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Impressionism
Timeline |
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Impressionism
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Neo-Impressionism
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Post-Impressionism |
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1898 |
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Embracing Europe |
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Having participated in a number of international exhibitions, the
artists are now enjoying significant prestige in Europe. This year
works by Degas, Manet, Monet, Renoir and Sisley are included in an
exhibition of the International Society of Artists in London, and
Durand-Ruel stages Impressionist exhibitions in Munich and Berlin.
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JANUARY
1st The dealers Boussod & Valadon publish a
portfolio of twenty reproductions of drawings by
Degas, dating from 1861 to 1896, and executed by his friend the engraver and printer Michel Manzi.
DEGAS
After the Bath (No.1)
1891-2
In 1891 Degas embarked upon a series of nude women at their toilet,
all of whom are seen from behind, with their long hair loose. It is
thought that a possible source for these lithographs was Delacroix's
The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople. This painting (which
Degas had copied thirty years earlier) shows a grieving woman from a
similar angle, with her hair also tumbling forward.
8th Works by Manet and Monet are included in an exhibition at
the South London Art Gallery,
Camberwell.
9th Degas buys a still life of a glass and napkin by
Cezanne from Vollard for 400 francs.
31st Sisley (who is still British) applies to the Ministry
of Justice to become a naturalized French citizen.
FEBRUARY
4th Renoir visits Cagnes-sur-Mer in the south of France for the
first time. He is most enthusiastic about this exceptionally
beautiful resort (which would later become his home).
APRIL
14th In connection with Sislev's application for French nationality,
the gendarmerie at Moret-sur-Loing report: 'His behaviour, morality
and integrity are very sound; he is quiet and peace-loving, he does
not visit anybody, and leads a very secluded life. His views do not
seem to pose a threat to national security.'
MAY
1st Sisley exhibits five pictures — all painted during his visit to
Britain in 1897 - at the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts.
14th
Durand-Ruel holds an exhibition of work by Monet, Pissarro, Renoir
and Sisley.
JUNE
1st An exhibition of recent work by Pissarro opens at Durand-Ruel's
gallery, plus a selection of pictures by Monet, Renoir, Sisley and Puvis de Ghavannes.
PISSARRO
The Place du Theatre
Francais
1898
Towards the end of 1897 Pissarro rented a room in the Hotel du
Louvre, which gave him a view of the Rue St-Honore, the Avenue de
1'Opera and the Place du Theatre Francais. During the next few
months he worked on a scries of paintings of these streets.
In this work the viewer looks down on the Place du Theatre Francais
(now the Place Andre Malraux). The theatre itself is in the top
right-hand corner, while the Avenue de l'Opcra leads off to the left
of the roundabout. The painting was one of a number of Pisssarro's
recent works exhibited at Durand-Ruel's gallery in June.
3rd Monet has a successful exhibition at Georges Petit's gallery.
Supplement to Le Gaulois (June 16th, 1898)
reviewing Monet's
exhibition at Georges Petit's gallery.
12th Works by Degas, Monet, Pissarro and Renoir are
exhibited at the Guildhall Art Gallery in London.
JULY
1st Renoir and his family, accompanied by Julie Manet, go to
Berneval, near Dieppe, where they rent a chalet. 4th An exhibition
of the International Society of Artists organized by Whistler opens
at the Prince's Skating Rink, in Kensington, London. It includes six
works by Degas and one each by Monet, Renoir and Sisley, as well as
Manet's Vagabond Musicians (1862) and the version of his
Execution
of the Emperor Maximilian that had been pieced together
by Degas.
15th Pissarro visits Rouen, where he stays till October.
22nd Degas
paints his last landscapes in St-Valery-sur-Somme, where his
parents had taken him as a child.
DEGAS
The Return of the Herd
с. 1898
Degas produced this painting during his visit to the village of St-Valery-sur-Somme
in July. Its harmonious colour and strong outlines are reminiscent
of Gauguin's work, which Degas greatly admired.
SEPTEMBER
10th Mallarme dies.
