The Impressionists

This research began in my Oral Communication Class at BRTC.  Each individual had to make an informative Power-point for our last speech.  I of course chose to do mine on Monet a French Impressionist.  Here is a little information about Impressionism.


Claude Monet

      










Self Portrait 1886













Claude Monet was a famous French artist known as the founder or father of the Impressionist Movement during the 19th century.  The Impressionist Period started around the 1870, and continued until the 1890’s.  According to Webster’s Dictionary impressionism is defined as a style or movement in painting, characterized by depicting a visual impression of a moment in terms of shifting effect of light and color.  This simply means that the impressionist painter’s official theory was that the color should be dropped pure on the canvas instead of getting mixed on the palette as in the Romanticism and Realism Periods prior to this new movement that occurrs between Realism and Modernism Periods.  

In 1874, Monet and a group of painters including Pissarro and Pierre-Auguste Renoir banded together to form a society of artists. They gave a public exhibition of their work at the studio of a Paris photographer. Monet exhibited a painting called, “Impression: Sunrise.” His painting gave the group its name, coined in derision by critic Louis Leroy referring to the entire exhibition as “Impressionistic.” Despite the financial failure of this first exhibit, the Impressionist continued to exhibit together until 1886.

This is a wonderful movie about all the impressionists.

Uploaded by deonildo1001 on May 25, 2011 on Youtube.

Other Impressionist are as follows:


Pierre-Auguste Renoir 

                             Self Portrait 1875
 
                         


Born 25 February 1841 in Limoges.  He was the sixth child of Leonard Lenoir  and Marguerite Merlet.  In 1844 Renoir and his family moved to Paris where Leonard Renoir earned his living as a tailor.  In 1854 Renoir left school and begin his apprenticeship as a porcelain painter at the firm of Levy Freres.  His precocious talent for painting would assure his career as a porcelain painter but the firm went bankrupt in 1858.  After that Renoir dabbled in a number of different jobs but it seems that he may have decided to become a full-time painter around this date.

On January 24, 1860 Renoir was granted permission to copy in the Louvre, a practice that he maintained for the next four years.  At this time Renoir had a taste for the eighteenth-century masters, including Fragonard, Lancret , Watteau and above all Boucher.  Bouchers Bath of Diana was the first painting that he adored and he continued to love it all his life.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - The Private life of a Masterpiece.

Edouard Manet

                      Self Portrait - 1878




 

 Born January 23, 1832, in Paris, France, Manet was a painter who defined tradition in both his choices of modern, urban subjects and his experiments with perspective.  His work was criticized for most of his life and was not truly appreciated until the 20the century.  He helped pave the way for the revolutionary art of the Impressionists  and Post-Impressionists, greatly influencing modern art.  He died April 30, 1883 in Paris. 

Manet The Man Who Invented Modern Art

Paul Cezanne  

                                 Self Portrait

Born January 19, 1839, in Aix-en Provence, Cezanne's father, Philippe Auguste, was the cofounder of a banking firm that prospered throughout the artist's life, affording him financial security that was unavailable to most of his contemporaries and eventually resulting in a large inheritance.

Jean Frédéric Bazille




















Self Portrait 1865














He was born on December 6, 1841 in Montpellier, Hérault (France) to a Protestant family of middle class.  In 1862 Bazille was studying medicine when he first meet Renoir which is when he became interested in the impressionist way painting.  Most of his famous works were painted when he was just 23 years old, which included The Pink Dress.  He most well know painting is a Family Reunion in 1867-1868. Sadly his career was short because he was killed in action during the Franco-Prussian War on November 28, 1870 in Beaune-la-Rolande, Loiret.  Many of Bazille's major works are examples of figure painting in which Bazille placed the subject figure within a landscape painted en plein air.

Frédéric Bazille

Uploaded by inesvigo on Nov 30, 2010 on YouTube

And the last painter in my collection is
Edgar Degas

                   Self Portrait 1855

He was born on July 19, 1834 in Paris, France.  His father was a banker and his mother was an American woman from New Orleans.  They were very musical household since his mother was an amateur opera singer his father often arranged recitals in their home.  Degas went to a prestigious boys' secondary school, known as the Lycée Louis-le-Grand.  From a very early age Degas showed remarkable talent for painting and drawing and was encouraged by his father who was a knowledeable art lover.  When Degas was 18 he got permission to practice at the Louvre in Paris. 

A few years later in 1862 he met Edouard Manet at the Louvre, and quickly developed a friendly rivalry.  They both disliked for the art establishment during that time as well as their beliefs that artist needed to have more modern techniques than just coping their masters. When the Franco-Prussian War broke out Degas volunteered for the French National Guard. When it ended in 1871 a bloody civil war broke out Degas avoided the tumult of the Paris Commune with a trip to New Orleans.  He returned to Paris at the end of 1873 where he along with other impressionist formed the Societe Anonyme des Artistes, who put on their own art exhibitions free of the Salon's control. 

