Paris 1874

My big takeaway from the National Gallery/Musee d’Orsay’s “Paris 1874” exhibition is that Paris 1874 wasn’t such a big deal after all. The show’s premise trades on the popular conception that the first Impressionist show in 1874 marked an almost cataclysmic moment when the Impressionists broke from the official Salon and charted the new course in art that has brought us to today. In fact, however, only seven of the 31 artists in the renegade show of the Societe Anonyme are now classified as the Impressionists. Their show was only one of 24 exhibitions in Paris of artists outside the Salon. Twelve of the artists showed in both the Salon and the Societe shows. Painters like Boudin, Monet, Bazille had been painting this way for several years already. And the most important Impressionist painting in the show, Manet’s “The Railway,” was in fact presented not at the Societe exhibition but at the Salon. The reason, I think, that we should attach such importance to the 1874 exhibition is not for what it displayed but for the fact that it was the first of eight successive Impressionist exhibitions, running to 1886, that collectively coalesced the core group of Impressionists and cemented their art as the dominant style of France and its tributaries.

In that sense, the exhibition is a more than useful historic corrective. While falling short of art masterpieces, to this spectator’s disappointment, it does accomplish two worthy goals: it places the work of Monet, Degas, Morisot, Cezanne, Renoir, Pissarro and Sisley in the context of the art around it at the time. And it relates this moment to French history: the need and desire for art to help France emerge from the devastation of the Franco-Prussian War and its aftermath.

The star of the Salon was a work by Jean-Leon Gerome, who was and is a wonderful painter, still collected and admired today (viz., Mia’s “Carpet Merchant). Coming from two weeks in Italy, I can see Gerome as a direct descendant of my favorites Ghirlandaio and Pintoricchio, technically brilliant artists who painted historical or religious tableaux, bright colors, clear compositions, no evident brushstrokes. Most of the other Salon artists represented have not survived as well, and for good reason. Their subjects are cliched, their figures’ poses are artificial, their facial expressions melodramatic. Some, like Bouguereau, are so corny they are good, but no one would confuse them with anything real. And that is where Impressionism leaves the Salon works in the dust, largely never to rise again.

The catalogue authors identify two characteristics that qualify Impressionism. One is the subject: instead of history or religion or moralizing genre, the Impressionists painted the world as they saw it, whether it was boats on the water, people in the theater or cafes, or families at home. This applies, as far as I can tell, to every single painting we call Impressionism. The second characteristic is less universal but also far-reaching: it is a freedom in handling paint. No longer was the finish exemplified by a Gerome essential. To observers at the time, in fact, many of the Impressionists’ works looked unfinished and were criticized as such, notably Monet’s “Impression: Sunrise” that gave the movement its name. I say this is less universal, for while Monet and Morisot, notably, show a looseness, even sketchiness, in their application of paint, a Degas can appear as finished as any Salon artist and his “At the Races” looks just as good from six inches away as six feet. (The same holds for Bazille, who is latterly included in the Impressionist group although he died in the war four years before our show.)

I should add a word or two about the individual works that make up Paris 1874. Of the 70 or so on view in Washington (the lineup differed in France), approximately half were shown at the Societe, half at the Salon. Not surprisingly, most of my favorites were from the former, although with 3,657 paintings appearing at the 1874 Salon, one can only wonder if the curators have chosen their one percent from the best, a cross-section, a selection to fit their themes, or largely from what was currently findable and available for travel. With only 215 works in the Societe show we can be sure the sample in D.C. is more representative of the whole, with the understanding that the curators have favored the cadre of 51 works by the Impressionist 7, which in any case are more likely to have survived the century and a half and become available for loan from public institutions.

The best surprise was Henri Rouart’s “Terrace on the Banks of the Seine at Melun.” Here was an artist I’d never heard of, painting a peaceful sunny scene that reminded me of William Merritt Chase’s later views of Central and Prospect Parks. A sweeping foreground path, a deep blue sky and lots of small detailed buildings in the background. Next to it was another artist fresh to me, Edouard Beliard, whose “Pontoise, View from the Lock” resembled a Jongkind in composition and clarity, although his objects were a tad fuzzier, and less appealing, than Rouart’s.

Among the famous Impressionists, Alfred Sisley was his dependably pleasant self and Berthe Morisot more than held her own: “The Cradle” was the single most haunting picture in the show. Degas’s “At the Races” from the MFA has been a favorite since my days in college, where I also spent hours studying Paul Cezanne’s “House of the Hanged Man.” Renoir, Pissarro and Monet all had good examples but also hinted at their later work that I like less.

My favorite artist in the show was Stanislas Lepine, and not far behind was Giuseppe De Nittis. Their works–and they each had three paintings in the exhibition–exemplified the loose boundary between the Salon and the Societe: in fact, of De Nittis’s trio, one showed at the Salon, one was rejected by the Salon and one showed with the Societe. I had loved Lepine’s work before, which I mainly knew from the Art Institute of Chicago, but the light emanating from his “Landscape” of 1869 blew me away. The amorphous point was well made on another wall, which showed side-by-side two portraits: the “Artist’s Grandfather” by Jules Bastien-Lepage that played at the Salon and a similar, but not so strong, “Old Fisherman” by Adolphe Cals from the Societe. A question I didn’t get to ask is why Eugene Boudin, the most important precursor to Monet and the Impressionists, was represented by six small pastel sketches and none of his iconic beach or harbor scenes.

Finally, a late chapter in the catalogue, not reflected in the exhibition itself, is titled, “1877: The First True Impressionist Exhibition?” and points to what was missing in 1874. This time, the Big 7 plus Armand Guillaumin and the key addition of Gustave Caillebotte, dominated the show, with 60 per cent of the works on display. There was no overlap with the Salon and the show included more of the paintings we know from Impressionism textbooks. This postscript reinforced what I had already concluded from my tours: 1874 was the warm-up, not the Big Bang. Maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ll get another crack at the art world’s favorite subject in 2027.

P.S. Just read in a review of a new Monet biography that “Impressionism” is generally dated from 1869, five years before this show, when Monet and Renoir painted side-by-side at La Grenouillere – more context for Paris 1874. The “first Impressionist exhibition” was not the dawn of the style, but rather its emergence in a concerted way upon the French art scene.