The Ultimate Trophy E-Book

Philip Hook

• Herausgeber: Prestel
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 268

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

In 1892 Degas' painting In the Café was sold for a mere 180 guineas at auction, with the public hissing as the hammer fell. Less than a century later another Impressionist work, Renoir's Moulin de la Galette, sold at Sotheby's for $78 million, accompanied by enthusiastic applause. In this history-cum-memoir Philip Hook, Senior Director of Sotheby's Impressionist and Modern Art department, examines the public's change of heart toward Impressionism. Starting with its shocking novelty and confounding style, he traces the impact of the Impressionist painting as it spread to Germany, America, and Great Britain, polarizing modernists and conservatives. Equally fascinating is the story of Impressionism's change in status. More than exceptionally pretty pictures, Impressionist works have become a currency in their own right, being bought and sold like blue-chip stock - coveted as much for their monetary worth as for their intrinsic beauty. Drawn from Hook's own experiences with art collectors and dealers, this fascinating chapter in art history is narrated through the lens of today's art market.

Leseprobe

Philip Hook

THE ULTIMATE TROPHY

How the Impressionist Painting Conquered the World

PRESTEL

Munich · London · New York

CONTENTS

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

Up Close It’s A Mess

The Shocking Novelty of Impressionism

CHAPTER TWO

The Cat on the Keyboard

The French Reception of Impressionism

CHAPTER THREE

A New Art for a New World

America and Impressionism

CHAPTER FOUR

A Cultural Deed

The German Reception of Impressionism

CHAPTER FIVE

Mormons in St Paul’s

The British Response to Impressionism

CHAPTER SIX

Chatwin’s Hair

The Impressionist Painting, 1945–70

CHAPTER SEVEN

Beyond Price

The Impressionist Painting, 1970–90

CHAPTER EIGHT

Optical Collusion

The Impressionist Painting after 1990

Selected Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements and Picture Credits

INTRODUCTION

This is a book about paintings and how people perceive them; not just as images, but as symbols of status, as cultural and social trophies. Specifically it is about the changing perception of Impressionism over the past century and a quarter.

Impressionism began in France in the second half of the nineteenth century as a revolutionary movement producing pictures that people found difficult to understand. It was the first modern art, provoking for the first time the reactions of public bewilderment and outrage that have since become so familiar, repeated by each succeeding generation as it confronts the ‘excesses’ of its own contemporary avant-garde. But over the past hundred or so years, an extraordinary change has taken place in the way people see Impressionism. These once controversial paintings have been transformed into the most popular and accessible art in the world. They have also become icons of extreme wealth, so much so that a Monet or a Renoir or a van Gogh now has a connotation that is as much financial as artistic: besides conjuring a vivid and familiar pictorial world, the names of these artists are like a unit of currency in their own right.

How has this happened? Why were some countries quicker to appreciate the Impressionists than others? Is there some quality unique to the Impressionists that makes them particularly attractive to the rich? These are some of the questions which I have set out to answer. In the process I have found myself drawing on the experience of my own career at both Sotheby’s and Christie’s and as an art dealer. So this book is partly a personal memoir, too: of paintings, of the people who buy and sell them, of the motives that drive those buyers and sellers. The paintings and the motives I have tried to identify correctly. The people I have sometimes disguised.

CHAPTER ONE

UP CLOSE IT’S A MESS

The Shocking Novelty of Impressionism

————

I once tried to sell a Monet to an Eastern potentate. He sat opposite me in the marbled splendour of his palace wearing an expression of intelligent perplexity. Outside, the palm trees barely moved in the oppressive afternoon heat, and the sea beyond was a still, deep blue. Through the window I could see the golden dome of a vast, recently constructed mosque, and a skyscraper decorated with the insignia of an international bank and a neon advertisement for Coca-Cola. Here in this cavernous reception room where the air-conditioning spun its chill cocoon, I noticed that even the carpets were sprinkled with gold dust. The lift in which a flunkey had accompanied me up to these private quarters was walled in mink. What was I doing here, I asked myself? Through a geological freak – huge resources of oil being mineable beneath the barren surface of his country – this man was rich to a degree that set him apart from the rest of humanity. He had a fine face and impeccable manners. He treated me with enormous politeness.

‘So’, he said, peering at the painting I had brought with me, ‘this will cost 7 million dollars at auction?’ He gave a quick, uncertain smile, as if he suspected he might be the victim of a practical joke but was determined to remain a good sport about it.

I told him it would, possibly even more.

