A Daring Departure

“The Impressionist painters, especially Monet and Sisley, had delicate sensations, quite close to each other; as a result their canvases all look alike.” Henri Matisse’s reservations were shared by other early-twentieth-century advocates of modernism. Clive Bell criticized Monet for his “bad science” and the Impressionists in general for leading artists down a “blind alley” with “absurd notions about scientific representation.” The Irish poet and critic George Moore—who had sat for Manet—claimed that Monet had been too concerned with the “rapid noting of illusive appearance.” For the German critic and art historian Julius Meier-Graefe, the “improvisation of the Impressionists” was but a transitory stage in artistic development. Writing in 1908, he declared that Manet, Degas, Cézanne, and Renoir were the “four mighty columns” of modern art. Roger Fry considered Cézanne and Renoir apart from their Impressionist brethren, with Renoir ascending to an “efflorescence of creative power” in his later years, and he praised Renoir’s nudes from this period for their “realization of plastic relief.”

In 1974, the centenary of the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris, such hesitations and distinctions were a thing of the past. The paintings of the seven Impressionists—Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Degas, Sisley, Cézanne, and Morisot—who were among the thirty-one participants in the show that took place in the photographer Nadar’s former studio on the boulevard des Capucines between April 15 and May 15, 1874, had become icons of nineteenth-century art, voraciously collected and popular among museumgoers on both sides of the Atlantic. The heroic struggle for recognition of these six men and one woman had been meticulously documented in John Rewald’s pioneering History of Impressionism, which had first appeared in 1946. (By 1974 it was in its fourth edition.) In September 1974, Paris’s Grand Palais mounted an exhibition of masterpieces entitled “Centenaire de l’impressionnisme.” Comprising only forty-two paintings dating between 1858 and 1886, it included works by Manet, Bazille, and Caillebotte—none of whom had participated in the inaugural Impressionist exhibition—and only eight that had appeared on the walls of Nadar’s studio a hundred years earlier. On view for just over two months, it was seen by more than half a million visitors.

The next two decades witnessed a renaissance in the scholarship on Impressionism, with monographs and studies of the movement by art historians such as John House, T.J. Clark, Richard Shiff, and Robert L. Herbert, the latter a frequent contributor to these pages. The 1980s and 1990s were also a heyday for ambitious exhibitions on the individual artists as well as on the group as a whole, accompanied by impressive catalogs—often of considerable heft—with new visual, literary, and archival material. While the popularity of Impressionist exhibitions gives no sign of declining—witness the response to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent “Manet/Degas”¹—in his introduction to A Companion to Impressionism (2021) André Dombrowski notes that scholarly engagement has “since diminished, along with interest in European art and visual culture of the nineteenth century more broadly.” A note of barely concealed condescension permeates recent reassessments of the movement. It has been characterized as one of “pretty pictures” beloved by the general public, and while recognized as “a crucial episode in the rise of modernist painting,” it has been co-opted to satisfy museumgoers “at an ever more frenetic pace as impressionist exhibition chases impressionist exhibition.” Even Jason Farago’s generally positive and well-informed review of “Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment” in The New York Times lamented that such exhibitions are a “preordained crowd pleaser,” described Impressionist paintings as schmaltzy, and raised the question, “Does loving Impressionism make me basic?”²

“Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment,” the blockbuster show celebrating the 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist exhibition, co-organized by the Musée d’Orsay and the National Gallery of Art, garnered both enthusiastic attendance—some 725,000 visitors in Paris, the second most in the Orsay’s history—and very positive reviews. In Paris the 150 or more works on display—forty-five of which had been shown at the official Salon of 1874—were installed in spacious galleries, with the Impressionists grouped separately for the most part, and paintings and sculptures exhibited at the official Salon were placed in contiguous rooms. The exhibition was accompanied by a virtual reality component, which lasted for almost two hours.³ The National Gallery chose not to offer this program, but it has been remounted at Eclipso centers in Atlanta and New York as a forty-five-minute immersive experience entitled “Tonight with the Impressionists.”

