: oil paint on canvas with a palette knife. Having had less-than-stellar previous interactions with galleries, he has found success in selling directly to collectors online with the help of his sons. I personally find the bright colors very cheerful and pleasing to the eye and that his works evoke emotions instead of a story. Below are some of his works:
Mary Cassatt was an American Impressionist painter who was born in 1844 in Pennsylvania. Gustave Geffroy, a French journalist and art critic, has regarded her as one of “les trois grandes dames,” which translates to one of the three great ladies of Impressionism. Although women only accounted for twenty percent of art students at the time, Cassatt began studying art at age 15 and was determined to make it a career instead of a social skill. Cassatt was dissatisfied with the quality of her American art education and moved to Paris in 1866 to study more seriously. Her career got off to a bit of a rocky start until she was invited by Edgar Degas to exhibit her with work with the Impressionists in 1878. Cassatt’s paintings frequently depicted intimate scenes of women and children. Her painting The Tea is pictured below.
Side note: A lot of people didn’t like Mary Cassatt because they felt she was too outspoken and opinionated, often coming across as rude. Those people may be right, but I think she’s pretty cool for relentlessly pursuing greater opportunities for women in art.
Serov was born in St. Petersburg Russia, he studied in Paris and Moscow. He was heavily influenced by realistic art of Repin and old master paintings he saw in the museums of Russia and Western Europe. His greatest works are portraits called “The Girl with Peaches” (1887)
These paintings depict his concentration on the perception of the model and nature. It also showed his spontaneous nature in these perceptions along with great use of light and color through different values. Another thing that can be noted in these paintings are the amazing reflections he was able to create. In his later work (around the start of the 20th Century) Serov began to move towards a more modernistic style and away from his impressionism.
Berthe Morisot was a French female Impressionist painter who contributed to the movement as a revolutionary of sorts. Bourgeois women at the time were not supposed to be intensely pursuing art, let alone working. She challenged those ideas. Her career brought her both incredible joy and depression, as she felt very insecure and self-conscious about her work – especially in a field where women were not necessarily welcome. One of her artistic trademarks was the prevalent use of white, which she was able to stretch and expand across her works. To say that I enjoy Morisot’s life and works is an understatement, as it makes me just a tiny bit less self-conscious about my messier painting style and new experiences of learning to paint. To know that a fantastic, talented artist like Morisot may have felt some of the same ways I do about my (i.e. self-conscious or doubtful) art is is pretty comforting. Since I’ve focused on using a whiter background in my complementary color painting, I’ve tried to channel a bit of her style as well.
Fun Fact: Morisot lived a bit of a double life. Although she considered herself a professional artist, she would hide her paintings when visitors came by her home, and assume the role as a cultivated hostess.
Artist: Eva Gonzales
Born in Paris, Eva Gonzales was a French impressionist painter and the pupil of Édouard Manet. Although she never exhibited with the impressionist painters in their controversial exhibitions, she is considered part of the group because of her painting style. Her early works were strongly influenced by Manet but she later developed her own personal style influenced by the events her life. Unfortunatly she died at the age of 34 during childbirth exactly six days after the death of her teacher Manet. Although her art career was short, she was renowned for demonstrating such a mastery of painting at such a young age.
Frits Thaulow is a Norwegian impressionist painter. During his life, he lived in France, but did not like the cityscape. His work reflects his love for small towns and countrysides. He was very interested in water and wanted to be a marine painter, so many of his works contain streams and rivers. He developed a very interesting form of impressionism with hints of realism, which became popular in his homeland in Norway.
I like this piece because it captures the gentle, cotton-like feeling of winter and snow. This piece also includes a stream of water which acts as the focal point, as is in many of this other works. The stream direction gives good perspective to the painting. The fence and tree in the right lack detail, but I like it because it reminds me of how I visualize things from a distance amidst a cold, still winter.
I really like this piece because of the effortless detail in the water. He really captures the softness of the sunlight and the quiet serenity of the village. I especially like the contrast between the sky and the detail in the buildings, so my eyes can focus on one or the other.
Bertrand-Jean Redon was born in Bordeaux, France in 1840. Audition earned his first art award at the age of 10. He began to formally study art at the age of 15 but to please his father, he soon changed to architecture. However, after failing his entrance exam, he went back to art and studied under Jean-Leon Gerome. Odilon took up sculpting, etching and lithography but soon had to stop in 1870 in order to serve in the army during the Franco-Prussian War. Post war, Redon worked solely on charcoal and lithography works. By the 1890s Redon switched his media to oils and pastel. A subject of interest was Hindu and Buddhist religion and culture. This is when we see the use of Buddha in numerous works. Odilon was an interesting fellow who wanted to express his internal feelings and psyche through his work. His subjects range from nightmarish dreams of science to animals to prehistoric times. Huysmans said that “these drawings defied classification; unheeding, for the most part, of the limitations of painting, they ushered in a very special type of the fantastic, one born of sickness and delirium.” I personally LOVE how Redon describes his work, “My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.” I connect with this because I am a believer that work should not be defined into categories but experienced subjectively and individually.
