The Impressionists: Masterpieces from the Musée d'Orsay
Exhibition themes: The Impressionist landscape
Like their predecessors and occasional mentors Eugène Boudin (1824-98) and Gustave Courbet (1819-77), a number of the Impressionists felt a particular devotion to the landscape. In eighteenth-century France the landscape had still ranked low in the hierarchy of acceptable genres for artists to paint. This attitude began to change in the first half of the nineteenth century, due partly to the influence of Romanticism's emphasis on landscape as a canvas for expressing an artist's individual feelings and emotions; and also due to a growing awareness among French artists of the successes won in this genre by their English counterparts John Constable (1776-1837) and J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851). Camille Corot (1796-1875), and the painters of the 'Barbizon School' who worked in and around the Forest of Fontainebleau from the 1830s, popularized the practice of painting out of doors (en plein air), setting up their easels before nature (sur le motif). Claude Monet's encounters with the plein air painters Boudin and Courbet in the late 1850s and early 1860s, helped develop his own interest in painting out of doors, an enthusiasm that proved infectious, spreading amongst Monet's fellow art students Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley, and being shared in the 1870s with his painter friends Camille Pisarro, Gustave Caillebotte, and the slightly older Édouard Manet.
After the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian war restored peace to the French countryside, Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley and Camille Pissarro moved outside of Paris to rural areas that provided them with a constant source of inspiration. The distinctive contributions that each of these artists made to the genre, seemed to confirm the often-quoted words of the influential writer and critic Émile Zola (1840-1902), that landscape painting was 'a little bit of nature, as seen through a temperament'.
