A New Look at Impressionism: Materials and Techniques of the French Impressionists

so thank you so much for joining us here today as you do week but after week and please join me in welcoming first up Annette Manik Thank You brick and Kristen and welcome everyone good afternoon rebellion materials and techniques of the French Impressionists or perhaps more appropriately the French independence for that is what they were independent artists many with strong personalities and opinions but United in a rejection of the salons restricted view of art stylistically in hierarchically they did of course have common ground depictions of Modern Life expressive visible mark making and an exploration of color which is our segue to pest out pastel is almost pure color it's made of pigment filler here represented by cailin and a little binder typically gum tragacanth mixed with water to create a thick paste which is rolled into sticks and then allowed to dry slowly the filler gives substance to the stick facilitates transfer to the paper and generates a range of value from dark to light the binder holds the stick together and not much binder is necessary to do that pastels are classified as hard or soft depending on the amount of binder in the stick hard pastels which have a little bit more binder are great for line and detail work while soft pastels generate passages of velvety color by the end of the 17th century artists could purchase ready-made pastel sets and here we are looking at a modern contemporary set all nice and neat in its roll snugged into the foam inserts to keep them from breaking and here we have Mary Cassatt's pastel said after a wee bit of use I would say it's currently on view in the Rabb gallery in the pastel exhibition ready-made pastel sets were true boon to artists because pastels unlike paints are not easily mixed each color from dark to light is represented by a separate color stick pastel colors can be limited to a limited to a limited extent while working on paper but over blending results in a dull and unattractive color because pastel color is not suspended in a medium such as oil the particles of pastel when blended mix directly with each other and lose their colour character and intensity typically ending up as various shades of brown or gray I don't know if any of you have ever done the colored sand and layer in glass or your children in a craft project did that absolutely beautiful intense color layers and then if it's accidentally mixed or someone impulsively gives it a shake all of those different color particles intermix and you end up with a kind of nondescript color and that's what happens with that style when it's over blended a variety of tools were available and are available to pastel artists for manipulating the pastel once it's on the paper and here we're looking at chamois stumps torta loans and brushes these implements can also be used to apply powdered pastel to the image as one's working or an artist could choose to use his or her hands directly and not use any implements at all it's a very straightforward medium in that way I'd like to go quickly through some basic pastel techniques to calibrate your eye to some of what we're going to look at later in the lecture basically it breaks down into dry and wet techniques here we see lines made from the point or the edge of the stick and then also these rectangular passages of broader color that are made by rubbing the flat part of the stick against the paper blending can be done as seen here with the torte alone blending tends to reduce the intensity of the color because the pastels getting worked into the fibers of the paper and also the compression affects the light scattering properties of that particulate material but this can be done to great effect with clothing or atmospheric effects chamois tends to be more vigorous in its effect on pastel it can be done subtly and lightly but it's the default eraser if you will for pastel and here you can see an area that was removed with the chamois the simplest wet technique in pastel is to dip the stick in water and make a mark artist absent a stick of water would also stick it in their mouth to wet it before they applied to paper I wouldn't recommend that but that that certainly was done and probably still is done the resulting mark tends to be pastier in nature it does not have the particulate powdery nature of dry pastel it's reverting to its manufacturer form when it was in that pasty mixture and allowed to dry pastel could also be crushed into a powder and with water added to create a paint the resulting paint tends sometimes has chunks of unpolarized pastel that are visible often has a kind of gritty nature from the filler material and has a kind of cloudy aspect to it as opposed to watercolor which has a more translucent and more of the look of staining the paper as opposed to sitting on the surface because pastel was not meant to be a paint it doesn't always fare very well because there's so little binder in that stick it doesn't hold together well as a paint a binder in paint or watercolor and other media is what allows the paint to form of film and because there's so little in pastel there's really not much to hold it all together and so here we're seeing the result of that weak film where there are losses Craxton and lifting supports the best attribute of a pastel support is a toothy surface because pastel is powdery with little binder it needs a rough or textured surface in order to stay put a wide range of purpose made pastel supports were available to 19th century artists some artists heeded the need of the stick in choosing a support and some did not this is a range of pastel supports used by artists in the exhibition in the MFA collection I'm going to go quickly through these because we're going to see these later on as we look at at individual pastels but at the upper-left we have a ribbed paper favored by Renoir in the center top row a course paper used in two goz early landscape that's on exhibition right now there are bits of straw in there which help hold the pastel in place and then next to it we have the unconventional support of a tracing paper smooth surface not good for paths style there's not much to hold the pastel to God found a way to make it work for him men a at the lower left is also working on a unconventional support for pastel which is a primed canvas meant for oil painting not pastel in the center the artists lair meet used a prepared paper which was attached to a conventional painting canvas stretcher situation and we'll look at that structure in a moment but his paper the prepared paper for pastel is a glue layer on top of paper with a gritty material embedded in it often times pumice or marble dust and then finally Cassatt we have another prepared paper this also has considerable tooth but the the grittiness of if you will is a little bit sharper than in the lair meat it's a subtle variation but it ends up playing out and how the pastel sits on the paper so here we have Renoir and I think for most of us this has many of the aspects that we associate with Impressionism and I put it here beside an 18th century pastel by Maurice Contenta Latour and I think you can see some significant differences in the handling of the two they actually have very little in common in terms of purpose and technique but they are both made in pastel