Caillebotte was born in 1848 to a wealthy Parisian family. He earned a law degree in 1868, was also an engineer, and was drafted to fight in the Franco-Prussian War before becoming a well-known painter. He was a member and patron of the Impressionists, but painted in a more realistic way than the other artists. He had an interest in photography, which influenced his more realistic style. As his artistic career progressed, he began to move towards a realism style and away from Impressionism. He painted many domestic scenes, including interiors, families, and portraits. Many of his paintings depict members of his family. Shown below is his painting of his garden.
Paul Dougherty was an American Impressionist painter from New York who was known for his marine paintings representing the East and West coasts of the United States, and also other countries. He was most well-known for his paintings of breakers crashing against rocky coasts. He actually studied law initially and even passed the bar exam, but he chose to pursue his art instead of law. His works were nominated for many awards at art exhibitions in places such as the National Academy of Design in New York and the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. I personally find his Dougherty’s works very beautiful and incredibly realistic and really enjoy looking at them.
painting 202 
Artist: Oscar Claude Monet
Monet was a French painter who was the “father” of Impressionism. His work was actually given this name as an insult from a critic because his work focused more on light and form than on the realistic nature of the painting. His love of the outdoors was enhanced by Eugene Boudin, who was a landscape artist and introduced him to outdoor painting. Monet attempted suicide in the Seine River because of the financial pressure placed on him after the birth of his first son, but soon after caught a break when he gained a patron for his work. Monet was a troubled soul who struggled with depression and anger management issues, which lead him to destroy many of his own pieces of work out of frustration. After his first wife passed away, he had an affair with another woman who he then married after the death of her former husband. They lived in Giverny, where the landscape served as an inspiration to some of his most successful paintings.
Sailboat At Le Petit Gennevilliers
http://www.claudemonetgallery.org/Sailboat-At-Le-Petit-Gennevilliers-large.html
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Artist: Vincent Van Gogh
Van Gogh was virtually poor and unknown as an artist throughout his lifetime. He was born in 1853 in the Netherlands and died at the age of 37 shortly after he shot himself in the chest. In 1873 he worked in a Gallery in London and proposed to his land lady’s daughter. When she rejected him he threw away all of his beloved books except his bible and decided to devote his life to God. He then got fired from the Gallery for telling discouraging customers from buying the paintings, saying they were worthless. He suffered mental illness and had a tragic love life. He is famous for cutting off and offering his ear to a prostitute named Rachel. He completed more than 2,100 works and is one of the most renowned painters in the world today.
“Sunflower” 1888/1889
https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/asset-viewer/sunflowers/NgEmkPlWfmO9aQ?utm_source=google&utm_medium=kp&hl=en&projectId=art-project
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I am a fan of Van Gogh. I appreciate his brush strokes more so now, learning the art of painting. Thanks for sharing.
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Pierre- Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)
Renoir was a French artist who helped to bring about the development of the impressionist style. Growing up his family was in the working class and as a young boy he worked in a porcelain factory. His drawing talents are said to have been developed from painting the patterns on fine china. Later in life after rejections from several salon juries Renoir in addition with Monet, Sisley, and Pissaro the group of artists mounted the first impressionist exhibition in 1874. Renoir’s children and grandchildren also entered into the industry of arts mainly in filmmaking.
“Luncheon of the Boating Party” 1880-1881
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I like the way the artist captured a narrative and sense of moving flow throughout the painting. Highlights and choice of color keep your eye on the painting.
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Edgar Degas(1834-1917)
Degas was a French painter and sculptor and is considered to be a major component of the Impressionism movement. He was born in Paris to a wealth family with a father who allowed Degas to set up an art workshop in their house. Despite having a much different style than other Impressionist artists of the time, he was a very active organizer and proponent of the movement. He had innovating composition and successfully captured emotion in much of his work.Degas believe that “the artist must live alone, and his private life must remain unknown,” resulting in a perceptibly boring life. In the 1870’s, Degas became strongly anti-Semitic, cutting off ties with all of his Jewish friends and models. Degas had enough money to paint what he wanted, which increasingly became the ballet. In ballet he saw the ideal place to observe fast motion and the opportunity for space composition allowed by the large stage.
