The French Impressionists [antikvár]

THE FRENCH IMPRESSIONISTS The name is too precious to be sacrificed; but 'impressionist', one must admit, is an imprecise description of the group of painters who in 1874 held an exhibition and by a penny-a-liner were dubbed 'Impressionnistes'. They were a mixed lot: some ofthem were already known as followers of Courbet and Manet, others had worked under the influence of Corot, one at least was a disciple of Ingres. In 1870 they had been more or less independent painters, each going his own way, and ten or twelve years later the best of them were going their own ways again. In the spring of 1874 Manet, who, oddly enough, and for reasons which must be discovered presently, came to be reckoned chief of the band, refused to exhibit with them, only to become a few months later the enthusiastic adept of Pleinairisme, painting under the influence of Monet such admirable impressionist pictures as Argenteuil, La Barque, Le Linge. And Manet, too, reverted to type. The question remains then: granted that most of the principal painters, with the exception of Manet, included in the present collection took part in the first Impressionist exhibition, what else had they in common? Whatever it may have been, we must seek it between the years 1872 and 1882 — the formative and golden decade. There was a doctrine and a technique, both of which will have to be discussed; but not all the impressionist masters believed heartily in the doctrine, and only two practised the technique consistently. Nevertheless, something was held in common, something vaguer but more significant than a doctrine. There was a point of view, an attitude to life and art, which for a time at any rate inspired them all. For a while they shared a new, an essentially 'modern' vision, and a passionate delight therein. Thus they rediscovered Paganism. 'The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.' That was their discovery. No need for the artist in search of subjects to go to history or mythology or literature ; no need to ransack the gorgeous East or the mysterious North ; no need to harry a picturesque past in pursuit of fighting Téméraires or stage-coaches or knights in armour; let the artist walk into the street (Plate 42) or railway-station (Plate 16) or suburban garden, or on to the racecourse (Plate 20), and there he will find beauty galore. Maybe such sentiments sound banal in 1951. They sounded dreadful in the age of Ruskin. They were the ravings of madmen or worse; they stank of anarchy. They were deemed a frontal attack on all that respectable people held sacred. And so they were. For behind these pagan paintings lay an assumption, an assumption that there was no call to worry about the 'Grand-Forever' of respectable church-goers, nor yet about the Welfare State of equally respectable anti-clericals. Without a hope of Heaven or Utopia, life was well worth living for itself and as it was: so it seemed to the Impressionists between 1872 and 1882—in Paris. And yet most ofthem were very poor. So far there is something like a common aim or inspiration; and when it came to devising means for expressing this new awareness of the beauty of ordinary sights— of top-hats and four-wheeled cabs, piles of luggage in railway-stations, iron bridges with steam This essay was first published in 1951. Clive Bell (1881 1964) was a well-known critic and writer on art, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Other works by him include Art (1914) and Since Césanne (1922).