and our on a similar paper that ribbed paper that we saw the detail on the Renoir earlier the subject in the Latour is a person of prominence and wealth Renoir subjects are common people in everyday clothes the Latour is an indoor setting while the Renoir background although unspecified suggests the light in color of the out-of-doors the litter resembles a painting which was the goal while the Renoir has the immediacy and directness of a drawing in the 18th century the aim was to minimize or obliterate that ribbed texture in the paper by rubbing down the paper with pumice which also raised the NAP of the paper all good for pesto in Renoir's case he celebrated the texture of the paper as it exciting accentuated the line work of the pastel and reinforced the characteristics of drawing interestingly Renoir had a choice in papers he could have chosen a paper without this distinctive ribbing but instead this was his paper of choice in latter's time this was the only type of paper available and its true characteristics were minimized looking more closely at the Renoir with breaking light I think the people in front are going to be able to pick this up a little bit better than the people in back some of these subtleties are hard to project but I use an arrow here to indicate the direction of the ribbing in the paper and as much as the arrow only goes that distance the ribbing is across the whole sheet and parallel and very closely spaced together and then there are also vertical lines which are more widely spaced together widely spaced apart we're looking at a detail of the flower and we can see a little bit better how Renoir is working the pastel on the paper these arrows are pointing to areas that he rubbed the pastel into the paper so this ribbed paper has high points Valley High Point Valley High Point valley it the arrows are indicating places where he's worked the pastel down into the valley where this third arrow shows the valley clean you're looking at the paper right there coming back to our full view and looking at the areas backed off we can see how he uses this to effect rubbing the pastel into the interstices of the paper allows him to create shadow and form whereas on the left the arrow pointing to the lighter area you get the sense of light on her shoulder in addition to the effects of light that can be achieved with this paper it really does accentuate the characteristic mark making of drawing so mr. men a choosing an oil painting support for his pastel what was he thinking that's what conservators say at any rage because it's really not a good support for pastel here we are looking at the back of the pastel in its frame the first arrow indicates the back of the frame the second arrow the wooden stretcher and then the last arrow we're looking at the back of the canvas and here it is outside of its frame and paper conservation the lower image or direct your attention there shows us the tacking edge where we can see his canvas the nail heads which hold that canvas to the wooden support and then the dashed line shows us the edge of the priming layer in a detail here we can see the texture of the canvas and the white area represents the the primer area because it's at the edge there's some where there typically you wouldn't see quite so much of the texture of the canvas and then the yellow of course is the pastel sitting on the top two men Hayes credit he tried to rub the pastel in an area and get things to really stick together but the result oftentimes in these pastels are pinpoint losses which I show you the arrows highlighting some of them certainly not all but some we consider these particularly fragile because it's not a good marriage of materials wonderful pastels but delicate the artist's lair meet worked on a somewhat similar structure men a the men a we just looked at but on top of that canvas support is a piece of prepared pastel paper and I have a schematic here that'll hopefully make this a little bit more clear so on the top we have the prepared paper with the irregular surface very friendly to pastel which sits on top of a canvas that wraps around the wooden stretcher held in place and then paper tapes which hold this package together we're looking here at the corner of the lair meat out of its frame above the dashed line is the surface of the pastel this dashed line represents the edge of that prepared paper here we have the canvas that sits below the prepared paper and then the brown paper tapes which hold it all in place this detail at the top edge shows the exposed ground of that prepared paper Laramie chose not to cover every centimeter of the support with pastel and wanted the ground to participate in the overall image so these topi areas represent that ground on the paper the white areas are sitting on the hilltops of that irregular surface and this arrow is pointing to an area where some of the black pastel has been worked into the interstices of the paper looking at another detail again we have that softer look of rubbed and pastel on the gray indicated by the arrow and then these arrows are indicating pastels sitting on the surface and used in combination the softer rubbed in passages with these areas of dense fluffy powdery pastel really really sparkles and if you haven't seen this pastel in the exhibition I encourage you to go and look at it it really is wonderful in the lab and unframed we have the opportunity to look at these things in ways that I'm sorry you all don't get to look at but I'm trying to share here with you today so one of the things that we observed with this unframed was the paper tape that we see at the right here there were areas of loss where we could see the original ground color which was a light blue a robin's egg blue and the arrows are indicating those places where we could see the ground so I'm going to ask you to imagine these areas all of the taupey areas in this detail as a light blue as opposed to the beige you see here and then imagine this whole pastel with light blue behind it where the exposed ground is able to play a stronger role in in the overall composition and it brings the lira meets palette closer in line with the impressionist palette it's still a beautiful pastel so please don't let this diminish your your love of it it really is is beautiful but a little bit altered Mary Cassatt also worked on a prepared paper with a little bit different tooth than the layer meet she her format was often similar to layer meets with a prepared paper wrapped over a painting canvas this pastel came into the collection without that support it's not uncommon in the history of a pastel for them to come off their stretchers or strainers for a variety of reasons I suspect it originally was in a format similar to the lair meet the detail I hope highlights some of that texture and the way in which these clouds of pastel are just really embedded if you think of not that you would have reason to do this but running a piece of chalk over a piece of piece of sandpaper it would be a similar kind of effect the sandpaper would just pull the chalk off of the stick and that's what these kinds of prepared supports did for artists Cassatt worked her backgrounds and her clothing very differently than her faces looking at the detail of the figure at the left very gestural very free open strokes not a lot of blending of color but her faces are usually much