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Impressionism


Continuing our art movement investigations we looked at impressionism. The huge developments in technology effected the Impressionist movement and had a huge impact on how artist depicted paintings. Things changed hugely for artists with the introduction of steam engines, ready made paint tubes and the first portable cameras, for example, The camera made it possible for artist to use photography to capture or freeze a moment in time and then being able to reference back to them for later painting. For example

  • After the Bath (Woman Drying Herself) Edgar Degas 1896 - Oil painting

Because impressionist painters were interested in representing life around them, they looked to people and places for subject matter. This is why they were so effected by the industrial revolution, because their world was one of street lighting, steam trains, factories and the people around them.

Montmartre at Night Camille - Pissarro - 1897

claude monet gare saint lazare - 1877 - Oil painting

One thing i love about these looser impressionist paintings is there is no figure that needs to be highlighted over another, it really is an impression of a scene. As you can see these are painted from there environment, and have street lighting and a train station. With the advances in rail travel it meant artist could go to the country side and paint beautiful paintings of landscapes and nature.

Renoir introduced what has become to be known as his Rainbow Palette.This is the use of  pure pigments and abandoning the use of black.

These artist painted in complementary colour, to create harmonized tone in there paintings this seemed to be very important to Impressionist painters. A good example of this is:

haystacks midday - 1890 claude monet
As you can see he used yellows on the edges of the hay stack and on the ground, he used purple and blue hues to make the shadows, yellow and purple being complementary colours, and the oranges in the stack complementing the blue in the shadows as well as the red tones in the hay stack and greens in the ground. 




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