IMPRESSIONISM AND PHOTOGRAPHY COMPARED
The IMPRESSIONIST approach.
In very simple terms, it could be said that the French Impressionists made paintings that resembled photographs which had been converted into mosaics. This might have been true, if the painters had followed the purest theory of Impressionism – the one which Monet expressed to an admirer (“Merely think, here is a little square of blue”, and so on). But French Impressionism never was practiced with such rigid, mechanical purity. Its early practitioners were too talented as artists to do that.
However it is still worth thinking about this theoretical purity in order to understand how painting developed after the Impressionist approach reached its peak, in about 1875. Nothing could be clearer than the instructions from Monet that were quoted in a previous chapter:
“When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you — a tree, a house, a field. . . . Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape.”
Monet’s advice to the American artist Lilla Cabot Perry.
“Reminiscences of Claude Monet from 1889 to 1909”,
The American Magazine of Art, Vol. 18, No. 3, MARCH, 1927
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23931183 (subscription required)
Monet was the purest impressionist. Degas even called him, “The only true Impressionist.” In that pure sense, an impressionist painting is not so much an example of painterly style as an example of a degradation of what appears in a viewfinder.
Pure Impressionism has no vocabulary of schemata. Like photography, it has no style (in the painterly sense). This is why Pissarro and Renoir gave it up, and why Monet exaggerated its qualities and became a ‘doctrinaire Impressionist’ (as Sickert called him), making of painting nothing but a beautiful patchwork quilt.
Bathers at La Grenouillère (1869)
https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/claude-monet-bathers-at-la-grenouillere
In the earliest days of French Impressionism, the objects depicted were clearly recognisable.
Water-Lilies (after 1916)
https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/claude-monet-water-lilies
As Monet went on, his subjects became ever less clearly defined. The fact that the painting was made up of a patchwork of coloured shapes became unmissable. The objects tended to dissolve away.
This may be why more or less pure Impressionism, unlike other styles, has persisted for so long. It consists of learning how to replicate what appears in a viewfinder, with some degradation. Painting such a picture is an exacting task athletically. Mixing and matching colours and placing them accurately is difficult; but the task does not require much memory and imagination. The result is bound to produce the pleasure of the shock of recognition.
Three examples of different computer filters applied to the original photograph. These change the appearance of the image, but do not add any schemata. Little mental input is required. The effect is to decorate the image, but not to make it more informative. The three variations show no understanding of the objects depicted.