more highly worked with blending and not much of the support showing at all in this detail you hopefully will also see the Impressionists color theory at play with greens and reds combined to intensify the color of each so at the jawline in particular one could see the reds and greens Monet and Irene will talk to you a great deal about Monet he did do pastels sporadically in his life his early work a pastel is more common in his early work he exhibited pastels in the first impressionist exhibition but then really made his name in painting and we will see that even in working this pastel the painterly effects that Irene will be talking to you more about our present so unlike the pastels that we have been looking at so far which are mostly evident in dry pastel technique we begin to suspect he's using a little water here the surface is not particulate and powdery it looks a little bit compressed although dry stick can be compressed and have a smooth surface as well but there's a brushy quality to this that as one starts to look around and here we're looking in the sky things begin to really indicate that he's using water in some fashion here and I draw your attention to the yellow stroke in the center and in particular those gray irregular shapes within the yellow stroke which are in fact losses so if you remember back to that ochre color mock-up that I showed you with the flaky losses because pastels don't make great paint that's what's going on here I'm highlighting a few more areas that show this flaking and loss not to overstate the fact that it's a flaky pastel but instead to hopefully illustrate how Monet was working in layers when you're working pastel dry you're really not working in layers the the powder sits next to another powder it kind of sits lightly on top but it doesn't form discrete individual layers when you add water then you get that weak film forming property and you start to see layers so underneath these gray strokes is yellow pastel and here's an example of that there that guy just has a lot going on so here we are I used this last example to show you because this was a little bit of a revelation to me as I was looking at this that the pastel was actually flaking as Monet was making it and I use these two areas of loss and this black line to hopefully illustrate it and I hope you'll stick with me so that that this makes sense to you as well so if you think about those losses that would have been a continuing flow of gray paint if those losses occurred after that black line was already there we wouldn't seek black lines where those arrows are they would have fallen off with those flakes of gray so from this it's my feeling that this was happening as he was working and not at all surprising given the nature of pastel and wet pastel we can hardly talk about late 19th century French pastel and not talk about de guy and I know Kitty Hanson devoted a whole lecture to you on that or talk and I will try not to be too redundant to what she's shared with you but I just couldn't like not come I couldn't come here and not talk about him and I'm hoping that I'm offering a little bit of a conservation perspective different from Katie's so you'll have a little bit more to take away with you this is a charcoal and pastel drawing done on tracing paper that tracing paper not a good material for pastel but a material that de God loved especially later in his career it offered him infinite flexibility and indulged his deepest obsessive qualities which was to copy and to alter slightly and change the position and transfer gave him all of that so he was determined to find a way to work with this and what he did was to use what we call a fixative which is a sticky solution which keeps powdery material in place many artists shy away from fixatives because they also have the unfortunate property of dulling pastel and what draws artists too pastel in the first place are these intense amazing pure colors the other negative with fixatives is that they initially darken the pastel on application but then over time continue to darken so you have the worst of all worlds other than the pastel stays put took I worked out a way of layering his fixatives and pastels to great effect and when we look at dancers Rose you will see that so this is sort of the beginning place for a full-blown pastel four to God typically working out the composition in tracing paper and we're looking at a detail here where he's lifted the charcoal a little he decides I want her to be a little lower this figure we're aware am I gonna put her arm who knows we'll only know after he finishes the pastel once he had established the composition as he liked it he would apply the fixative set the charcoal drawing maybe with a few touches of pastel added and then take it to his mounter who would mount it onto a thick paper board and I'm showing another detail here which illustrates what's not uncommon with these is that you'll see little blisters with breaking light where the tracing paper is not completely attached so on two dancers Rose how do we get passed out to stay put and when we're working on tracing paper and working in layers this was done on tracing paper as well it's actually five pieces of tracing paper he not uncommon Lee would expand his compositions but technically or not technically compositionally first looking at this we see how the guy used the stage prop of a tree as a framing device the dark vertical form presses on the figures from the left accentuating this unusual backstage view and when we get a little further along in the slides we'll see how his handling of pastel with the tree and with the figures varies and actually helps shift the viewers perspective on onto the dancers this detail hopefully shows you the texture and the color intensity that Digga was able to achieve working in this very eccentric way so again he's got his charcoal drawing he fixes it he applies pastel he fixes that and he works up these elaborate tapestries of color and line that are just unbelievable and here's another detail of one of the ballerinas face and I'm hoping you get a sense of the variety of mark making that he's using here so now back to our tree prop and and the figures wanting the viewer to focus attention on the figures he's leaving his last layer of pastel unfixed so it can Sparkle and it can shine and the mark making is very distinctive and individualistic where on the tree the color is broader it's a little bit duller it really plays second fiddle to the main event which which are these ballerinas dancers resting we're gonna deconstruct this one a little bit at the length it's made of three different pieces of paper mounted onto a paper board in this case the guy's not working with tracing paper he's working on a more conventional paper he put this piece of paper down first or his mount or did by his direction this one's second and this top strip last and these little rectangular shapes that fill out on the edges are areas of uncovered mounting boards so it's it's what the three papers were attached to looking at that upper left corner we see where the three papers join together and then the exposed mounting board and the fact that once these three pieces of paper were attached to the mounting board the whole mounting board including the three pieces of paper were his canvas the washes of color go all the way to the edge