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Course: Europe 1800 - 1900 > Unit 5
Lesson 3: Impressionism- A beginner's guide to Impressionism
- What does “Impressionism” mean?
- How the Impressionists got their name
- Impressionist color
- Impressionist pictorial space
- Japonisme
- Degas, The Bellelli Family
- Degas, At the Races in the Countryside
- Degas, The Dance Class
- Degas, Visit to a Museum
- Caillebotte, The Floor Scrapers
- Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street; Rainy Day
- Caillebotte, Man at his Bath
- Morisot, The Cradle
- A summer day in Paris: Morisot's Hunting Butterflies
- Cassatt, In the Loge
- Cassatt, Little Girl in a Blue Armchair
- Cassatt, Woman with a Pearl Necklace in a Loge
- Cassatt, The Loge
- Cassatt, The Child's Bath
- Mary Cassatt, The Coiffure
- Cassatt, Breakfast in Bed
- How to recognize Monet: The Basin at Argenteuil
- Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise
- Monet, The Argenteuil Bridge
- Painting modern life: Monet's Gare Saint-Lazare
- Monet, The Gare Saint-Lazare
- Monet, Cliff Walk at Pourville
- Monet's Wheatstacks (Snow Effect, Morning): Getty conversations
- Monet, Poplars
- Monet, Rouen Cathedral Series
- Monet, Water Lilies
- How to Recognize Renoir: The Swing
- Renoir, La Loge
- Renoir, The Grands Boulevards
- Renoir, Moulin de la Galette
- Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Portrait of Madame Charpentier and Her Children
- Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party
- Renoir, The Large Bathers
- Impressionism
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A summer day in Paris: Morisot's Hunting Butterflies
Berthe Morisot, Hunting Butterflies, 1874, oil on canvas, 46 x 56 cm (Musée d'Orsay, Paris). Speakers: Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
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Then turn on the video. The application will type what it hears Drs Zucker and Harris saying. It's not perfect, but it's easier than typing it all yourself. I just did it with a chromebook. I'm pretty sure that a Windows or Apple machine is just as effective.(1 vote)
Video transcript
[music] We're at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris looking at Berth Morisot's
"Hunting Butterflies." -Morisot was a key member
of the impressionist circle, that group of artists
who exhibited together between 1874 and 1886. -And like Degas,
she came from an upper-class family, but as a woman she had more restrictions on where it was appropriate
for her to be seen. And the result
is that many of her paintings depict the world that she inhabited, and here we see a young woman
with children. -She and Cassat too
often depicted domestic subjects like this one. -Here we were out of doors
like many impressionist paintings, and that sense
of loose, sketchy brushwork that flouted the rules of the academy, this looked like a sketch,
not a finished painting. -This was made in 1874, the same year
as the first impressionist exhibition. The lack of resolve in form would have been seen
as absolutely radical, and it snubbed everything
that academic painting held dear. -And by academic painting, we’re referring
to the traditions of painting that were carried on by the academy through its school of fine arts
that also, for the most part, controlled official exhibitions in Paris. We're clearly in a park;
we're not in the actual countryside. This is a well-to-do Parisian family
out for a day of leisure. For all its sketchiness and looseness
of that brushwork, there's still a forthrightness
about that central figure who looks directly out at us. -She holds a butterfly net at a diagonal in contrast to the upright tree
immediately to her right that separates her space in the canvas from the space of the children. -The expectation of a painting would be that it would create
an illusion of space, but there really isn't one here. If we take that flowering tree, look at that brownish paint
that follows along the bottom that moves up the left side. It doesn't change its tonality. It doesn't move from dark to light as it moves into the background;
it just stands out as paint. -That bit of soil before the planting where the tree is located
functions two ways. We can read it back in space, but we have to force that a little bit. It also rests
on the surface of the canvas. Here we see artist who is experimenting with allowing paint
to function simultaneously in two ways, both as a vehicle to depiction and as a forthright representation
of itself. And because of that,
we see canvases like this by Morisot and by Édouard Manet, for example, as creating a conflict
between recessionary space, the illusion of death,
and the flatness of the canvas. -That figure strides toward us. There's an insistence
on her subjectivity here that I find fascinating
from a woman artist. -I love how despite the softness
of the brushwork her eyes are piercing;
they look directly at us; they catch our gaze, and they hold it. The young woman is acting into space, is in control of this space. -And moving away from a child who almost seems to be beckoning
toward her. -One could almost say
that by expressing her independence, she refuses to be like the butterflies that she wants to capture in that net. [music]