Whenever I have the opportunity to visit an art museum I haven’t seen before I generally head to the Impressionists. The National Gallery is a really serious museum with a wonderful collection of art that spans many, if not all of the major periods of art. This is a real contrast to the art museums of say Italy, which can be enormous but only house one or two types of paintings, primarily of course Renaissance works.
The thing that I love about Impressionism is that it broke from the idea that art had to be a literal translation or reflection of its subject. This was partly due to the advent of photography so that artists were no longer solely responsible for recording or recapping events in history in a documentary fashion. This was good news for, well the art of art.
The thing that was important to the Impressionists was indeed the “impression” left by a particular scene. They saw the beauty in the everyday, in the way light and color (as they liberally interpreted it) played on a particular subject and left a particular subject. For this reason Impressionists frequently worked outdoors and finished works all in one sitting, something previously unheard of.
Early Impressionist painters were radicals in their time, breaking many of the rules of picture-making that had been set by earlier generations. Up until the Impressionists, history had been the accepted source of subject matter for paintings, but Impressionists looked instead to the many subjects in life around them. In doing so, they rejected attempts to portray ideal beauty, and instead sought the natural beauty of their surroundings at a given moment. They captured a fresh and original vision that often seemed strange and unfinished to the general public but in doing so they not only, in my opinion, created some of the most beautiful works of art, they enunciated a philosophy of beauty and art that I whole-heartedly embrace.
There’s a healthy collection of Impressionism at the National Gallery, Van Gogh, Monet, Cezanne, Gauguin, Mary Cassat, to name a few. One of my favorites is there, it’s the attached Manet entitled “The Railroad”. The thing I love about it is that it sort of summarizes the Impressionist philosophy. The particular image, a woman and her daughter waiting for a train, is of no particular importance and no particular “beauty” even. But to the eye of an impressionist, it makes a beautiful impression of color, light and even character.
I think there’s real value to thinking like an Impressionist; in seeing the beauty of the mundane, the beauty of the impression for the impression itself, or the fact that the beauty of the impression is confined to a select few. It’s the impressionist that would say that there is beauty all around us if we simply open up to see it, relieve ourselves of the definitions of beauty or significance and recognize that its impression is all around us.
A young girl gazes out the window of a restaurant, in the eyes of one beholder a reddish glow encircles her silken hair, her lambent skin exudes a pristine light, her eyes sparkle in a color unknown to even all nature, and the moment, the impression is alive to his eyes and his heart. The moment with his daughter is of no historical significance but the Impressionist sees it as the art it is.
By Clay Konnor