and looking again at the seam of the vertical left paper and the main piece of paper and looking specifically at this area of her arm which is very blunt we understand that he is working these two figures separately on separate pieces of paper and then in his repurposing reorganizing what kind of composition do I want to make he brings them together for for this pastel and then just works the image across the seam unfazed if that's not enough there are a few other little telltale tracks on this this pastel to give us some insight into the guy's thinking although truth to be told we don't really know the full story here I'm going to take away those other two pieces of paper and draw your attention to these areas which represent crease marks in the paper so they run edge to edge on this rectangle and then another vertical line which is a graphite line drawing so I put it to you that before he combined this composition and decided what the final look would be that he thought hmm I wonder if I cropped it this way how that would work for me or maybe I should go a little bit more in and do this one ah let's just you know come right in tight on her in the end he went with what we see today I'd like to quickly show you some of his pastel technique in this work because it represents wet and dry nicely we had the line work of the edge of the stick dry we have the flat of the stick represented by the whites we have scribbly action going on on the other side of the bench and then we see him blending blending so vigorously in her knee that he raised the NAP of the paper and also this is a really nice illustration of what happens when you mix a bright blue and a peach and a cream and agreeing together and you get this kind of gray warm muddy thing perfect for the shadow that he was trying to create but when you want something to really sing you don't want to over mix too much with pesto and then her tutu which is extraordinary a wonderful combination of blending and powdery pastel which gives you the sense both of the air between the the crinoline or whatever the material the tutu is made of shadow and then offset against the white really really beautiful back in the shoulder of the figure at the left we see indications of his dipping the stick in water and making these little marks which have an impasto quality to them again that paste that's generated from the wet stick and these washes we have brush strokes in it there's a cloudiness and a particulate heaviness to these washes that suggests that he may well have crushed pastel in water and applied it this way and I'll end on this one not the whole actually still have me for a lil while longer I picked this one because it shows wet me meeting dry so her shoes and the tutu are largely dry technique and her feet are resting on what is largely wet technique and now printing in monotype duh pastel with monotype after the first monotype he made amazing and I'm afraid I'm going to walk you through how a monotype is made so that we can look at what I'd like to show you with de gAHS monotypes and pastel monotypes so with monotype you start with a printing surface you're not making marks permanent marks in or on top of that surface you're just putting ink down and manipulating the ink on the plate you put a damp piece of paper over that and you get a print a mirror image of what's on the plate you can get more than one image from a plate but each image after the first is lighter because there's less ink on the plate to transfer to the paper and then we also have the wrinkle of counter proofing so once that first print is made and the ink is still wet you can put a damp piece of paper over that wet ink print run it through the press and get another image it will be the mirror image of the first print but it'll be in the same orientation as your printing plate de guy used first and second pole images from his monotypes he also used the counterproof the reverse and to me it's very similar to what he's doing with the tracing paper trying different variations to see what's finally going to work for him the MFA is fortunate to have a color monotype landscape monotype by dega both because it's a wonderful thing and from a conservation perspective it gives me the bones of the pastel monotypes this is how his pastel monotypes the landscape start with colored ink that in this case yellow and a kind of brownie violet color looking at the details we can see this the brushwork in the ink as he's working it on the plane and also a kind of reticulated surface and area which represents the transfer of ink from the plate to the paper coming to one of our pastel mana types I can tell you there are at least three different color printing inks underneath the pastel if there are more at some point someone sees them good for them I saw three red and green and black and in this detail we see an area of the green printing ink without pastel over it and here we have the fluffy pink pastel that's sitting over the green printed it has that reticulated quality to it now we're really zooming in in magnification again the fluffy pastel back here we see some of that reticulated black printing ink and then stay with me this arrow is pointed to a kind of milky area and there's a milkiness and a shine to this that suggests to me that he's also working with fixatives at least in our pastel monotypes similar to his work in with dancers and rows where he's putting pastel down fixing it and then working over it again at least vocally but I did find quite a few areas like this and so I'm going to end with Camille Pissarro with this painting and it is a true fusion of painting and pastel aesthetic bizarro was considered a mentor and stalwart in the impressionist movement he exhibited in all of the impressionist exhibitions while this painting clearly represents some of excuse me the tenants of Impressionism capturing everyday life in a bright color palette with the expressive mark making it is anything but spontaneous it is a composition constructed in his studio it has far too many moving parts can you match trying to capture all of these people and their various poses sitting out there in the courtyard with your your easel not going to happen plan air a tenant or hallmark of Impressionism is really a way of working better suited to landscape and with that I'm going to hand it over to Irene who will talk about Monet the master of plein air thank you [Applause] [Applause] [Music] let me just make sure I remind myself how to use some of these things um I haven't given a talk like this in a little while so I hope I do not drive you crazy with the sound of flipping pages which I'll try to abandon after a certain point we will move to Claude Monet in his garden in chef Aaron II I have to say it's a special day this is actually his birthday he was born November 14th 1840 so I was going to talk about Mona anyway primarily I mean completely but this makes it even more important and I certainly have the greatest respect for all the impressionist painters but we'll take a look at Monet's work as it's represented in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts so we'll be looking quickly at nine paintings out of the 35 that are in the collections here as everybody understands Monet's goal was to paint directly from nature paint as much as you could in plein air to record as faithfully as possible the