In John Russell Pope’s stately galleries in Washington, the installation of “Paris 1874” was a somewhat tamer, more academic affair. It opened with Monet’s Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise, 1872; see illustration above)—the canvas that gave the movement its name, making its first voyage to the United States—placed next to Jean-Léon Gérôme’s L’Éminence grise (1873), the crowd-pleaser of the Salon of 1874 and the recipient of its médaille d’honneur. (At the Orsay, Impression, Sunrise was given a room to itself.) In Washington, the encounter between Gérôme, a lifelong enemy of the Impressionists, and Monet was likely intended to contrast the polish of Salon paintings with the vigor and experimentation of the New Painting (as it also came to be known). But in Gérôme’s meticulously executed historical melodrama, one is struck by the dappled light evoked by yellow patches of color that glance over the stone landing and stairs. That some of the freedoms introduced by advanced painting of the 1860s had infiltrated the work of such a bastion of officialdom was an unexpected takeaway from this opening salvo.

The integration of Impressionist and non-Impressionist paintings in Washington—only the final gallery of landscapes was devoted, with one exception, solely to the practitioners of the movement—had a tendency to blunt the lightness and fluidity as well as the vibrancy and audacity of the Impressionists’ compositions. This was particularly the case with Monet’s magisterial Luncheon (1868–1869), an exceptional loan from Frankfurt’s Städel Museum that did not travel to Paris. Inspired by Manet’s Luncheon in the Studio (1868)—for which Monet had modeled (as a stand-in) for the seated, smoking figure at right—Luncheon had been refused by the Salon of 1870 and was the most ambitious work in the Impressionist exhibition of 1874 (although it had been painted five years earlier). It was also the most expensive; priced at 5,000 francs, it remained unsold.⁴ With the painting crammed in the center of room 5 at the National Gallery, one couldn’t easily absorb the complex spatial and societal issues explored in this rarely lent full-length work, a celebration of bourgeois prosperity, paternity, and propriety, although the models for the painting were Monet’s mistress, Camille Doncieux, and their son, Jean, born out of wedlock in August 1867. This was all the more frustrating since an entire wall in a neighboring gallery displayed a reproduction of Léon Bonnat’s Christ on the Cross, commissioned in 1873 for the Cour d’Assises of the Palais de Justice in Paris and exhibited at the Salon of 1874. (This painting had not been part of the Orsay exhibition.)

Such caveats aside, “Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment” was an exceptional curatorial and scholarly achievement, admirably fulfilling the organizers’ brief to revisit an exhibition that has become “both fabled and little known today.” (À la fois mythique et méconnu: the French is more eloquent.) Both on the walls and in the pages of the excellent catalog it was made clear that the first Impressionist exhibition—on view for a month but almost a year in preparation—was a complex, heterogeneous, and in some ways marginal affair. As has long been established, only seven of the thirty-one participants were Impressionists, and only one quarter of the approximately 215 works on view in Nadar’s galleries were by these artists. Planning for a group exhibition independent of the Salon was initially the responsibility of Monet and Pissarro, who launched the project in May 1873. (They were joined later that year by Renoir and in early 1874 by Degas.) This was not to be a Salon des Refusés but a commercial undertaking that would open two weeks before the annual Salon, which in May 1874 showed some 3,657 works in twenty-four galleries and was seen by more than 300,000 visitors during its seven-week run. (Critics complained that it was a veritable Tower of Babel, “with a kilometer of paintings to make one’s way through.”) By contrast, the first Impressionist exhibition was installed in seven (or eight) rooms and had an attendance of around 3,500 visitors.

Notably absent from the supporters of this project was the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who had been buying works by Manet and his younger colleagues and exhibiting them in his London gallery since the winter of 1870. (Durand-Ruel lent two works by Sisley to the Impressionist exhibition in 1874 but acquired nothing from it.) This archconservative likely resented the cooperative structure of the group and was an avowed enemy of the current French government. As Renoir noted many years later, “We needed a reactionary to defend our painting, which Salon-goers said was revolutionary. Here was one person, at least, who was unlikely to be shot as a Communard!” In an article that appeared on the front page of Le Figaro on October 31, 1873, Durand-Ruel blamed the slump in his business on

the fear of falling again into the hands of republicans, and we all aspire, both as Frenchmen and as tradesmen, to the return of the hereditary monarchy, which is the only institution that can bring an end to our difficulties.

