![]() ![]() ![]() These artists knew each other and each other’s work, and held strong opinions on the aims, limits and directions of their own art and the art world of their time. Social connections among the artists also played an important role in the development of Impressionism. Instead, their attention was on the world in which they lived and worked, with a primary focus on nature. This was not a world populated by traditional art historical subjects, such as gods and goddesses, biblical figures or heroic military leaders. ![]() The Impressionists were united by a common belief that they should respond to and represent the world around them. In critical responses to these independent exhibitions, this daring, varied and ambitious new painting became known as Impressionism. This new group staged eight public exhibitions between 18, revealing an approach to painting that privileged ‘impressions’ – often painted en plein air (outdoors, directly in front of the subject) – over what the selecting judges for the Salon considered ‘finished’ works, which were highly academic in style and painted entirely in the studio. ![]() In 1874, a group of artists in Paris formed a society for the purpose of exhibiting their work independently of the Salon, the official exhibition program the French government established in 1748. Mary Cassatt, an American-born artist integral to the French Impressionist movement and whose work is featured in the exhibition, advocated among her fellow Americans for their patronage of her French colleagues, ensuring that many great Impressionist paintings found their way into important American collections. MFA Boston’s significant collection of French Impressionism benefited from the collecting efforts of individual Bostonians, some of whom visited the artists in France during the movement’s height. Together, these paintings demonstrate the full scope of the artist’s immeasurable contribution to the Impressionist movement. Painted over a thirty-year period, these paintings depict many of Monet’s most beloved scenes of nature in Argenteuil, the Normandy coast, the Mediterranean coast and his extraordinary garden in Giverny. These broader themes are punctuated by focused sections of the exhibition that examine significant moments and characteristics in the practices of a selection of artists, including Renoir and his experimentation with pictorial effects in the 1880s, as well as Pissarro and his role as mentor to a number of other artists.Īn exhibition highlight is a breathtaking display of sixteen canvases by Claude Monet, in an immersive arrangement reminiscent of the distinctive, oval gallery designed for his famous Water Lilies at the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, between 1922 and his death in 1926. Still life paintings, intimate interiors and street scenes by such artists as Manet, Renoir and Gustave Caillebotte also feature. Many artists also placed equal weight on recording movement and change in urban and domestic realms. Moving through an immersive exhibition design, audiences experience the hallmarks of Impressionism, including distinctive brushwork, unique points of view, arresting use of colour, as well as places dear to the artists, such as Paris, Fontainebleau Forest, Pontoise, Giverny, the Normandy coast and the South of France. The growth of the movement in subsequent decades is mapped through an exploration of the favoured subjects and ideas of the Impressionists. Presented thematically across ten sections, the exhibition opens with early works by Monet and his forebears, Eugène Boudin and painters of the Barbizon School, illustrating their profound influence on Monet’s use of the then radical method of painting outdoors en plein air (‘in the open air’) to capture changing conditions in nature. Through an arresting display of paintings and works on paper that showcases the breadth of the movement, the exhibition evokes the artistic energy and intellectual dynamism of the period by placing emphasis on the thoughts and observations of the artists themselves, revealing the social connections, artistic influences and personal relationships that united the group of radical practitioners at the centre of this new art movement. French Impressionism charts the trajectory of the late-nineteenth century artistic movement, highlighting the key milestones and figures at the centre of this period of experimentation and revolution in modern art. ![]()
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