look and feel of a particular place at a particular time this is a very difficult thing to do and he really mastered it will progress chronologically and consider aspects of his style which were present in the early work and then how his technique evolved in time as you know from your looking in our galleries his technique was superb his eye was superb I'll start by just quickly going through the art materials that were available to Monet and the other Impressionists mostly because there actually were some innovations that were critical to the success of Impressionism starting in the 18th century even French artists started pulling away from making their own materials with apprentices in the studio but buying them in specialist shops oops sorry this nerves the specialist shop where artists would go and get their paints canvases stretchers etc this is not an exciting slide I'm going to be on it for a little while but it makes some important points the image on the Left gives the size of standardized stretched linen linen was the most common much support for impressionist artists and certainly Monet when they were pre-prepared as they were so commonly in these shops they were of very specific sizes which were actually developed with older painting in mind certain proportions for a portrait certain proportions for a landscape the impressions often found themselves using a portrait format for a landscape they were freer in the use of those supports stretched fabric and we will soon see an image of the reverse of the painting has slight give which facilitated the quick act with application of paint favored by the Impressionists Monet sometimes special ordered his canvases because he in general had an idea in his mind quite set of what exactly was going to be portrayed in the painting and therefore he would request specific sizes for his stretched canvases it's on the right you get a sense that there was a great variety of texture available to the artists in those canvases from very fine to very rough and coarse and Monet used various of these textures as in his career primarily using the smoother preparations but there are some rougher ones that we'll see later and then the bottom you have to canvass bits of canvas prepared with a ground a cellulose based material like a linen canvas is vulnerable to acid degradation from direct contact of acidic materials so the standard preparation to protect the canvases was to apply a size which helped to seal the fibers of the fabric and then to apply a ground layer to give you another layer of sealing but also a bed layer for the application of paint the Impressionist used canvases prepared in that way the grade at the bottom indicates to you that there were various colors available in these pre-prepared canvases basically white well white probably too strong but variations of cream of pink of gray and well actually as you saw in the lair meet with the faded base the past at least were dealing with made choices about the color for the ground as well this I'm glad and that showed the reverse of the MANET because it's probably a little clearer than this image of the back of one of our water lilies this is the 1907 water lily we'll be looking at the front of it towards the end of this presentation but that is an original stretcher and the original canvas stamp we're always very interested in the canvas stamps because somehow it gets you a little closer to the artist and know a bit more about whose shop he was buying from the canvas in this case is incredibly fine that may not show as well in this image as I would like but it is almost like a hankerchief Linens liking the canvas shipped amps I'm going to show you two more the one on the left is actually from la Japan des which no longer it's no longer visible the he's been lined but he's clearly these are three different sources this is the actual this is obviously a more contemporary image it gives you an idea about the scale of applying ground for mass production basically of these canvases so this is a the application of a ground of a commercial ground has a much more consistent smooth surface than an artist prepared ground oil paint I mean in its simplest constituents is oil it's usually linseed or poppy oil and dry pigments that are then going to be ground into it ground pigments dry pigments always look amazingly vivid when they're in the bottles before being worked into a paint this image is wonderful the traditional way of hand grinding the pigment into the oil medium and then machine developments in the 19th century that allowed a speedier production of the paint there were different opinions about the quality of whether hand-ground was better than machine ground I'm honestly not sure of Monet's preferences someone like Delacroix's somewhat older artists absolutely demanded a hand ground paint another innovation in the 19th century something we so take for granted is the paint tube no before the paint tube there were basically animal bladders that were used to contain the paint and in order to get the paint out you made a hole in the bladder squeezed and then filled the hole with a thumbtack or something like that this led to rapid drying out of pink in the collapsible metal to tubes of paint you can obviously much better seal the paint from the air which makes it you're able to keep it for a longer period of time and this also greatly facilitated being able to go outside to play to paint it was very important for plein air painters to easily be able to transport their materials their paints there was another development which it's again it's so common to us that we're kind of surprised by the fact that if you look at the brushes on the far right of this image there what you see every day in blick you know basically the metal for rule is what it's called holding together the bristles of the brush it actually allowed this is the favorite brush brush of the Impressionists because it allowed heavier application of paint it allowed a consistency if they wanted it in that stroke of paint and it imparted a lot of texture which you can see on the surfaces of these paintings then the perhaps the greatest change in the 19th century was the explosion in the range of color that was available to the Impressionists and these were the result of developments in the chemical industry during that century this image is from one of the three books I mentioned in the bibliography this is from the wall walk through sorry I can't say wall rough rich hearts but this is a fantastic image for showing what became available after 1870 it is astonishing see I could now read all this off to you but basically it's cadmium zkk rooms and then a whole range of the of Blues synthetic ultramarine and cobalt just a fantastic range of them now this doesn't mean the Impressionists and Monet didn't use traditional colors they certainly did white LED is a major part of his paintings also in the early years use of black then and the ochres the ochre colors the traditional earth-based colors but really with the development of these colors which sometimes were use pure often used mixed with white to reduce the intensity of the chrome and then sometimes mixed with other paints of strong hue in order to get a particular color but basically without these colors impressionist painting as we know it wouldn't have been possible this is just for fun