‘But how can that be?’

‘Because it’s by Claude Monet, one of the most famous of the Impressionist painters. It’s a very beautiful one.’

‘Please, explain to me something I do not understand.’ He rose from his chair and walked over to a painting that he already had hanging on his wall. ‘For this work by Jean-Léon Gérôme I paid only 900,000 dollars.’

It showed a street market in Cairo. Each figure was minutely, photographically painted, with all the finish that distinguished the masters of French academic art in the second half of the nineteenth century. ‘Surely’, insisted the owner, ‘this Gérôme is superior to the Monet. It is a masterpiece. It is real. It is how things look’.

How things look. His Royal Highness had touched upon the essence of what Impressionism was about. Nonetheless, I decided not to risk a theoretical debate and stuck to the financial certainties. ‘The Gérôme is a very good one, of course’, I reassured him. ‘But the Monet is more highly prized on the market.’

‘But this man Monet does not know how to paint, not as well as Gérôme. The colour is jarring. The figures are awkward. The strokes of the brush are too broad, they are not precise. There is no detail.’

I thought about quoting at him how Mallarmé explained Impressionism in 1876: ‘As to the detail of the picture, nothing should be absolutely fixed. The represented subject, being composed of a harmony of reflected and ever-changing lights, cannot be supposed always to look the same but palpitates with movement, light, and life.…’ But I wasn’t confident it would do any good. My client came from a culture unfamiliar with the way western painting had developed over the past century and a quarter. He was groping towards an understanding of it. By instinct, however, he preferred the certainties of Gérôme to the suggestive imprecisions of the Impressionists. And it came to me then that this was how people – not just the philistines, but intelligent people, too – must have reacted when the Impressionists first exhibited in Paris in the early 1870s.

In the early part of the twenty-first century, we are used to the shock of newness in art. It is barely a shock any more. But the Impressionists were the first painters to confront the public with a dramatic revolution in the way paintings looked. It simply hadn’t happened before. As a result there was no set language with which to express reaction to what you saw, far less to assimilate it. Zola in his novel The Masterpiece of 1886 describes the public’s inarticulate horror at the new sort of pictures they found in these first avant-garde exhibitions: ‘That novel rendering of light seemed an insult to them. Some old gentlemen shook their sticks. Was art to be outraged like this? One grave individual went away very wrath, saying to his wife that he did not like practical jokes’.

1 The old way of seeing: detail and finish. Gérôme, The Baths at Bursa, 1885.

2 The new painting: light and atmosphere. Monet, The Grand Canal, Venice, 1908.

That novel rendering of light. It is easy to forget how garish Impressionist colour must have seemed to the Parisian public of the early 1870s. They were used to the conservative colour keys of the typical Salon exhibitor like Gérôme, laboriously recording what he knew about an object rather than the effects of light he saw reflected off it. When it came to landscape there was already a group of painters – the Barbizon School – whose pictures were advanced enough to be painted ‘en plein air’ in direct confrontation with nature. But what made the Barbizon School less problematic, less challenging, was that they – as did Gérôme – still tended to paint local colour rather than overall optical effect. Essentially the way they painted their fields and foliage was no different from the Dutch masters of the seventeenth century. Their paintings still looked reassuringly like seaweed. It took a big jump to come to terms with the Impressionist technique. This involved brushstrokes which did not of themselves define form, but instead created a vibrating tissue of optical sensations. The new way of seeing meant that Impressionist pictures were not only rougher in finish, but also much brighter than any others around, because of their new understanding of light and colour.

3 The Barbizon School, a reassurring link with the past. Rousseau, The Edge of the Forest, 1866.

Gérôme, the arch-conservative spokesman for the Academic tradition, never forgave the Impressionists their impudence. Twenty years on, in the 1890s, he was still ranting against them. The modernist painter Gustave Caillebotte had had the temerity to bequeath his personal Impressionist collection to the nation. ‘For the government to accept such filth’, declared Gérôme, ‘there would have to be great moral slackening’. A century later that moral slackening was still being wondered at, here in this marbled palace beside an Eastern sea.

How did Impressionism happen? It wasn’t an isolated event: looked at in the European context, it was simply the most significant and sustained of the rebellions that took place against the Academy in nineteenth-century painting. Across the continent official, academic art had grown stale and moribund. By the middle of the century, for instance, the Paris Salon – the exhibition organised by the numbingly conservative committee of the École des Beaux-Arts as the showcase of contemporary French painting – was a depressing stew of sentimental genre scenes and tired melodramas drawn from history and antiquity. The rebellion took different forms in different countries, but what it had in common everywhere was the younger generation’s desire to cleanse artistic vision, to invigorate it by a more direct pictorial representation of reality. The result became known as Realism (with its implicit grittiness), or Naturalism (literally, the remorseless transcription of Nature).