The decision to rent Nadar’s former studio for 2,020 francs was a good one, since the premises with their immense glass windows on the third and fourth floors were something of a landmark in the heart of one of Paris’s most fashionable tourist areas, opposite the Grand Hôtel with its seven hundred rooms, near the Jockey Club, and not far from the theater district. Monet and his colleagues added (and paid for) an entrance canopy, a turnstile, and security. In the end Renoir was responsible for the relatively spacious hang—to a friend in early April he noted that he was “still not quite out of the woods with this complicated installation”—in which the works were placed on walls of reddish-brown fabric, shown on two levels only, and not skied as at the Salon.⁵ From a meticulous rereading of the journalists’ reviews of the exhibition and a study of the floor plan of Nadar’s studio, the curators of “Paris 1874” have been able to reconstruct digitally the arrangement in the various rooms, one of the most fascinating additions to the corpus of scholarship on this topic.

Monet and Pissarro created a société anonyme, or joint-stock company, modeled on the charter of a bakers’ union in Pontoise, that allowed them to establish a self-administered corporation not requiring state authorization. Constituted on December 31, 1873, the Société des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs et Lithographes was intended to last for ten years, with annual exhibitions permitting the sale of works and a commitment to publish a regular journal. Each member paid an annual fee of 60 francs to provide a minimum capital of 1,200 francs. Seven years earlier Bazille—who was killed in November 1870 at the Battle of Beaune-la-Rolande—had attempted to launch such an independent artists’ collective but had succeeded in raising only 2,500 francs. From the financial records found among Pissarro’s papers, we know that the first Impressionist exhibition incurred expenses of over 9,000 francs and that, pace Monet’s recollections of Nadar’s generosity, the photographer had charged rent for the use of his premises. Revenue from attendance and sales was disappointing—of the 102 works available for purchase, only four were sold—and after the accounts were drawn up, each member still owed the société 184 francs. Not surprisingly, it was dissolved in April 1875.⁶

The need for financial support led Monet and his fellow organizers to cast their net wide. Efforts had been made to recruit painters such as Henri Fantin-Latour, Jean-Jacques Henner, and James Tissot, all of whom declined to participate. As late as April 6, 1874, a little over a week before the vernissage, Degas was still urging Manet to exhibit with them, though he had steadfastly refused. Confident that Manet could be persuaded to change his mind, Degas informed the engraver Félix Bracquemond that “riled up by Fantin and his own self-induced panic, Manet still refuses to join us; but as yet nothing seems to be definitively settled.” In fact it was. Manet had sent four paintings to the Salon of 1874 (two of which were rejected) and did not yield to Degas’s blandishments. However, he agreed to lend Morisot’s ravishing Hide-and-Seek (1873) to the exhibition.

It is clear that a primary motivation for organizing this independent exhibition in April 1874—one of some twenty-five art shows mounted in Paris that year—was the artists’ growing frustration with the annual Salon and its jury. The Impressionists’ exhibition was not intended as a “contre-Salon.” Not only did it open well before the official celebrations at the Palais de l’Industrie, but at least one third of those participating in it also had work on view at the Salon of 1874 (notably Eugène Boudin and Giuseppe De Nittis). But if the organizers were far from constituting an avant-garde collective with a new shared aesthetic, their efforts were not without risk. The collector and writer Théodore Duret—heir to a dynasty of Cognac distributors and an early champion of the Impressionists—argued forcefully against such a venture, telling Pissarro in mid-February 1874:

You have one last barrier to surmount, namely becoming known by the public and accepted by all the dealers and art lovers. For this, there are only the auctions at the hôtel Drouot and the great exhibition at the Palais de l’Industrie…. Your group exhibitions will not help you gain a reputation. The public does not go to them. You need to make a name for yourselves, to brave and confront the critics, to present yourselves to the general public. This can only be done by exhibiting at the Palais de l’Industrie.