to show you a palette from one of the paint producers Lefranc beaugeois who are still in business and the orderly arrangement of the color is basically to give you a sense you know their sense of the range of colors that would be available the right is a Monet's palette which exists and the museum marmatan in Paris from his studio at the end of his life and that mentioned the concept of contrast simultaneous contrast of colors this was the 19th century saw an incredible amount of writing and theorizing about the effect of color on the eye and how it's mixed in the brain but the basic principle that I want to convey here is that opposite colors opposite each other on the color wheel will intensify the appearance of each when they're put in proximity to each other lastly you could also at those shops by your outdoor painting equipment and it was incredibly important for someone like Monet whose major goal was to do as much painting outside as he could however there were points in his career consistently when he did paint inside this is an image from 1870 this is bozhil studio basile had more money than most of them so he had a fancy studio and who you see there is Monet I should prize Monet MANET bozhil the tall man but essentially Monet also did work inside on the paintings at times it can be next to impossible to know you know the line of demarcation between work outside and work in the studio I think other talks in the the series have given you an idea of why impressionist painting was so revolutionary and was seen as so outrageous because it did not follow traditional salon painting which was the accepted style of the time it's interesting to note however that in the many steps in preparing a painting and this is our great Renault that's in the European galleries there were preliminary work there was preliminary work that was done quite rapidly the sketch on the left and then the sketch on the right which is more studied trying to establish the tonal values but the one on the left is particularly amazing because you know you just you think it's only the impression that's who we're so free and their handling but he's setting his colors and it's rather extraordinary to see that again though the point is you couldn't show something like that in the salon and it wasn't accepted which is why ultimately Impressionists form their own group and exhibited independently making the point again about older peers older painters working quickly outside the image on the left is a Corot from around 1828 on a thin panel with a bright white ground rapidly applied paint his point here is to help him establish for perhaps a later painting the appearance of light in that exact scene then on the right a series of image of sketches that were done by Paul hue they were done in a northern forest so it's a darker color palette to some degree but there's great fluidity great sense of them having been painted outside so there were precedents for outside painting it's just it wasn't acceptable in a painting here we have a work which is out on exhibition the work on the right is a Rousseau that's in Franco's gallery and it is an example of Barbizon painting artists who were intent on realistically rendering a landscape they did work outside but they also did pepper Ettore work like you see on the left here I don't want to cause you to be confused the work on the left is not does not correspond to the painting on the right it's just one of the images that I could find that showed you how deliberately worked up the paintings his paintings would be in advance again depending on tonal variation more than anything else and highly realistic detail the combination here allows you to see the earliest Monet in the collection the wood gatherers at the edge of the forest which is also out in the galleries in the Bracco's gallery and they dated about 1863 it's kind of interest and we don't know if he knew the specific grew so but it's interesting to see the similar buildup of the composition of field of green orange and brown trees blue sky but look how subdued the Rousseau is compared to the Monet so we'll look at the Monet a little more closely and begin to see some of the characteristics that were present in his work from right from the get-go the strong green and in contrast to the rather strong oranges which again you have the effect of the complementary colors makes them vivid the way the green is applied is very broadly brushed and much simplified compared to the Rousseau the trees have detail but not to the degree of the Barbizon painting this is a close image on the right is through the microscope and gives you a good look at the face of the foremost figure actually that the picture on the left also shows you the broadness of the brushwork and the texture that's in it from the brush this seems to be a combination of the old-fashioned sable brush and a bristle brush which animates the overall texture of the surface of the painting in the detail you see him making extremely quick cursory strokes to indicate her face please also notice that the strong green color is underneath the strokes of the face and this is a common thing with Monet's technique is that they'll be an under color and he then modifies it or works something else completely over it this would never happen in a salon type painting which was all pre-planned where each part a part of the composition was going to be laid in the interplay between a tree and the sky is incredibly important in Monet we're going to see this consistently and that is he is trying to evoke the action of wind in the air and so the leaves of the tree are not specifically defined their quick brush strokes and technique really does give you a sense of movement this also this part of his style that you're going to see over and over again but deepening in the sophistication of its use is the fact that he will lay a stroke in and then modify it with a stroke going over it this again gives you helps to create the sense of what your eye experiences when you are looking at trees in a landscape and sensing movement and that just that things are not precise that they're integrated the painting on the upper left here is a Buddha in the museum collection but not out now and then the Monet ships in harbour from 1873 which is out in the Monet gallery boudin was incredibly important for Monet he actually the reason the two met was because boudin was based in the normandy area of the art where Monet was raised and he realized apparently I mean when Monet was a teenager they met when in 1858 Monet was like 18 and he was known in the town because he did caricatures of people in the town and they were displayed in art supply stores or in galleries and bouton became aware of it saw that this man had tremendous talent and really encouraged him he also realized that Monet was very interested in painting in plein air which boudin did when he did his studies for Works and that is what is what you're seeing on the upper left there quick brushstrokes a sense of the light all achieved from having painted it outside the Monet which is from about 1873 he boudin is long in his path but it shows how he's progressed and what his major interest in creating light and movement I actually realized I have just left out a quote which Monet said about boudin I mean they worked together for a few years and the influence of boudin