In France the leader of this tendency in painting was initially perceived to be Édouard Manet. Then, as the decade of the 1860s progressed, a band of young supporters emerged: Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, and – in his own way – Degas. Out with the old, meaningless tradition of classicism, they declared. Out with history painting. Out with the tyranny of the subject. Out with Gérôme. In with the new way of seeing. In with the direct recording of an effect, an impression of nature. And in with the realism that demanded ‘il faut être de son temps’ in Baudelaire’s words, that you should only paint what you had direct visual experience of, that is to say the world about you, regardless of whether it was conventionally beautiful or ugly.

The year 1863 was significant in the early development of Impressionism. That summer the rebels against the Salon were acknowledged for the first time. Those whose works had been rejected by the conservative jury (and thus excluded from access to the vast majority of the buying public) were allowed their own separate exhibition called the Salon des Refusés. The critic Théophile Thoré went to the rebels’ show and observed astutely:

French art, such as one sees it in these proscribed works, seems to be making a new start … The subjects are no longer the same as those in the official galleries: little mythology or history; present-day life, above all in its popular types; little effort and no taste at all: everything is revealed just as it is, beautiful or ugly, distinguished or vulgar. And [there is] a method of working altogether different from the working methods consecrated by the long domination of Italian Art. Instead of searching for the contours, what the Academy calls drawing, instead of insisting upon the detail, what lovers of the classical call finish, they aspire to render the effect in its striking unity, without worrying about the correctness of the lines or the minutiae of the accessories.

Five years later the young American painter Mary Cassatt, not long arrived in Paris from Philadelphia, was writing home in her charmingly breathless, if not always grammatical manner: ‘The French School is going through a phase. They are leaving the Academy style and each one seeking a new way consequently just now everything is Chaos’.

The new way. You went for the overall effect, rather than the detail. You studied the light and its reflections with intense devotion. You painted with broader brushstrokes and with brighter, simpler colours. And you painted only what you saw about you, in its immediacy and directness. You didn’t make things up out of your imagination. You didn’t draw your subjects from the past. You didn’t use black, because you’d discovered that shadow was actually composed of other colours, predominantly purples and blues. You didn’t paint local colour at all, which meant you didn’t paint the colour you knew something to be, but the variable colour you saw it to be, determined by the condition of the light. Actually, the new way wasn’t totally new. The British water-colourist Alexander Cozens had anticipated some of this in the late eighteenth century when he observed: ‘In nature, forms are not distinguished by lines but by shade and colour’. But in French hands, at this later juncture of history, the formula proved explosive. In the Goncourts’ 1866 novel Manette Salomon, a young artist declares: ‘You’ve got to apply colour without mixing it, find the way to model without mixing your pigments, use the full range of the palette…. The palette is the reduction of sunlight to its component parts, and art is its reconstruction’. Eight years later the critic Jules Antoine Castagnary, reviewing the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 (the one at which the term ‘Impressionist’ was first coined), summed it all up perceptively: ‘They are Impressionists in the sense that they render not a landscape but the sensation produced by a landscape.’

There was an immediacy to the Impressionist technique, a spontaneity that the Goncourts’ character hints at. You put the colour straight on, unmixed. In the face of the changing effects of nature, you didn’t have much time to capture your impression. It had to come right with the first touch. ‘Manet and his school use simple colour, fresh, or lightly laid on, and their results appear to have been attained at the first stroke, so that the ever-present light blends with and vivifies all things’, wrote Mallarmé in 1876. This is an idea bubbling through from Romanticism. ‘Posez, laissez’, Baron Gros advised his pupils. Make the brushstroke and leave it. The first touch is the right one, because it’s the spontaneous, sincere one. ‘I am like the tyger’, maintained Byron of his poetry. ‘If I miss my first spring, I go growling back to my jungle. There is no second. I can’t correct; I can’t, and I won’t’.

4 ‘Up close it’s a mess’: Impressionist brushwork.

In the film Clueless the heroine, Cher, a worldly-wise 17-year-old from Los Angeles, and her friend Tai are watching another girl on the dance floor:

TAI: Do you think she’s pretty?

CHER: No, she’s a full-on Monet.