He never married but was intimate with many women, including the American painter Mary Cassatt.including the American painter Mary Cassatt.

During his life he painted around 1200 paintings and also made about 75 scultures.  His most famous sculpture is the Little Dancer, a real ballet dancer who he captured in time with his sculpture made of wax.  Degas passed away on September 27, 1917, at the age of 83.

I believe that these men throughout their lives wanted the fame of an artist, but never really got the satisfaction of knowing just how much they would impact and change the modern thoughts of art during their century. It is their legacy's they leave behind that intriques me the most about each one. Each man came from different lifestyles and different classifaction of society. Most of them struggled because they followed their passion for Art instead of other professions that would have been paid for by their fathers. Even though each one was on a different journey, their path's soon meet up with ethe other, captured forever in a period of time we now know as Impressionism.

The Musee d'Orsay

The Musee d'Orsay is a museum in Paris, France, on the left bank of the Seine, housed in the former railway station, the Gare d'Orsay, an impressive Beaux-Arts edifice built between 1898 and 1900. It holds mainly French art dating from 1848 to 1915, including paintings, sculptures, furniture, and photography, and is probably best known for its extensive collection of impressionist and post-impressionist masterpieces (the largest in the world) by such painters such as Monet, Manet, Degas, Renoir, Cezanne, Seurat, Gauguin and Van Gogh. Many of these works were held at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume prior to the museum's opening in 1986.

Claude Monet "Father of Impressionist Period"

Early life of Claude Monet.  

He was born Oscar Claude Monet on November 14, 1840.  His father Claude Adolphe worked in his family’s shipping business where he was known as a shop keeper and his mother Louise was a trained singer who took care of the family.  Monet was born in Paris France and lived there until he was five.  His father was offered a job by his brother-in-law and the family moved to Le Havre, a port town in the Normandy region.  He grew up there with his older brother Leon.

Monet got his primary education at a private school and in 1851 he entered the Le Havre secondary school of arts.  Monet did not like being confined to a classroom.  At an early age, Monet developed a love of drawing.  He filled his schoolbooks with sketches of people, including caricatures of his teachers.  Locals knew him well for his caricatures.

In 1858 Monet was introduced to Eugene Boudin a local landscape Artist, who became his first mento and taught him to use oil paints and outdoor techniques for painting.  At age 16 Monet left school and went to live with his widowed aunt in Paris where he enrolled as a student at the Academic Suisse.  Later he meet his biggest influence and mentor Johann Barthold Jongkind, who was also a landscape painter.

Camille Doncieux Monet meet Camille Doncieux  in 1866.  She was 18 years old when she posed for Monet one of his most famous paintings called, “The woman in green dress”.  She also became Monet’s favorite model as well as his mistress.    They married on June 28, 1870.  It was during this time that Monet painted various works of modern life.

Camille developed tuberculosis in 1876 and died from this disease in 1879 at the age of thirty-two.  Monet painted her one last time on her death bed. That would be the last time Monet would ever paint his beloved Camille.  She left behind two children.  Claude and Camille had two children together. 

1) Jean Armand Monet was born on August 8, 1867 before Monet married Camille.  He is often seen in many of Monet’s paintings alongside his mother.  He later married Blanche Hoschede daughter of Alice Hoschede in 1897.  She was very fond of Claude Monet and painted alongside him. 

2) Michel Monet was born in March 17 1878. 

Alice Hoschede is the nurse who helped Camille during her sickness.  Alice and her husband Ernest and their six children moved in with the Monets after Ernest went bankrupt 1877.  Ernest, however, spent most of his time in Paris, and eventually abandoned his family and went to Belgium. Monet had several difficult months following the death of Camille; a grief-stricken Monet (resolving never to be mired in poverty again) began to create some of the best paintings of the 19th century.  Alice Hoschede helped Monet to raise his two sons along with her six children in Paris.  Eventually joining Monet in Vetheuil, and then moving with him to Poissy in 1881 and finally settling in Giverny in 1883 after Monet discovered Giverny on a little train between Vernon and Gasny.  The relationship between Claude Monet and Alice Hoschede developed and became official although they remained unmarried. After Ernest Hoschede died in 1891 Claude Monet and Alice Hoschedé married in 1892.  

Monet painted several groups of landscapes and seascapes in what he considered to be campaigns to document the French countryside.  His extensive campaigns evolved into his series’ paintings.  He worked on the paintings exhaustively, despite poor health and double cataracts, until  he died from lung cancer on December 5, 1926.  He was 86 years old.  He is buried in the Giverny Church Cemetery.