ART HISTORY - Impressionism

Continuing looking at art movements we looked at Impressionism. The huge developments in technology effected the Impressionist movement and had a huge impact on how artists depicted paintings. Things were changing with the introduction of the steam engines, ready made paint tubes, ready made fashion, street lighting, advances in colour theory and the first portable cameras.

The trains allowed artists to travel to the countryside and paint, making me think they must have had assistants! could you imagine lugging everything you need onto a train and then back again... But in saying that the camera made it possible for an artist to use photography to capture or freeze a moment in time and then be able to reference back to them for later painting. For Example...

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

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a French painter who was a leading artist in the development of the impressionist style.  Renoir introduced what had become known as his Rainbow Palette. This pallet is the use of pure pigments. It abandoned the use of black. Artists used this and painted in complementary colour, to create harmonized tone.

haystacks midday - 1890 claude monet

Yellow pm the edges of the hey stacks and the ground, purple and blue hues to make the shadows, these complimenting each other. The oranges in the stack complementing the blues in the shadows as well as the red tones in the hay stack and greens in the grass.

Impressionist painters were interested in representing life around them they look to people for subject matter. This is why they were very effected by the industrial revolution because the world around them was one of street lighting, trains, factories and the people who lived among it.

Montmartre at Night Camille - Pissarro - 1897

claude monet gare saint lazare - 1877 - Oil painting

I love the looser impressionist paintings because no one figure needs to be highlighted over another, it really is an impression of a scene. As you can see these show trains, street lighting - they are painted in their environment.

The impressionists were a group of artists that had both men and women in the group. It resulted in art being shown from the different view points of men and women at the time.

Edgar Degas liked to capture the lower class women who worked hard.

Laundresses (1884)

As well as his famous paintings of ballet dancers. His view was that of a man looking in on a woman. Where as his close friend Mary Cassatt, a wealthy american painter,is more from a comforting and different kind of looking in... it is more from a woman's point of view.