Monet discards hundreds of years of tradition of how to paint light, and shows us what he’s really seeing.
Claude Monet, The Argenteuil Bridge, 1874, oil on canvas, 60.5 x 80 cm (Musée d’Orsay, Paris)
Please note that there is significant background chatter in this video. The Musée d’Orsay is happily a very busy museum and this painting is hung in a relatively small room.
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:03] We’re at the Musée d’Orsay, and we’re looking at an 1874 Monet. This is “The Bridge at Argenteuil,” which is a suburb of Paris.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:13] Where Monet lived briefly.
Dr. Zucker: [0:14] And was accessible to Paris by the train. This is the new suburbs that are made possible by not only the wealth of the city, but also the industry of this time.
Dr. Harris: [0:23] And a place where people would go to escape the intensity of urban life in Paris, and go boating, and go fishing, and go picnicking. You can see from this painting how fun that would be here.
Dr. Zucker: [0:37] Yes. What really comes across is just the brilliance of the light on a summer day.
Dr. Harris: [0:42] Monet is discarding hundreds of years of tradition of the way that one would paint trees and water, and has found a new method for painting outdoor light. Remember, he’s painting this out-of-doors, too. This is a painting painted en plein air.
Dr. Zucker: [0:59] This is the height of Impressionism. 1874 is the year of the First Impressionist Exhibition, and Monet has, as you said, discarded an entire tradition, turned painting on its head by saying, “What’s important is not the thing that I’m painting, but it is the optical experience of seeing.”
Dr. Harris: [1:15] That’s right.
Dr. Zucker: [1:16] That’s critical here.
Dr. Harris: [1:17] Right. In order to jettison those hundreds of years of how to paint a landscape, Monet asks himself, “What am I really seeing? If I put away everything my brain tells me and everything a person learns at the Academy, as though my eye were born now, and I just looked at the scene, what would I see?
[1:36] “Patches of green, patches of bluish-green, dabs of purple. Not what I know. Not like chiaroscuro, the formula of academic painting, but the actual visual experience of this.”
Dr. Zucker: [1:50] When you look at, for instance, the English painter Constable, you can identify the types of trees, you can identify the hardware that’s on the barges that he renders. Here, almost nothing is identifiable. It’s not about that. It’s not about understanding of what kind of sailboat that is, of what kind of sail that’s that canvas that’s rolled up.
Dr. Harris: [2:08] No.
Dr. Zucker: [2:08] None of that is important. In fact, as you said, the water, there are parts of it that could be a green lawn in another context. In fact, it’s just the reflective qualities of that surface.
Dr. Harris: [2:17] Right. He’s thought, “Oh, I see a dab of green. I see a dab of blue.” You have an intensity of color. He’s using these colors that would never be seen in an academic landscape painting.
Dr. Zucker: [2:27] Because they would have always been muted.
Dr. Harris: [2:30] Mixed.
Dr. Zucker: [2:30] That’s right.
Dr. Harris: [2:30] Here, they’re just the same in the foreground as they are in the background. For example, that green that we see in the water, that’s the shadow of the tree, it’s just as green and just as deep as the tree itself, and so, there’s a kind of flattening that happens here that I think looked very radical in the 1870s, and a kind of sketchiness and a looseness to the brushwork that made it not look like a finished painting.
[2:55] Now, landscape painters had done studies out-of-doors for hundreds of years. The idea was that Monet was making a completely finished painting out-of-doors, saying “this is done,” even though it lacked the kind of polish and finish expected by the Academy.
Dr. Zucker: [3:10] It was a mere impression.
[3:12] [music]
