The technical methods of the French Impressionists and of the early English group vary but little. The modern method of placing side by side upon the canvas spots, streaks, or dabs of more or less pure colour, following certain defined scientific principles, was made habitual use of by Turner. Both Constable and Turner worked pure white in impasto throughout their canvases, high light and shadow equally, long before the advent of the Frenchmen.
An example of this was to be seen in a large painting by Constable hung in the Royal Academy Winter Exhibition of 1903. The Opening of Waterloo Bridge, exhibited in 1832, was declared by the artist’s enemies to have been painted with his palette-knife. Almost the whole of the canvas, especially the foreground, is dragged over by a full charged brush of pure white, which, catching the uneven surface of the underlying dry impasto work, produces a simple but successful illusion of brilliant vibrating light.
This work was not well received by the contemporary press and public. It was regarded as a bad joke, became celebrated as a snowstorm, compared with Berlin wool-work (a favourite simile which Mr. Henley has recently applied to Burne-Jones), and was derided as the product of a disordered brain. Seventy years have barely sufficed for its full appreciation.
By a curious coincidence Bonington’s Boulogne Fishmarket was hung almost exactly opposite in the same Winter Exhibition. This canvas must have had an enormous influence with Manet, its blond harmony and rich flat values within a distinct general tone being a distinguishing feature of the great Frenchman’s style.
The Impressionists, therefore, continued the methods of the English masters. But they added a strange and exotic ingredient. To the art of Corot and Constable they added the art of Japan, an art which had profoundly influenced French design one hundred years before. The opening of the Treaty ports flooded Europe with craft work from the islands. From Japanese colour-prints, and the gossamer sketches on silk and rice-paper, the Impressionists learnt the manner of painting scenes as observed from an altitude, with the curious perspective which results. They awoke to the multiplied gradation of values and to the use of pure colour in flat masses. This art was the source of the evolution to a system of simpler lines.
In colour they ultimately departed from the practice of the English and Barbizon Schools. The Impressionists purified the palette, discarding blacks, browns, ochres, and muddy colours generally, together with all bitumens and siccatives. These they replaced by new and brilliant combinations, the result of modern chemical research. Cadmium Pale, Violet de Cobalt, Garance rose doré, enabled them to attain a higher degree of luminosity than was before possible. Special care was given to the study and rendering of colour, and also to the reflections to be found in shadows.
So far as the term implies the position of teacher and pupils, the Impressionists did not form themselves into a school. On the contrary, they were independent co-workers, banded together by friendship, moved by the same sentiments, each one striving to solve the same æsthetic problem. At the same time it is possible to separate them into distinct personalities and groups.
Photo by W. A. Mansell & Co.
A COAST SCENE · R. P. BONINGTON
