The Private Lives of the Impressionists

I'm very happy to recommend a book by Sue Roe called The Private Lives of the Impressionists. I've still not got to the end of it but I'm really enjoying this book which really rounds out one's understanding of the group called the Impressionists.

My paperback version (RRP £9.99) is my current bedtime reading and you might be surprised to know that I'm recommending it despite the fact I've not yet quite got to the end of it! I'm opting for the 'draw it out and make it last' option rather than racing to finish it - but thought I'd highlight it now in case people are starting to provide suggestions to people about what they'd like for Christmas. The paperback price definitely puts it in the stocking filler category.

UK Paperback Book Cover (Vintage House)

detail from Self Portrait in his Atelier
by Claude Monet

Actually, another important reason I'm only three-quareters of the way through is that it's my current bedtime reading and I tend to fall asleep fairly fast so I'm only managing a couple of pages each night! I have however known this book was going to get a book review from me after only a very few pages of starting to read this book.

So why do I want to recommend it?

This is what the book does:

• it covers the lives of all the Impressionists - Manet, Monet, Pisarro, Cézanne, Renoir, Degas, Sisley, Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt before, during and after the creation of their group

Timeline of the Impressionists - Wikimedia

• it also highlights the other people who are important to the story of the Impressionists - such as painters Caillebotte and Bazille, the art dealer Durand Ruel (who established the market for Impressionism in the United States as well as in Europe) and the paint merchant Tanguey also get pretty good coverage.
• it describes the environment of the places where they lived, frequented and painted as they were at the time which has provided for me a whole new perspective of certain of the works.
  
• This is also a story of the Paris which had been transformed by Baron Haussman and of the impact of the Franco-Prussian war - which had a major impact on more than one of the painters - the siege of Paris in 1870-71, the establishment of the Paris Commune and the emergence of the Third Republic.
  
• it tells the stories of the Salon des Beaux Arts and the first Salon des Refuses in 1863 and exhibitions by the Impressionists (minus Manet) starting in 1874, 1876, 1877, 1879, 1880, 1881, 1882 and 1886 and the relative success of each of the painters in different contexts
  
• you gain insight into their familial and fraternal relationships - and the very many difficulties associated with the class system of the time without having to read a detailed biography of individual painters. This highlights some of the oddities such as the fact that both Manet and Cezanne had wives and children who were not known to their families.
• For Americans, there an interesting chapter towards the end of the book which i've already peeked at which tells the story of how Duran Ruel opened up the market for Impressionist paintings in New York.
  
• The book more or less finishes in 1883 around about the time of the death of Manet. Its focus is therefore much more about the birth of Impressionism than about everything that happened to the Impressionist Painters - however it does leave scope for another book! At the moment, an epilogue provides a very abbreviated summary of what happened next for each if the painters
  

Why I recommend this book

This book covers a critical period for a number of the different painters who became known as the Impressionists. It's incredibly dense and covers a huge amount of detailed information in a way which speaks of comprehensive and meticulous research.

What makes this book different for me is the articulation of the various relationships between the different painters. So often books about the Impressionists tend to list them as individuals and comment on their works in the same way. This book focuses much more on the connections and the way they supported and influenced once another. It's an invaluable insight also into how a group with common motivations can support one another through different challenges and emotional and financial difficulties - and there were quite a few of those!

It also gives a very good insight into just how long it took some of these painters to become successful and just how financially stretched they were at times.

I am particularly enjoying the way in which Roe provides an insight into the incredibly different characters and personalities of the painters. I am repeatedly left wondering quite how some of them came to be members of the same group.

I like the way the book discusses how specific paintings came into being. The index is good because you can look up a specific painting by title and check out what it says - so it's good if you also want to use it as a reference source. Unusually for a paperback, this book also provides two sections of colour plates of paintings which feature in the text.

It's also a really great index for tracking down particular events. In fact the notes and index - which make up around 20-25% of the pages of my paperback persuade me that this is a very well read, well researched and well organised author! It's brilliant for providing you with references to sources if you want to pursue some particular aspect of one of the painters.

One of the surprising by-products of reading this book is that I now feel I understand far more about what happened in Paris and France in the second half of the 19th century than I ever did
while studying late 19th century European History at school!

Now I know I've succeeded in making it seem incredibly academic - but the reality is that this book is an incredibly easy read. Roe has a gift as storyteller. She has been able to take dry facts and convert them into a narrative which is always interesting - even when it takes you down paths you're not quite expecting.

I also think this book would be a terrific read for anybody currently facing challenges associated with the credit crunch and the recession. Reading about people facing very similar difficulties somehow helped to remind me of the enduring themes and challenges of life. There really is nothing new under the sun - except when somebody has a bright idea about how to apply paint!

The Art of Impressionism and associated painting techniques

I highly recommend Professor Anthea Callen's book The Art of Impressionism - painting techniques and the making of modernity (2000, Yale University Press) for anybody who, like me, likes the work of Impressionist painters and is also fascinated by the preparation and process behind the making of art.

If you want to know more about what the Impressionist artists used for paint, what sort of canvases and grounds they painted on, how they applied their paint, where and in what sort of conditions they painted and finally whether and how they varnished and framed their works then this is the book for you!