TAI: What’s a Monet?

CHER: It’s like the painting, see: from far away it’s OK, but up close it’s a big old mess.

Up close it’s a mess. Cher was only echoing the view of my polite but mystified Eastern client. Actually, the fact that many Impressionist paintings only work at a certain distance was recognised early on. Lucien Pissarro reported to his father of the cramped conditions at a London exhibition in 1883: ‘I must tell you that one is obliged to view the paintings from too close by, and you can imagine the fright which your execution causes’. Significantly it was an American critic, Theodore Child (Cher’s spiritual great-grandfather), who wrote about the Impressionists in January 1887: ‘Their pictures must always be looked at from the requisite distance, and as wholes which cannot be decomposed, for their practice is to neglect particular tones in order to attain a luminous unity, just as a musical composer will arrive at harmony by an agglomeration of dissonances’.

In two different ways an Impressionist painting has the appeal of a pun. If you get too close to it, you are reminded that it is no more than an agglomeration of coloured brush strokes on a canvas surface; but step back a pace or two and suddenly the same brush strokes become a startlingly convincing illusion of light-flooded reality. Then there is the tendency of some Impressionist painters – Monet in particular – to paint the same scene over and over again under varying lights and in changing seasons (haystacks, water-lily ponds, cathedrals, in summer, winter, spring, at dawn, midday and dusk). The variety of effects which results is also a pun – dramatically different looking paintings simultaneously all of the same subject. There’s a piquancy to the spectator, pleasing in the way that a pun is pleasing.

And perhaps there was one further element to the early appeal of an Impressionist painting: there may have been an attraction to its rougher texture and broader brush stroke. This was a generation still coming to terms with photography. It found the proximity of painting to this new science disquieting. Therefore a way of painting – Impressionism – which delivered an illusion of reality on a par with a photograph, but because of its conspicuous brush stroke could never be confused with a photograph, was a reassurance. Look, the spectator could tell himself: this is a painting because you can see paint on it. The brush strokes were the evidence of the artistry; proof that the work of art was created not by a machine, but by a human hand expressing a human temperament. In the late nineteenth century there was a vogue for painters like Velázquez and Hals, the bravura of whose handling of paint emphasised their individuality and distanced them from photography. The fullest exploitation of this taste emerged in Sargent’s hugely popular portrait style, a marriage of Impressionist brush stroke with the ‘swagger’ portrait tradition of the eighteenth century.

‘The naturalist school’, wrote Castagnary in 1863, ‘declares that art is the expression of life under all phases and on all levels, and that its sole aim is to reproduce nature by carrying it to its maximum power and intensity: it is truth balanced with science’. The result is a scientific, unemotional, almost clinical cast to the Impressionist vision. You see it in the titles of the paintings: Route de village; Effet de neige; Petite Danseuse de quatorze ans. Quatorze ans: it has the precision of the labelling of a specimen in a museum exhibition. The same thing was happening in literature. Writers were becoming ‘anatomists and physiologists’ according to Sainte-Beuve. ‘In order to find the beauty of today’, said the Goncourts, ‘there is perhaps need of analysis, a magnifying glass, near-sighted vision, new psychological processes…. This is the great century of scientific restlessness and anxiety for the truth’. And Flaubert – of whom Sainte-Beuve had written that he ‘handled the pen as others do the scalpel’ – declared: ‘Human beings must be treated like mastodons and crocodiles; why get excited about the horn of the former or the jaw of the latter? Display them, stuff them, bottle them, that’s all – but appraise or evaluate them: no!’

There were radical implications to this new way of seeing: all individuals were equal under the democratic eye of the scientific painter of modern life. Truth to nature – sincerity to what you registered optically, in contrast to the tired artifices of the Academy – carried with it a political stance: ‘It is sincerity which endows works of art with a character which resembles a protest’, wrote Zacharie Astruc in 1867. That element of protest was further defined by the Neo-Impressionist Paul Signac a generation later: ‘The anarchist painter is not he who does anarchist paintings but he who without caring for money, without desire for recompense, struggles with all his individuality against bourgeois and official conventions’. Here, glimpsed for the first time, are two of the great myths of modern art: art as protest, and the artist as heroic revolutionary, sticking to his innovative principles in the face of ignorant reactionary opposition. These ideas, so familiar to us today, were invented with the Impressionists. But it’s important to draw a distinction between the original intention of the first Impressionist artists, and the effect that their art had. Unlike later generations of modernists, they didn’t set out to attack the bourgeoisie. Nothing would have pleased them more than if their paintings had immediately appealed to the moneyed class of conventional picture buyers. It was only when their cleansing vision provoked such hostile reaction in those quarters that they became willy-nilly cast in the role of anti-bourgeois revolutionaries. Such is the common fate, we now know, of modernist art movements. But the Impressionists were the first to find it out.