Dancers, 1878
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Paul Cezanne was a prominent French Post-Impressionist painter. His modern style and technique was misunderstood for many years. Paul Cezanne used heavy brush strokes during his early years and thickly layered paint onto the canvas. His work was often considered violent but later in years he began to change his style. He worked mostly with landscapes and loved the challenge of drawing from nature.
Still life with apples:
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Artist: Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901)
Toulouse-Lautrec was a French painter and illustrator, and is among the most well known Post-Impressionist artists. He spent most of his time in Paris, but showed his art in other prominent cities in Europe. Toulouse-Lautrec’s life was short and full of illness, disabilities, and health issues. His limited ability to participate in physical activities steered Toulouse-Lautrec in the direction of creating art. His paintings used thick strokes with exaggerated colors to create his forms. I love his use of color in his sketch, Seated Dancer in Pink Tights, because the orange and blue complementary colors make the dancer stand out on the page. The contrasting styles of line used also add a new dimension to the piece. Toulouse-Lautrec’s visible marks and lack of color blending makes his work, and other Post-Impressionist work, very visually interesting and engaging.
Seated Dancer in Pink Tights
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Camille Pissarro (1830-1903)
Pissarro was a Danish-French painter part of the Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist movements. He gathered together and encouraged many of the Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painters including Seurat, Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin and was seen as a father figure to many of them. His work portrays nature and life as it appeared, without “artifice or grandeur,” which was revolutionary for the time. His subject matter was village life and the natural world leading Pissarro to work outside while he painted. Something interesting about Pissarro is that he married his mother’s maid and they had seven children together. Pissarro was known for his wisdom and counsel, which helped him spur on the Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist movements by inspiring some of the great artists of that time. A piece of his that I thought was beautiful is “Hyde Park, London” shown below.
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Artist: Lenoid Afremov
As a Russian–Israeli modern/post impressionistic artist, Afremov works mainly with a palette knife and oils in most of his works. He has a unique style that is visually appealing due to his use of color and motion. In his early works, he was inspired by Dali, Picasso, Modigliani and Chagall. Interesting fact: much of his work is available and has become known online; he self-promotes and sells his paintings exclusively on the internet. His work is also described as being politically neutral (as well as colorful) but I wanted to mention this because it might be due to his heritage and personal life. Afremov dealt with a lot of discrimination because of his background and lived in places where he was unable to paint freely. In the early 1900s. he worked with mainly watercolors and acrylic before finding his current and most well-known media: oil paint on canvas with a palette knife. Having had less-than-stellar previous interactions with galleries, he has found success in selling directly to collectors online with the help of his sons. I personally find the bright colors very cheerful and pleasing to the eye and that his works evoke emotions instead of a story. Below are some of his works:
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Artist: Mary Cassatt
Mary Cassatt was an American Impressionist painter who was born in 1844 in Pennsylvania. Gustave Geffroy, a French journalist and art critic, has regarded her as one of “les trois grandes dames,” which translates to one of the three great ladies of Impressionism. Although women only accounted for twenty percent of art students at the time, Cassatt began studying art at age 15 and was determined to make it a career instead of a social skill. Cassatt was dissatisfied with the quality of her American art education and moved to Paris in 1866 to study more seriously. Her career got off to a bit of a rocky start until she was invited by Edgar Degas to exhibit her with work with the Impressionists in 1878. Cassatt’s paintings frequently depicted intimate scenes of women and children. Her painting The Tea is pictured below.
Side note: A lot of people didn’t like Mary Cassatt because they felt she was too outspoken and opinionated, often coming across as rude. Those people may be right, but I think she’s pretty cool for relentlessly pursuing greater opportunities for women in art.
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Artist: Valentin Alexandrovich Serov
Serov was born in St. Petersburg Russia, he studied in Paris and Moscow. He was heavily influenced by realistic art of Repin and old master paintings he saw in the museums of Russia and Western Europe. His greatest works are portraits called “The Girl with Peaches” (1887)
And, “The Girl Covered by the Sun” (1888)
http://artmight.com/Country/Russian-artists/Serov-Valentin-1865-December-5-1911/serov-girl-in-sunlight-71825p.html
These paintings depict his concentration on the perception of the model and nature. It also showed his spontaneous nature in these perceptions along with great use of light and color through different values. Another thing that can be noted in these paintings are the amazing reflections he was able to create. In his later work (around the start of the 20th Century) Serov began to move towards a more modernistic style and away from his impressionism.
