Impression Sunrise from the 1874 Impressionist Show was one of Claude Monet's paintings in his series studying the effects of light and atmosphere on the Cathedral of Rouen at different times of day. In the painting, form and substance vanish as light transforms objects and surfaces into atmospheric spaces. Monet worked outdoors, painting plein air to capture how color was not the property of an object but how light controls color intensity and how it is affected by the time of day and movement of the sun. The painting inadvertently founded the name of Impressionism for the loose, atmospheric style that focused on the effects of light and color.
2. Introduction to Photography
Pre-Photographic Inventions Early Photographs
Camera obscura Daguerreotype
• A box (in earlier times a room) • A unique item of very high clarity
with a hole and a lens at one end • Has a mirror surface
• An image is projected onto the • Three-dimensional effects are
opposite end striking
• The image is traceable with pen • Highly vulnerable to physical
and paper damage and scratching
Photogram • Placed in an individualized frame
• A flat object is placed on photo- with a top
sensitive paper • Very expensive procedure
• The paper is exposed to light and a • No negatives
silhouette is rendered Calotype
• Makes a positive and a negative
image
• Negatives were not clear
• Has a grainy texture
3. Questions
about the Nature of Photography
• Photography has become accepted as a fact. How can we
question the facts that photographs present?
• How can the vantage point change our impression of a
subject in a photograph?
• How is time the subject of all photographs?
• Is photography a mirror of the world, or a window onto the
world?
6. Louis Daguerre
• 1787 – 1851
• Produced his first photo in 1939
• Inventor of the Daguerreotype
• This used a copper plate with a finely polished silver layer on its surface. It was made
light-sensitive by reaction with iodine (and later bromine) vapour which produced a
coating of silver iodide. Following an exposure - perhaps 10 minutes using a camera in
bright sunlight - the almost invisible image was made visible by suspending the plate
above a heated mercury bath. The mercury did not alter the silver iodide, but where an
image had been formed this consisted of small particles of silver. This combined with
the mercury to form a light gray silver amalgam in the lighter parts of the image. The
darker parts of the scene were unchanged silver iodide and this was dissolved using a
strong salt (sodium chloride) solution, revealing the polished silver surface. Later hypo
(sodium thiosulphate) was found to be better for this 'fixing' process.
7. Early Photography
Daguerre, Still Life in a Studio
• First photographs imitate painted
still lives
• Long shutter speeds meant that
inanimate objects were a natural
choice
• Variety of textures in this
photography to reveal its
capabilities” cloth, flask, sculpted
cherub heads, framed
painting, relief sculpture, etc.
• Reference to the vanitas of Dutch
still life painting
13. Ever open to new ideas and discoveries, Nadar was
the first in France to make photographs
underground with artificial light and the first to
photograph Paris from the basket of an ascendant
balloon. Even though a proponent of heavier-than-
air traveling devices, he financed the construction
of Le Giant, a balloon that met with an unfortunate
accident on its second trip. Nonetheless, he was
instrumental in setting up the balloon postal service
that made it possible for the French government to
communicate with those in Paris during the
German blockade in the Franco-Prussian War of
1870.
Ruined financially by this brief but devastating
conflict, Nadar continued to write and
photograph, running an establishment with his son
Paul that turned out slick commercial work.
Always a rebel, at one point he lent the photo
studio to a group of painters who wished to bypass
the Salon in order to exhibit their work, thus
making possible the first exhibition of the
Impressionists in April, 1874. Although he was to
operate still another studio in Marseilles during the
1880s and '90s Nadar's last photographic idea of
significance was a series of exposures made by his
son in 1886 as he interviewed chemist Eugene
Chevreul on his 100th birthday, thus
foreshadowing the direction that picture journalism
was to take. During his last years he continued to
think of himself as "a daredevil, always on the
lookout for currents to swim against." At his
death, just before the age of ninety, he had outlived
all those he had satirized in the famous
Pantheon, which had started him in photography
Nadar
18. •Portrait photography
becomes popular with
shorter shutter speeds
•Deeper richer black and
white tones in more modern
photography
•Figures still had to hold a
pose for a long time
•Stern, severe, commanding
presence
•Artistic genius at the
summit of his career
•Autocratic looking
Manet Delacroix
19. Muybridge, Horse
Galloping
•Muybridge settled a
debate about whether or
not a horse, in full
gallop, would naturally
have all four hoofs off the
ground at the same time
•Successive camera shots
at paced intervals revealed
the answer
•Multiple-camera motion
studies with a
zoopraxiscope
•The transitional figure
between still photography
and motion pictures
1878
21. Pre-Raphaelites
• The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood • The Brotherhood's early doctrines
(also known as the Pre- were expressed in four
Raphaelites) was a group of declarations:
English painters, poets and 1. To have genuine ideas to express;
critics, founded in 1848 by John 2. To study Nature attentively, so as
Everret Millais, Dante Gabriel to know how to express them;
Rossetti and William Holman 3. To sympathise with what is direct
Hunt. and serious and heartfelt in
• Against the what they perceived as previous art, to the exclusion of
the mechanistic approach to art what is conventional and self-
parading and learned by rote;
from the Mannerists on. Felt
raphael’s classical influence to be 4. And, most indispensable of all, to
produce thoroughly good pictures
bad.
and statues.