An early American critic was in no doubt of the revolutionary agenda of the movement, describing the Impressionists – not without a note of awe – as ‘communism incarnate, with the Red Flag and Phrygian cap of lawless violence boldly displayed’. He was wrong, in that individual Impressionists like Renoir, Monet or Degas were certainly not communists. But in a broader sense Impressionism as a style was a metaphor for change and flux. Its dissolution of form into colour and atmosphere was an alarming development for the conservative bourgeoisie. It could be interpreted as yet another assertion of the ambiguity and instability not only of the physical environment but also of social and political conditions.

5 and 6 The young revolutionaries: Pierre-Auguste Renoir (5) and Claude Monet (6).

6

The factor which ultimately facilitated the rise of Impressionism was a change in the way paintings were marketed. In an increasingly entrepreneurial age, it was perhaps inevitable that art and commerce would be drawn closer together. This produced a new phenomenon, the powerful dealer, who interpreted and marketed the new art to the public, and simultaneously employed the artists he was promoting by guaranteeing to buy their work. The importance of Paul Durand-Ruel to the Impressionists was incalculable, as we shall see in later chapters. Indeed as a template for the future development of the art market, the emergence of the entrepreneurial dealer was an element of crucial significance. The active branding of artists as commodities, paying stipends to them, nursing them through various price-levels by a carefully judged series of commercial gallery exhibitions, all are features of the sophisticated contemporary art market of the twenty-first century. But all have their origins in the way Impressionism was marketed by Paul Durand-Ruel in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. I certainly would not have had the sort of career I have enjoyed as an art dealer and auctioneer a hundred years later without Durand-Ruel.

7 Anxiety therapy by dappled light. Monet, Parc Monceau, 1878.

The enduring appeal of Impressionist painting has proved to be its capacity to uplift the spirits of the spectator, its mood-enhancing effect. Doctors and dentists around the world decorate their waiting rooms with reproductions of sunlit Monets and Renoirs. It is anxiety-therapy by dappled light. Even amid the initial hostility, this anti-depressant quality was identified surprisingly early on. The critic Armand Silvestre wrote in 1873: ‘What apparently should hasten the success of these newcomers is that their pictures are painted according to a singularly cheerful scale. A “blond” light floods them and everything in them is gaiety, clarity, spring festival…’. What the Impressionists chose to paint appears to the cynical eye of hindsight a deliberate exercise in customer manipulation, blatant exploitation of the feel-good factor. A list of what is characteristic Impressionist subject matter and what isn’t would run as follows:

Impressionist

Anti-Impressionist

Conviviality

Anguish

Beaches

Battle scenes

Recreation, holidays

History, morality

Picnics, gardens

Death, disaster

Streets, restaurants, cafés

Anecdote

Race meetings

Emotional profundity

Theatres, concert halls

Intellectual complexity

Sea views

Shipwrecks

Undulating countryside

Precipitous landscape

Sunshine

Night scenes

Cornfields, sunlit snow scenes

Bad weather: storms, floods

Of course it would be an exaggeration to claim that the Impressionists never painted bad weather or its effects; but the reality of the present-day market is that subjects like floods are difficult to sell, precisely because they upset people’s expectations of what Impressionist painting should be all about.

Another important factor in the rise of Impressionism was the railway. Railways were emblematic of modern life, and thus ideal subject matter for artists who strove to be contemporary. Monet, Manet and Pissarro all featured trains, stations and railway lines in their work. Indeed Monet’s series of views of the Gare Saint-Lazare is one of the icons of Impressionism, the artist’s technique finding its perfect expression in the rendering of the evanescence of the steam billowing up from the engines. The invention of the railway was important to landscape painters of this generation in another way, too: it opened up the countryside to city-based artists in search of accessible rural subject matter. A day-return to Argenteuil could produce five or six paintings (one of the advantages of their method was that Monet and his school worked quickly). Then there was the enormous wealth that the late nineteenth-century railway expansion produced, a significant element in France’s economic boom of the early 1880s, which brought more money into the art market and in turn boosted demand for the Impressionists. Railway fortunes were even huger in the United States, and this new wealth also benefited the Impressionists: for instance Mary Cassatt’s brother Alexander, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, was an early collector. The age of mass travel had begun; and as coal yielded to oil as the fuel of preference, so yet more staggering wealth was created for oil producers. Hence, a hundred years on, my feeble attempts to sell this Monet in the shadow of the mosque.

