Painting. World artists. Cammile Pissaro and Pierre-Auguste Renoir
An extremely gifted member of the Impressionist group
was Camille Pissarro (1830-1903). He was the most
careful and craftsmanly of them all. His companionship
and advice provided a technical foundation for Cezanne,
who called him "humble and colossal". Pissarro is both
in the scrupulously painted Boulevard des Italien, Paris
- Morning Sunlight, of 1897. With infinite care he
recorded the innumerable spots of colour constituted by
people, carriages, omnibuses, trees, windows, and kiosks
in this view of one of the great metropolitan
thoroughfares, whose activities provided the subject for
many Impressionist paintings. Impressionist artists
often worked side by side painting the same view of a
street, a cafe, or a riverbank at the same moment of
light and atmosphere, and it is often only the special
sensibility and personal touch of each painter that
makes it possible to tell their works apart.
The sparkling Les Grands Boulevards, of 1875, by Pierre
Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) shows how much latitude
remained for individuality in treating a similar subject
at the height of the collective phase of the
Impressionist movement. Renoir, the most exciting and
active of the group, has not bothered with details. He
has captured a moment of high excitement as we look
across a roadway from the shadow of the trees to the
trotting white horse pulling a carriage filled with
people in blazing sun. Warmth, physical delight, and
intense joy of life are the perpetual themes of Renoir.
Trained at first as a painter on porcelain, he later
studied with the academic painter Charles Gleyre and
soon made the acquaintance of the Impressionist group,
with whom he exhibited until 1886.
The best painting of the Impressionist highest point is
Renoir's Le Moulin de la Galette, of 1876, depicting a
Sunday afternoon in a popular outdoor dancing cafe on
Montmartre. Young couples are gathered at tables under
the trees, or dancing happily through the changing
interplay of sunlight and shadow Characteristically,
there is no trace of black, even the coats and the
shadows turn to blue. One could scarcely imagine a more
complete embodiment of the fundamental theme of
Impressionist painting, the enjoyment of the moment of
light and air. Although he later turned toward a
Post-Impressionist style, Renoir never surpassed the
beauty of this picture, which sums up visually the goal
he once expressed in words: "The earth as the paradise
of the gods, that is what I want to paint".
Literature: Book "Western European
art" A.P. Minyar-Belorucheva |