• Often considered the first avant-
garde movement in art
22. Christ In the House of His Parents, John Everett Millais, 1850
23. The Barbizon School
• Name derived from a village in Northern France
• Rejected Classical Landscape style and insisted on
Direct Observation
• Inspired by Constable (Salon of 1824)
• Closely allied with Realists, pre-cursors to the
Impressionists
• Artists included Millet and Courbet as well as Jean-
Baptiste-Camille Corot and Theodore Rousseau
25. Impressionism Timeline
• 1863 – Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe • 1870 – Franco-Prussian War
& the Salon des Refuses (50 • 1871 – France defeated
women artists, 13%)
• 100 or more women at the Napolean III unseated, Adolphe
official salon yearly Theirs becomes President of the
• 1865 – Olympia accepted and Third Republic
jeered. American Civil War Kaiser Wilhelm crowned Emperor
ends of Germany at Versailles
• 1866- Baudelaire dies, Monet at • 1874 – The First “Impressionist
the Salon Exhibtion”
• 1867 - Maximillian is executed.
“Salon of Newcomers”
(Renoir, Monet, Pissaro, Degas)
26. Impressionist Artists of Note
• Eduoard Manet
• Claude Monet
• Berthe Morisot
• Auguste Renoir
• Camille Pissaro
• Edgar Degas
• James McNeil Whistler
• Mary Cassatt
• August Rodin
27. Eduoard Manet
• 1832 – 1883
• Considered the Godfather of the Impressionists
• Never Showed in an Impressionist Exhibition
• Well educated, close friends with Baudelaire and
Zola
• Achieved both Notoriety and some recognition
through the official Salon
• Became Friends with Monet and painted some “au
plein air”
• Influenced other Impressionists through his unique
technique
28. Realism
Manet, Luncheon on the Grass
• A modern response to Giorgione and Raphael
• Rejected by the official salon and exhibited in the Salon of the Refuses
• Models are obviously posing, no unity of figures and landscape
• She is undressed rather than nude
• Two men dressed in contemporary clothes contrasts with the nudity of
the foreground female
• Nude figure directly engages us
• Still life very unrealistic
• Sketchy broad brushstrokes
• Triangular composition
• Flattening of perspective
29.
30. The Judgement of Paris
Engraving after Raphael
Marcantonio Raimondi
c. 1516
35. Manet, Olympia
• Based on Giorgione and Titian
• Unashamed of nudity; direct confrontational stare
• Absence of modeling
• Doubtful morals suggested; prostitute receiving flowers from an
admirer
• Created a scandal at the Salon of 1865
• Black cat: an exclamation point at her feet
• Bouquet from a customer
• Cold and practical look, no curiosity, no joy
• Realistic nude, contemporary setting
• Contrast of black and white tones
• Black servant caused concern: references to animal behavior and the
lower classes
39. Realism
Manet, Bar at the Folies-Bergere
• Melancholy and absent gaze at
customer ordering a drink
• Mirrors reflect the world around
her
• Artificiality of perspective
• Strong verticals down center
• Impressionist brushwork
• Fruit and flowers defined by a few
brushstrokes
• Is the woman in the back a
reflection of the main figure in a
mirror?
40.
41. Influence of Japanese prints
1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris introduced Japanese
culture to Europe. European artists were inspired by the
following characteristics of Japanese woodblock prints:
• 1 Flat quality that lacked perspective
• 2 Flat areas of color
• 3 Odd angles of composition
• 4 Curving lines
• 5 Charm, without sentimentality
• 6 Lack of shadow
42. Hokusai is generally more appreciated in the West than in Japan. His prints, as well as those by other Japanese
printmakers, were imported to Paris in the mid-19th century. They were enthusiastically collected, especially by
such impressionist artists as Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, whose work was
profoundly influenced by them
43. Sanno Festival Procession at Kojimachi
I-chome
1857 (130 Kb); From "One Hundred
Famous Views of Edo"; Woodblock
print, 13 1/4 x 8 5/8 in; The Brooklyn
Museum
Hiroshige (1797-1858), Japanese
painter and printmaker, known especially for his
landscape prints. The last great figure of the Ukiyo-e, or
popular, school of printmaking, he transmuted everyday
landscapes into intimate, lyrical scenes that made him
even more successful than his contemporary, Hokusai.
44. Ushimachi, Takanawa
1857 (130 Kb); From "One Hundred
Famous Views of Edo"; Woodblock print,
13 1/4 x 8 5/8 in; The Brooklyn Museum
47. Claude Monet
• 1840 - 1926
• The archetypal
Impressionist
• Interested in in the transient
nature of light and effects of
color
• Spent time in England with
Pissaroduring Franco-
Prussian War and studied
Constable and Turner
49. Monet, Impression: Sunrise
•Painting inadvertently founded the name of
Impressionism
•Form and substance vanish
•Light transforms objects and surfaces into atmospheric
spaces
•Color was not the property of an object, but the light
controls color intensity
•Color affected by time or day and movement of the sun
•Monet worked outdoors, plein-air
50. Monet, Rouen Cathedral
•One of Monet’s paintings in a series
•Cf. Muybridge
•Fixed composition and view in most of
the series
•Subtle gradations of tone and color
•Limited palette, subtle handling of paint
•Gothic cathedral, religious and cultural
significance
•Stone work of cathedral dissolves in light
51.
52.
53. Berthe Morisot
• 1841-1895
• First Woman to Join the
Impressionist Painters
• Friend and Model for
Manetwho influenced her
highly
54. Morisot, Villa at the Seaside
•Shaded verandah at a summer resort
•Figures are informally grouped
•Private balcony
•Discreetly fashionably dressed
women
•Woman sits elegantly covered to
avoid a tan
•Brisk broad brushstrokes
•Women neither spectacles nor on
parade
•Plein-air