Two things emerge from a close reading of the reviews of the first Impressionist exhibition: the generally favorable response of the press—of around sixty articles published, only seven were overtly hostile—and the critics’ focus on the paintings of the core members of the group rather than those artists (the majority, in fact) who did not work in this advanced style. Ernest Chesneau, the critic for Paris-Journal, even complained that the corporation had opened its doors too widely, admitting “all the incompetents, all the hangers-on at the official exhibitions.” While Louis Leroy’s pungent critique of the exhibition in Le Charivari, in which the group was given its name in print for the first time, is often cited as indicative of the philistinism and incomprehension of the art press (and the public generally), the lengthy review by the distinguished critic Jules-Antoine Castagnary that appeared four days later in Le Siècle—a newspaper with a much larger readership of 40,000—provided sensitive and informed commentary. “They are impressionists,” he wrote, “in the sense that they render not a landscape but the sensation produced by a landscape.” Another ally, the critic Philippe Burty, identified the Impressionists’ “common artistic aim” as “in technique, the rendering of the broad daylight of the open air, and in feeling, the clarity of the initial sensation.” It should be noted, however, that even the most supportive critics were alarmed by the sketchiness and lack of finish of the Impressionists’ canvases, and at least one referred to the group show as an “exhibition of sketches” (l’exposition des esquisses).

In part, the relatively positive reception can be explained by the fact that the Impressionists’ pictorial strategies—the abandonment of traditional chiaroscuro, the use of coloristic modeling and syncopated brushwork—were not new in 1874. Manet had pioneered such innovations in his Salon paintings of the 1860s, and as his avatars—members of the École des Batignolles, immortalized in Fantin-Latour’s group portrait at the Salon of 1870—Monet and Renoir had already worked together in the summer of 1869 on a series of elaborate, experimental plein air landscapes at La Grenouillère, a somewhat raucous bathing and boating establishment twenty minutes by train from the Gare Saint-Lazare.

It takes a certain effort of the will (and imagination) to recover the daring and radicalism of many of the Impressionist paintings on view in Nadar’s studio in the spring of 1874, all of which are familiar and admired today. The “shock of the new” can still be experienced in front of a work such as Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines (see illustration at beginning of article), a sketch for the larger horizontal canvas today in Moscow’s Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, which was sent to the 1874 exhibition. Two gentlemen in top hats, indicated by a flurry of black strokes midway up the right-hand edge of the canvas, look down from the unseen balcony onto the teeming Parisian crowd below. Some of the passersby are shown walking, some in cabs, with a light dusting of snow visible on the pavement and the hoods of the carriages. As there were several frosty days in Paris in November and December 1873 (but no snow until February 1874), it is probable that Monet made this painting in late 1873.⁷ The sensation of a cold, wintry afternoon is palpable, but still striking today are the disembodied patches of pink impasto in the lower right-hand quadrant of the canvas that read almost as abstract patterns of paint. (They represent the balloons being hawked to children by one of the street vendors.)

Another of the paintings on view in 1874, Renoir’s La Loge (Theater Box) —one of the glories of London’s Courtauld Gallery and rarely seen outside Somerset House—was listed for sale by the artist for the ambitious sum of 2,500 francs. After failing to find a buyer, it was shipped to London in November by Durand-Ruel to be shown in the Ninth Exhibition of French Artists in his galleries on New Bond Street, where it was exhibited as At the Theater and again went unsold. La Loge was finally acquired by the picture dealer Père Martin for 425 francs.⁸ (According to Ambroise Vollard, Renoir claimed that he was so desperate for money at the time that he agreed to part with the painting for 85 francs, but this is an unreliable reminiscence.) In La Loge Renoir placed his models—both dressed in considerable finery (note the man’s gold cuff link and white glove)—in one of the boxes closest to the stage in front of the drop curtain. These seats did not provide a particularly good view of the performance but gave their occupants exceptional visibility for the other members of the audience. The variety and rhythms of Renoir’s handling of paint evoke the sensation of a glance that lingers and hesitates before deciding upon its focus. François Debret’s Opéra Le Peletier had been ravaged by fire on the night of October 29, 1873, and since Charles Garnier’s new opera house would not be ready to mount performances until January 1875, the Paris Opéra was homeless when Renoir was at work on his painting. This might help explain the nostalgia, affection, and anticipation conveyed in his scene of Parisian highlife.