encouraging him to work in plein air and to work freely and gesturally Monet said suddenly when he was watching boudin paint outside suddenly It was as if a veil had been torn from my eyes I understood what painting could be so in 1873 and this one clearly was done completely outside he's sketching he's noting I you know ships in the harbor on a fairly gray day and how is he expressing this through basically wonderfully loose brushstrokes in the sky and the water and then somewhat tighter but not too tight and filling in of the boats and the reflections of the boats I mean what a thing is this this this man consistently in his career trying to do the reflections in moving water this is really very difficult and it's impressive how well he achieved that in his work here we have a detail from the masks and you see the quick broad brushstrokes of the blue of the sky also the lightest areas in the sky are areas of exposed ground so in this case the ground is really quite light the colors of the mast there's a lot of blending going on in there and also disconnected strokes to define say part of the rigging and that again it gives you the idea of this quick look and the way things appear when you're actually looking at them as opposed to giving the complete structure of the mast and rigging here detail from the bow the reflection of the boat into the moving water so you see these wonderful dark red strokes which are the reflection of these touches and there is green in areas like this or a dull green but again it's kind of a simultaneous contrast of colored on the dull end of the spectrum then this is the lower obviously lower right with the signature and you just it's just extraordinary energy in those squiggly strokes to define the water and the reflections of the sky in the water Boulevard symphony is in the gallery the Monet gallery it is Boulevard son Dhani in argent I couldn't forgive my pronunciation in winter and it's from 1875 if we have a specific date for this painting it is an extraordinary achievement in rendering the effect of a wet snow on a landscape it's also and this he actually was outside at least when he started the main part of this very deliberately picking a low vantage point that made the whole painting kind of flip up and it increases your sense of how difficult it was for these figures to make their way through the snow on a just to make that same point so these incredibly intense chartreuse colors the contrast with a maroon also because I've been giving details without showing where they come from with boxes and such to keep track of the Blues here because there's touches of them there this goat shows you that he used a dark ground for this painting it's not as dark as what you see we shot this in the gallery and the color and the gallery is actually kind of warm so don't think of it as green think of it as kind of a mid gray color selection is important in paintings because the way what happens with light and pinching on the painting is that it goes in and then comes out and if there's a dark gray or a darker ground it will affect the overall look of the surface even with as much white as is apparent in this painting the that there's an extraordinary amount of brush work quick brush work with the bristle brushes thick buildup of paint in the center section you also see the wonderful blobs of snow that are accumulated on this fence and on the bodies and on everything in the painting that gives you that feel for how what the experience of being in the snowfall I should know I grew up in upstate New York just extraordinary painting all these quick quick strokes to define the slats of the fence and you'll notice that there's this brownish Moony color set up right in contrast with those vivid green strokes notice also the blue strokes into the snow here I think the point I'm trying to make is he's working very hard to paint what he sees but he's also wanting to and very successfully achieve an overall unity to the painting colors used in one place showing up in a different maybe value or intensity in another the back the trees against the houses in the upper right the effect of these very quick brush strokes of the tree branches over the chimney the chimney is you lose the sense of the solidity of the chimney to some degree again it's an amazing evocation of the experience of being in the snowstorm and and there's a blurriness that's prevalent throughout the whole plus again even though it's got a fairly subdued palette that really because you see this vivid aquas the greens and these Maroons his palate becomes increasingly complex as time goes by and which makes it even more amazing that he controlled it in the upper left we have again the tree and its interaction with the sky the skip eNOS the scumbling which means you know a bristle brush not holding that much paint but catching the highest points of the canvas this is expressive of the action of the wind in this tree and then in contrast the solidity of the house in front of it lastly the sky the Sun which is trying to fight its way to some degree through this snow and the variation in the impasto in the Sun which and then the smoother mixed pink and blues surrounding it which create that idea of somewhat subdued light but also it has some vivacity to it I'm going to quickly show you an image of the flowerbeds at Vito sorry more bad pronunciation from 1881 simply because these colors surely are some of those modern pigments we haven't done media analysis of pigment analysis of many of our paintings that really requires taking samples in order to absolutely what pigments are used but just looking at this you can't can't imagine this having been painted with a traditional palette and then these details hopefully make the same point the other thing to notice in the water is how he's fitted strokes which are represent the waves of the water around and sometimes over the lower line flowers he's creating an overall integrated surface as well as defining the flowers and the water this is our valley of the petite Cruz which has been storage I'm hoping you will have the opportunity I mean you will have the opportunity to see it sometime again because as you know the paintings the installations do change I find this a particularly exciting painting for his palette for his technique and the overall effect of it he actually was this is painted in 1889 and actually started out going on a social visit to the Cruz Valley which is in the central part of France but he was so taken with the landscape and his desire to recorded in different times of day different light that he did 24 campuses in that three-month period the MFA painting is actually at a lower view than some of them at the level of the riverbed at the end of the day thus you have a sense of falling light and strong contrasts between shadowed and light areas they're strongest in the foreground and they diminish somewhat in towards the bag when you look at it you think primarily and I have to say this which is from a very high quality scan the digital image really doesn't catch the quality of the air and light in this pane which is why we want to look at them in the galleries ultimately I think there's just too much palette too much variation for a digital image to really convey the color appropriately each when you look at it first you think there's alternating bands of