LikeLike
Artist: Berthe Morisot
Berthe Morisot was a French female Impressionist painter who contributed to the movement as a revolutionary of sorts. Bourgeois women at the time were not supposed to be intensely pursuing art, let alone working. She challenged those ideas. Her career brought her both incredible joy and depression, as she felt very insecure and self-conscious about her work – especially in a field where women were not necessarily welcome. One of her artistic trademarks was the prevalent use of white, which she was able to stretch and expand across her works. To say that I enjoy Morisot’s life and works is an understatement, as it makes me just a tiny bit less self-conscious about my messier painting style and new experiences of learning to paint. To know that a fantastic, talented artist like Morisot may have felt some of the same ways I do about my (i.e. self-conscious or doubtful) art is is pretty comforting. Since I’ve focused on using a whiter background in my complementary color painting, I’ve tried to channel a bit of her style as well.
Fun Fact: Morisot lived a bit of a double life. Although she considered herself a professional artist, she would hide her paintings when visitors came by her home, and assume the role as a cultivated hostess.
“Woman and Child in the Park”
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Born in Paris, Eva Gonzales was a French impressionist painter and the pupil of Édouard Manet. Although she never exhibited with the impressionist painters in their controversial exhibitions, she is considered part of the group because of her painting style. Her early works were strongly influenced by Manet but she later developed her own personal style influenced by the events her life. Unfortunatly she died at the age of 34 during childbirth exactly six days after the death of her teacher Manet. Although her art career was short, she was renowned for demonstrating such a mastery of painting at such a young age.
LikeLike
Artist: Frits Thaulow
Frits Thaulow is a Norwegian impressionist painter. During his life, he lived in France, but did not like the cityscape. His work reflects his love for small towns and countrysides. He was very interested in water and wanted to be a marine painter, so many of his works contain streams and rivers. He developed a very interesting form of impressionism with hints of realism, which became popular in his homeland in Norway.
I like this piece because it captures the gentle, cotton-like feeling of winter and snow. This piece also includes a stream of water which acts as the focal point, as is in many of this other works. The stream direction gives good perspective to the painting. The fence and tree in the right lack detail, but I like it because it reminds me of how I visualize things from a distance amidst a cold, still winter.
I really like this piece because of the effortless detail in the water. He really captures the softness of the sunlight and the quiet serenity of the village. I especially like the contrast between the sky and the detail in the buildings, so my eyes can focus on one or the other.
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Odilon Redon – Post Impressionism
Bertrand-Jean Redon was born in Bordeaux, France in 1840. Audition earned his first art award at the age of 10. He began to formally study art at the age of 15 but to please his father, he soon changed to architecture. However, after failing his entrance exam, he went back to art and studied under Jean-Leon Gerome. Odilon took up sculpting, etching and lithography but soon had to stop in 1870 in order to serve in the army during the Franco-Prussian War. Post war, Redon worked solely on charcoal and lithography works. By the 1890s Redon switched his media to oils and pastel. A subject of interest was Hindu and Buddhist religion and culture. This is when we see the use of Buddha in numerous works. Odilon was an interesting fellow who wanted to express his internal feelings and psyche through his work. His subjects range from nightmarish dreams of science to animals to prehistoric times. Huysmans said that “these drawings defied classification; unheeding, for the most part, of the limitations of painting, they ushered in a very special type of the fantastic, one born of sickness and delirium.” I personally LOVE how Redon describes his work, “My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.” I connect with this because I am a believer that work should not be defined into categories but experienced subjectively and individually.
LikeLike
Gustave Caillebotte
Caillebotte was born in 1848 to a wealthy Parisian family. He earned a law degree in 1868, was also an engineer, and was drafted to fight in the Franco-Prussian War before becoming a well-known painter. He was a member and patron of the Impressionists, but painted in a more realistic way than the other artists. He had an interest in photography, which influenced his more realistic style. As his artistic career progressed, he began to move towards a realism style and away from Impressionism. He painted many domestic scenes, including interiors, families, and portraits. Many of his paintings depict members of his family. Shown below is his painting of his garden.
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Artist: Paul Dougherty
Paul Dougherty was an American Impressionist painter from New York who was known for his marine paintings representing the East and West coasts of the United States, and also other countries. He was most well-known for his paintings of breakers crashing against rocky coasts. He actually studied law initially and even passed the bar exam, but he chose to pursue his art instead of law. His works were nominated for many awards at art exhibitions in places such as the National Academy of Design in New York and the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. I personally find his Dougherty’s works very beautiful and incredibly realistic and really enjoy looking at them.
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