‘It was as if he had been struck with a subtle blindness that permitted images to give their colour to the eye but communicated nothing to the brain’, writes Edith Wharton describing a moment of crisis for Ralph Marvell in The Custom of the Country. Her imagery is taken from the theory of Impressionism. I tried it myself once: I let my gaze linger on one of Monet’s series paintings of poplars on the River Epte, in an attempt to achieve Ralph Marvell’s state of mind. I registered the pure visual sensation of the sinuous S-shape formed against the sky by the trees receding round the bends in the river, broken by the strong vertical lines of their trunks in the foreground. I congratulated myself. This was good, this was what Impressionism was all about: pure visual sensation, nature absorbed optically in a system of shapes of colour. Hadn’t Monet wished he could have been born blind, then suddenly regain his sight, so that he could begin to paint without knowing what the objects were that he saw before him? In the same way that Ralph Waldo Emerson pursued the idea of the ‘transparent eyeball’ that would exclude all personal interpretation from the direct experience of nature, so Monet sought what he called ‘the innocent eye’.

But here is the fallacy of Impressionism. Here are the seeds of its demise. There is no such thing as pure visual sensation. Because we have not been born blind, sensation and perception are inseparable. An artist cannot render objective truth. A painting reproducing nature will always be refracted through the personality of the artist, as Zola recognised: ‘Art is a bit of creation seen through a powerful temperament’, he wrote in 1867. Indeed that is what gives it its piquancy, what distinguishes it as a work of art. And as spectators, too, we know too much. We are interpretative beings. We will never be like Ralph Marvell seeing things simply as abstract patches of colour. The patches are inevitably significant, associative. So the S-shape means something. It is the foliage on a line of trees growing on the banks of a river curving into the distance. But because we know too much we can also interpret shapes in variant ways, not as the artist intended. As I stood in front of the painting, Monet’s poplars suddenly reformed themselves in front of my eyes as something quite different: the shimmering but unmistakable impression of a dollar sign.

By the end of the 1870s, artists in the Impressionist circle were beginning to recognise that it was time to move on. They had reached a kind of cul-de-sac. Just to register your impressions in front of nature, which the Impressionists were doing supremely well, had become limiting. Degas spoke of ‘the tyranny of nature’, declaring painters had made themselves ‘the slaves of chance circumstances of nature and light’. Renoir wrote in 1880: ‘While painting directly from nature, the artist reaches the point where he looks only for the effects of light, where he no longer composes, and he quickly descends to monotony’. The symbolist Odilon Redon took the argument a step further. ‘Man is a thinking being’, he wrote the same year. ‘Man will always be there. Whatever the role played by light, it won’t be able to turn him aside. On the contrary, the future belongs to a subjective world.’ Art was more than simply registering your optical impressions in front of nature. Art meant the interpretation of the objective world by the subjective experience. In 1893, Pissarro too was admitting in a letter to his son: ‘Everything (in nature) is beautiful, the whole secret lies in knowing how to interpret’. In Zola’s equation, a balance between nature (the thing depicted) and temperament (the artistic prism through which it is depicted), the scales now tipped in favour of the latter. The way was open for van Gogh and Gauguin, and the generation of the Post-Impressionists, to brandish their temperaments to such extraordinary effect.

The lack of intellectual and emotional content in Impressionism has worried people ever since. Impressionist art is the art of surfaces: its subsequent historians are sometimes guilty of ‘going very deeply into the surface of things’, and in their anxiety investing paintings with an emotional profundity which simply isn’t there.

8 A receding line of trees, or a dollar sign? Monet, Poplars on the River Epte, 1891.

Here is a modern writer, Paul Hayes Tucker, struggling with Monet’s winter scenes of the early 1880s:

With its surface cluttered with huge slabs of ice from the once-frozen river, the views of the Seine in these paintings, indeed the scenes as a whole, are both sonorous and silent, energised and elegiac. The canvases appear to be filled with cries of pain and moments of wonderment, sighs of resignation and odes of hope. They suggest notions of the past cracking and splintering and concerns about whether the present was liberating or unnerving.

You can’t help suspecting that the pain, wonderment, resignation and hope exist more meaningfully in the mind of Professor Tucker than that of Claude Monet.