pink and green contrasting colors pink green pink green and then when you look at it more closely you see that each area is just an incredible mix of a huge variety of color applied in extraordinary range of stroke so the stumbling does dominate in this painting of the application of a thick oil paint over a textured surface below and then there are some areas of wet and wet but it's it is just we even looking at an area like this and you see how much variation there is in the color just like weaving together of individual strokes of paint and then the water of course with the quick strokes to show the action of the water the texture that building up of paint was incredibly important to Monet and this is an overall raking light not the best raking light but it does give you a scent raking light as light coming from just one direction so it really emphasizes the relief of the painting I think the detail does a better job of showing the extraordinary surface on this painting which is so built up with these individual strokes this detail is particularly wonderful here with actually here the defined rocks the pink rocks with all that brilliant light coming off of them and then behind it in shadow caused by those rocks it's this beautiful blue he actually applied that quite gently quite smoothly relative to the painting the thickly impasto painting that you have in this area sorry I'm looking at the incredible difference in color on this Apple as opposed to what you're seeing so hopefully it'll be out in the galleries in some time when you can really enjoy it because it's quite a painting then we have the tree which is in front of the rocky background one of the strips of the rocks and a little slip of land projecting into the water he defines each of these elements and yet there's this visual intermingling of them nobody has a definite line of demarcation really interesting colors like this darker color probably oppression blue pulled into the water these colors having some relation to these colors you know I say it and it sounds like Oh simple but it is so impossible to keep control of all of this and he was so masterful at it here's a closer look the one on the right is a microscope image of the section of the tree here where you get a good idea of the effect of scumbling the nut the kind of catching only the tops of the higher paint and then here interestingly is an example of wet and wet because this is fairly smooth he established a line here and then boom went through and broke into it with another stroke which both strokes being wet at the same time you get this blending effect small detail from the bottom of the painting below that tree area which shows you that this did have a light ground which is here and this really shows you the eye scumbling how paint will catch the higher parts of the impasto beautiful detail from one of the slides of vegetation the this is also relatively wet in wet paint but what happens here is that you actually although I yeah you should be able to see it colors actually blend in and create like a new color with this higher red this very clear stumbling out in the Monet gallery are two of the series paintings of haystacks which we own so that you can go and look at them with these points in mind you know this creation of the lighting effects from manipulating the texture of the painting from using contrasting colors and I think the more you look at these the more you appreciate his incredible level of skill and control in we have two water lilies one from 1905 one from 1907 the image on the right are shows the tacking margins and actually misrepresents the situation of what I want to show you in this image is the fact that the 1905 painting was painted on a very relatively coarse canvas and then the painting on the right the water latest from 1907 was done on a much finer canvas like a handkerchief linen actually almost the color of the grounds on both paintings is pretty much the white that you see on the right again the color that you see there on the right has to do with the lighting conditions in the gallery the 1905 painting has a much more textured surface than 1907 which in general is smoother but has plenty of texture itself the this is a detail from both of them showing his work to try to convey reflections from trees into moving water with the water lilies everything in movement details from the 1905 under the microscope show you the action of the brush mostly this is scambling of scumbling and a concentration of color to just create those water lilies I'm sorry I'm getting myself out of sync here excuse me so here is the detail through the microscope and you see the incredible and build up of impasto and the distinct colors but with some blending you also really sense the texture from partly comes from the fact that this is a strongly textured canvas hey it's kind of princess in the pea kind of effect in a way you know you start out putting paint on something that's rough and it just increases the quality of that texture as you add more paint you see that perhaps even more clearly on the these images the image on the left is from a point near the edge of the canvas where often Monet's the thickness of the paint drops back but it shows you really quite clearly the texture of the canvas and how the paint is catching on it this image which is from at this point I couldn't even tell you where exactly it's from but you know the shadows in the water he has this very extraordinary effect of thick paint evenly smoothed out and we actually are not totally certain how he manages this how he actually achieves it because this is in the gallery wasn't able to do microscope images but I just wanted to hone in and show you in general how much more lightly the paint was painted here another thing you can see in this detail is that your reading texture from previously applied paint he was endlessly changing subtly changing positions of things to some degree it may have to do with him chasing shapes on the water to some degrees just as a painting he is changing his mind as to where he wants things to reside little details showing the quick strokes the absolute quick strokes that gives you the idea of the water lilies lying on the surface of the water there's tremendous amount of paint color variation within even a small area such as this and you really see the texture from lower layers of paint it all animates the paint as a whole painting as a whole so back to Monet in a studio this is a studio at Iver knee and then painting paintings that ultimately ended up in Laurel Cherie in Paris a series of eight that show you on a very large scale his explorations into reflections light in his water lily pond that's actually a very important thing to note he actually created an environment in order to be able to explore light and color and reflection in a more controlled way but the paintings like this I hope make you see why he was so exciting to so many 20th century artists who are moving more towards an abstracted way of viewing things and painting them although he would never obviously call himself and a working in an abstract manner he wanted to catch that light thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

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Id: _hDJJkiwM1A

Length: 83min 50sec (5030 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 24 2020