A subtheme in the exhibitions in both Paris and Washington—and an issue touched upon in several essays in the catalog—is the effect of the recent Franco-Prussian War and Paris Commune on the core group of Impressionist painters. Can Impressionism, as a style and repertory of modern-life subjects, be understood as offering a sense of salvation and expiation after the ravages and dislocations of the dark days between Napoleon III’s surrender to the Prussian army at Sedan in September 1870 and the violent clashes of la semaine sanglante in Paris and the suppression of the Commune in May 1871? The turmoil, upheaval, and uncertainty experienced by Manet and the future Impressionists during this period is the subject of Sebastian Smee’s engrossing Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism. However, as the exhibition’s primary organizers, Anne Robbins and Sylvie Patry, note, not a single work in Nadar’s gallery in 1874 engaged directly with the consequences of France’s recent defeat and civil war. Is it reasonable to assume, as Smee writes, that visitors encountering Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines in Nadar’s galleries, for example, would have been conscious that this thoroughfare “had seen some of the most atrocious violence during Bloody Week”? There is no doubt that France’s humiliations in war and the recent carnage in the capital provided history painters and sculptors with subjects for the Salon. But among the works by the more advanced painters, Manet’s etching of women queuing at the butcher’s during the siege of Paris and his two lithographs and a large drawing in ink, watercolor, and gouache depicting the bloodshed of the Commune, produced in 1870–1871, were outliers. In their paintings and works on paper on view in the spring of 1874, the Impressionists returned to a repertory of modern-life subjects and suburban landscapes that had been established in the late 1860s.

Of course, all the future Impressionists had been deeply affected by the disruptions of the Franco-Prussian War and the subsequent civil unrest and famine in Paris. Both Pissarro and Sisley lost their homes and the contents of their studios to the Prussian onslaught. Pissarro’s property in Louveciennes was looted and destroyed; he estimated that out of 1,500 canvases only forty paintings survived.⁹ Sisley suffered the same pillaging in Bougival. In September 1870, Morisot’s studio in Passy was commandeered by the army: “The militia are quartered in the studio, hence there is no way of using it.” Renoir, who was called up for duty on August 26, 1870, and assigned to a light cavalry regiment stationed outside Bordeaux, fell ill from dysentery and suffered a nervous collapse. Although he did not see battle, he painted almost nothing for seven months, returning in April 1871 to Paris, where he wandered the streets in the early evening to the sounds of cannon fire and bombing. With the Commune in full force, however, Renoir painted the beautiful portrait of the mistress of his friend Edmond Maître, arrayed in fashionable silks and lace, holding a Japanese fan, and looking pensively at an iron birdcage housing four budgerigars. (The canvas is signed and inscribed “April 1871.”)¹⁰

One needs to tread carefully when seeking the ramifications of the country’s defeat at the hands of the Prussian army and the depredations of the civil war in Paris for the emerging repertory of Impressionist canvases produced by the small group of artists leading the charge in April 1874. Does the specter of L’Année terrible preside in any meaningful way over the development of this new pictorial language? Do early Impressionist landscapes and subject pictures—or their more conservative counterparts shown at the Salon—serve as balm or expiation to assist in the recovery from national trauma? In place of this new orthodoxy, it is worth returning to Meyer Schapiro’s assessment of early Impressionism as an art of urban idylls, of spontaneous and informal sociability. In its continuities with advanced painting of the 1860s, he wrote in Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries (1978), Impressionism engaged—and celebrated—haute-bourgeois preoccupations with leisure, consumption, and luxury:

In enjoying realistic pictures of his surroundings as a spectacle of traffic and changing atmospheres, the cultivated rentier was experiencing in its phenomenal aspect that mobility of the environment, the market, and of industry to which he owed his income and his freedom. And in the new Impressionist techniques which broke things up into finely discriminated points of color, as well as in the “accidental” momentary vision, he found, in a degree hitherto unknown in art, conditions of sensibility closely related to those of the urban promenader and the refined consumer of luxury goods.