The Impressionists: Masterpieces from the Musée d'Orsay
Exhibition themes: The still life
For the Impressionist artists, who fought for the right just to be themselves rather than conforming to academic formulas, the still life could have a liberating significance. This was implicit in an Impressionist artist's very choice of that humble subject, which for generations had occupied a lowly place within the accepted hierarchy of paintings, whereby religion and history were assumed to be of greater importance as a subject for artists. One-fifth of all the canvases painted by both Édouard Manet and Paul Cézanne were still lifes; and Henri Fantin-Latour's whole career was maintained around the still life.
Still life could serve many purposes for the Impressionists, as well as for their associates. A retreat into aesthetic sanity for Édouard Manet after hostile criticism of his figurative paintings drove him to seek solace in another genre; and, in the last years of his life, a partial panacea for the pain of terminal illness. For Henri Fantin-Latour, a curse, faced with collectors who wanted nothing else from his immense artistic talent. A testing ground, on which the young Émile Bernard could try out his radical new theories of synthetism and cloisonnism, which we see developed in the next section of the exhibition, in the paintings produced by Bernard after his encounters with Paul Gauguin at Pont-Aven. And, for Auguste Renoir, an irresistible blend of creative distraction, historical referencing, and sensual attraction. Although Claude Monet is represented in this exhibition exclusively by landscapes, it is important to remember that he included either still life or floral paintings among his contributions to five of the Impressionist group exhibitions.