This magnificent book is the first full-scale exploration of Impressionist technique. Focusing on the easel-painted work of Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Cezanne, Cassatt, Morisot, Caillebotte, Sisley, and Degas in the period before 1900, it places their methods and materials in a historical perspective and evaluates their origins, novelty, and meanings within the visual formation of urban modernity. Yale University Press

Interestingly Professor Callen also corrects some impressions that many people have about Impressionist painters. For example, plein air painting started long before the start of Impressionism, not all Impressionists painted 'plein air' and none of them used mass produced tube paints! (see note 2 at end)

Drawing on scientific studies of pigments and materials, artists' treatises, colormens' archives, and contemporary and modern accounts, Anthea Callen demonstrates how raw materials and paintings are profoundly interdependent. She analyzes the material constituents of oil painting and the complex processes of "making" entailed in all aspects of artistic production, discussing in particular oil painting methods for landscapists and the impact of "plein air "light" "on figure painting, studio practice, and display. Insisting that the meanings of paintings are constituted by and within the cultural matrices that produced them, Callen argues that the real "modernity" of the Impressionist enterprise lies in the painters' material practices. Bold brushwork, unpolished, sketchy surfaces, and bright, "primitive" colors were combined with their subject matter--the effects of light, the individual sensation made visible--to establish the modern as visual.
Yale University Press

You can browse the contents page here and here. It is packed with an incredible amount of well researched detail about context and practice in the past and as things changed during the course of the nineteenth century in France. It also has a fantastic glossary and very detailed bibliography and endnotes.

Bear in mind that I knew within about 30 seconds of picking it up that I was buying this book. This morning I sat down to have a skim read of it. I'd waited until I had enough time. As it was it took well over two hours just to dip into it. I'm not even going to attempt to tell you all the new things I learned as a result. It's the sort of book you read in stages and/or slowly - savouring every page. You then make sure you never ever loan it out, reread it again periodically and dip into it on a regular basis.

It also has the very best photography of Impressionist paintings and small sections of them that I have ever seen in a serious art book. For that alone both author and publishers are to be congratulated. You can compare the weave of one sort of canvas to another and look at many other details of paintings. What I particularly appreciated was the way in which you could really examine the nature and quality of the mark making - giving you the quality of information which I normally get by getting 'up close and personal' with a painting. I'm the sort who spends ages staring at a painting or drawing trying to work out what an artist painted it on, what colour the ground was and what colours they used - so you'll appreciate that this book represents everything I ever wanted to know. I also love the way she labels each painting with the standard format and size of the canvas used!

Plus it has many reproductions of paintings that I've never ever seen before in any other book (but that's probably me to some extent!). Examples of such included:

• numerous examples of ébauches
  

ebauches - block-in or underpainting, the initial layers of an OIL PAINTING, executed in fluid, dilute paint (see SAUCE) which establishes the composition in masses of light and shade, or or colour (cf ETUDE AND ESQUISSE)
The Art of Impressionism - Glossary

• Cezanne's the Garden at Les Lauves. If you click the link below you can see more Cezanne paintings of Provence and if you then click the link to this painting on that page you can read what Cezanne has to say about painting in 1905 when he was nearly 70 - a year earlier than the date of this painting!
  

The Garden at Les Lauves, c. 1906
Paul Cezanne
oil on canvas
The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC

• Claud Monet's Oatfields is one of only two paintings by Monet which remains unvarnished, has changed hands only once since its original purchase and is in a private collection.

The difference perceptible to the naked eye between the unvarnished Oatfields and the varnished variants shown beside it, was staggering. It is not a difference which is apparent in reproduction....
Prof. Anthea Callen Chapter 12 Framing the Debate

I confess I found the academic turn of phrase a bit wearing at times. I'm not quite sure why academic language continues to avoid the use of plain English (unlike many other parts of the Establishment which have shifted towards a framework which emphasises accessibility) - but it does - and this book definitely qualifies as a university level text. Here's an excerpt.

The book is listed by the National Portrait Gallery as having been consulted in the preparation of the Directory of Artists Suppliers. I loved looking at all the facsimiles of original illustrations of various aspects of art supplies!

I'll comment again when I've actually finished reading this book properly - but I suspect I'll be referencing this book very many times on this blog before that happens!

Note:
(1) Anthea Callen is Professor of Visual Culture in the Department of Art History at the University of Nottingham's School of Humanities. Her publications also include " The Spectacular Body Science, Method and Meaning in the Work of Degas ".
(2) On original publication of this piece, I misrepresented the artists' uptake of tube colour. I misread (with skim reading) what was stated about the manufacture of paint and confused the fact, as reported in the book, that the Impressionists avoided the uncertainties then associated with mass-produced paints with their uptake of tube paints. The text has now been corrected to make this clearer.

Links:

• The Art of Impressionism - Painting Technique and the Making of Modernity
  by Anthea CallenYale University Press. (2000) Hardback, 240 pages; Illustrations: 150 colour plates, 120 b&w illustrations ISBN 0300084021; ISBN-13 9780300084023
• Amazon: The Art of Impressionism