OCTOBER
8th Sisley's wife, Marie-Adelaide-Eugenie, dies of
cancer. He is suffering from the same disease.
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10th Renoir and Durand-Ruel's son Paul go to see a Rembrandt
exhibition in Amsterdam. While in Holland, they also visit The
Hague.
NOVEMBER
Renoir produces designs for decorative panels in the house of the
impresario Paul Gallimard, but does not paint the panels themselves.
Durand-Ruel stages Impressionist exhibitions in Munich and Berlin.
Pissarro congratulates Zola on his pro-Dreyfus polemic J'Accuse.
DECEMBER
8th-24th Monet visits London to see his son Michel,
who is learning English there. He produces no work during his visit.
12th Renoir sells Degas' The Dance Lesson (c. 1879), which he had
chosen as a gift from Caillebotte's collection after the latter's
death.
With the money it fetches, he buys a view of La
Rochelle by Corot.
Consequently, a coldness ensues between Degas and
Renoir. |
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MONET THE EPICURE
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A photograph of Monet in his dining-room at Giverny (c. 1898), which
was painted in two different shades of yellow. Monet's treasured
Japanese prints can be seen covering the walls. |
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In his fascinating book about his stepfather Claude Monet: ce mal
connu, published in 1960, Jean-Pierre Hoschede - the son of Alice
and Ernest Hoschede - provided an intriguing account
of Monet's favourite dishes and the painter's eating and drinking
habits at the Giverny dinner table: |
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Monet... had a very good appetite ...He loved good wine, and would
never put water in it. That would have been sacrilege. Nevertheless,
we never saw him less than in control of himself, and the reason for
this was that, although loving a fine wine, he never abused it,
being a gourmet and not a glutton. For the same reason, although he
appreciated good cooking, he preferred simple dishes. He did,
however, have his preferences. For instance, he liked asparagus very
lightly cooked, and would have a separate dish of more thoroughly
cooked asparagus for his guests. Salads he liked to season himself-
and in what a manner! He would fill the spoon with ground black
peppercorns, coarse salt, a lot of olive oil and a little wine
vinegar, all well mixed up, and then douse the salad with the
contents, making it almost black. Once it had been treated like
this, the only people who could eat it were Monet and my sister
Blanche, who always ate whatever he did. He had similar preferences
for everything he ate.
With duck for instance, he always took the
wings off... and before they were cooked drenched them in a mixture
of ground pepper, coarse salt and grated nutmeg. For lobster, Monet
had a special sauce made of ground pepper beaten with the 'cream'
taken out of the shell -something which is not usually eaten. When
there was an especially copious meal, Monet always had 'le trou
normand', a glass of Calvados taken between courses. Similarly,
every day, after coffee had been served in the studio, Monet would
always have a glass of plum brandy, made from the plums in the
garden. He was particularly fond of game, especially grouse, which I
always had to provide for him during the season -especially for
Christmas and New Tear's Day. It did not have to be fresh, as Monet
liked his grouse well hung. He never followed any particular diet.
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LITERARY LINKS |
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The death of Stephane Mallarme was a great blow to the surviving
Impressionists. Never before had the links between art and
literature been as close as they were in nineteenth-century France.
Baudelaire had written extensively about art, and in the 1870s Zola
had been not only a friend of the Impressionists but for a
considerable time their stoutest defender. There was, not
surprisingly, a natural camaraderie between the writers and artists
that the establishment classed as 'rebels', and a two-way traffic of
ideas and
images flowed between them. Flaubert, for instance, who lived near
Giverny and counted Monet among his friends, was very receptive to
Impressionist ideas; and in L'Education sentimentale (1869) the
artist Pellerin's painting The Republic: Progress or Civilization
- showing Christ driving a railway engine through a Virgin forest —
was intended as a metaphorical reference to the Impressionists'
concern with contemporary life, which became an important element in
their approach to art.
A watercolour sketch by Edmond de Goncourt of his brother Jules,
painted shortly before the latter's death in 1870.
The novelist and critic Edmond de Goncourt was particularly
interested in the work of Degas - whom he saw almost as a rival,
commenting in 1891: 'He is enamoured of modernity, and within this
context has concentrated on washerwomen and dancers. I find this
quite an admirable choice, especially since in Manette Salomon
(1867) I myself cited these two professions
as providing the most pictorial examples in our age that a painter
could think of Conversely, in Parisian Sketches, published in 1880,
Huysmans included an account of an acrobatic turn at the
Folies-Bergere that was obviously based on Degas' Miss La La
at the Cirque Fernando. The publisher Georges Charpentier — who
subsidized the avant-garde art journal La Vie moderne,
which held exhibitions of work by the Impressionists — was a
committed patron of the movement. Similarly, Marcel Proust and other
writers who had no personal links with the Impressionists lent them
their support and expressed their admiration for them in their
writings.
With Mallarme, however, the links were personal as well ideological.
He had met Manet in 1873. soon after arriving in Paris - and in
1885, two years after the painter's death, he wrote to Verlaine 'I
saw my dear Manet ever)' day for ten years, and I find his absence
today incredible.' It was at Manet's studio — where Mallarme used to
drop in on his way home from teaching at the Lycee Fontane (now the
Lycee Gondorcet) — that he become acquainted with Zola, Monet and
Morisot, as well as Degas and Renoir, who became his close friends.
In 1875 Manet illustrated Mallarme's prose translation of Edgar
Allan Poe's The Raven; and the following year - during which
he painted a portrait of the poet — he illustrated one of his most
famous poems, L'Apres-midi d'unfaune.
GAUGUIN
Nevermore, О Tahiti
1897
This reclining nude recalls Manet's Olympia, which Gauguin
had copied in 1891, but has a much more overt symbolic content.
Despite the title and the unexplained presence of the bird, however,
Gauguin denied more than a passing reference to Edgar Allan Poe's
narrative poem The Raven.
Mallarme, for his part, wrote
enthusiastic articles about Manet, Morisot and Whistler;
and on the death of Morisot he became one of the guardians of her
daughter Julie, a duty which he fulfilled with enthusiasm during the
three remaining years of his life. Nevertheless, despite his links
with the Impressionists, Mallarme was one of the founders of the
Symbolist movement - which reacted against both Romanticism and
Realism, emphasizing the mystical and the religious. He was
therefore closer in feeling to the Post-Impressionists, and was one
of Gauguin's earliest supporters.
The poet Paul Valery — Mallarme's disciple and successor as the
leading literary Symbolist, who was a talented draughtsman and
sculptor as well as a writer — enjoyed equally close links with the
Impressionists and married Jeannie Gobillard, Morisot's niece.
Valery was particularly close to Degas — one of his first major
works, La Soiree avec M. Teste (1896), was partly based on his views
of Degas - and in 1937 he published a book on the artist entitled
Degas, danse, dessin.
GAUGUIN
Portrait of Stephane
Mallarme
1891
Throughout his career Gauguin produced a great many wood engravings
lithographs and monotypes, but this is his only known etching. It dates from a period in early 1891 when Gauguin was
seeking publicity for a fund-raising sale of his work from
Martinique, Brittany and Aries. Mallarme had helped the artist by
persuading the novelist and critic Octave Mirbeau to write a
eulogistic article about Gauguin, which appeared in L'Echo de Pans a
week before the sale.
Several of the Impressionists displayed a strong interest in
literature. Degas wrote a number of sonnets, which were passed
around among his circle in manuscript form, and his letters are
models of wit and acuity. Renoir's literary ability is apparent from
the introduction he wrote in 1911 to a new translation of Gennino
Gennini's II Libro dell'Arte; Monet read widely and had an extensive
library at Giverny; and Cezanne, who wrote a considerable number of
poems in his youth, retained his interest in poetry throughout his
life, his favourite books being Virgil's Eclogues and Baudelaire's
Les Fleurs du mal. |
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CONTENTS |
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