International Year of Chemistry 2011: The Impressionists: Painting at the Time of Change

The Impressionist landscapes, with which we are so familiar, look deceptively calm. Still, they contain hints of the major social, political, and technological upheavals that took place in 19th-century France and changed attitudes toward painterly themes and representation. Urbanization was one. A major restructuring of Paris took place under the direction of Baron Georges E. Haussmann between 1853 and 1870. Another was industrialization of the countryside, which led to major structural transformation and to changes in the way of life. Finally, there were political crises: the Franco-Prussian War in 1870–1871 and the subsequent Paris Commune. Although politics did not much permeate Impressionist art, the effects of industrialization on the urban and rural landscape did.

The beginning of the 19th century saw a new generation of painters moving away from the idealized studio landscapes in which nature was just a background to a biblical or Greco-Roman story. For them, the landscape itself became a focus of painting. Painters went out to paint in the open air in what became known as the plein air approach. The most important group worked around the village of Barbizon, not far from Paris, and these painters are regarded as important precursors of Impressionism. It was, however, the Impressionists who became the epitome of …


International Year of Chemistry 2011
The Impressionists:

Painting at the Time of Change
Marek H. Dominiczak 1* The Impressionist landscapes, with which we are so familiar, look deceptively calm. Still, they contain hints of the major social, political, and technological upheavals that took place in 19th-century France and changed attitudes toward painterly themes and representation. Urbanization was one. A major restructuring of Paris took place under the direction of Baron Georges E. Haussmann between 1853 and 1870. Another was industrialization of the countryside, which led to major structural transformation and to changes in the way of life. Finally, there were political crises: the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 -1871 and the subsequent Paris Commune. Although politics did not much permeate Impressionist art, the effects of industrialization on the urban and rural landscape did.
The beginning of the 19th century saw a new generation of painters moving away from the idealized studio landscapes in which nature was just a background to a biblical or Greco-Roman story. For them, the landscape itself became a focus of painting. Painters went out to paint in the open air in what became known as the plein air approach. The most important group worked around the village of Barbizon, not far from Paris, and these painters are regarded as important precursors of Impressionism. It was, however, the Impressionists who became the epitome of plein air painting and who developed a unique "instantaneous" style.
Claude Monet (1840 -1926) was born in Paris. His parents moved to Le Havre when he was 5 years old. There he learned from a leading seascape painter, Eugène Boudin. Monet spent 18 months in Paris in 1859 and 1860. Later, he lived in villages not far away. In 1872, Monet settled in Argenteuil, where he painted many of his works that reflect industrialization of the countryside. He then lived in Vétheuil (1878 -1881) and Poissy (1881-1883). In 1883, Monet finally moved to Giverny, the place of the famous garden and, today, Musée Claude Monet.
Monet said that the painting should reveal truth to individual experience. His emphasis on observation is in a way similar to that placed on it by the scientific method. His image of the refurbished Parisian railway station Gare Saint-Lazare is a marker of many underlying cultural issues. It is a celebration of new architecture and technologies: Railway stations were seen at the time as new "cathedrals" of progress, and the locomotives represented cuttingedge technology with a great promise. In this painting (Fig. 1), Monet used all Impressionist means to create momentary effects, capturing the clouds of steam and smoke drifting toward the iron and glass roof of the station and contrasting them with the shadows of the railway tracks and locomotives below. For the first time in his career, he made a series of paintings of the same subject, aiming to demonstrate that the nature of a subject can be revealed only by showing it in a different light and from different points of view. Monet painted 12 views of this station, 7 of which were exhibited side by side at the Paris Salon in 1877. He later did the same with the views of the Rouen Cathedral, the haystacks, and, finally, water lilies in his Giverny garden.
Where is chemistry in this? It is in the use of paint technologies and in the application of emerging theories of color, both seminal to Impressionist painting. A whole range of new pigments was developed at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century. Of the 20 principal colors the Impressionists used, 12 were new synthetic paints [see the Ball reference (3 ) for more information]. Monet was an enthusiast of these new pigments. He also applied the color theory of a chemist, Michel-Eugène Chevreul (1786 -1889). Chevreul was professor of organic chemistry at the National Museum of Natural History and director of the famous Gobelins tapestry works. He was the discoverer of oleic and stearic acids, a member of the British Royal Society, and the recipient of their prestigious Copley Medal. What made Chevreul's stamp on the arts was his theory of complementary colors and his 74-color "wheel." In 1828, he demonstrated that the way a color looks to the eye is influenced by the colors that surround it. Placing the so-called complementary colors side by side makes a painting look brighter. Chevreul's early work had perhaps the greatest influence on the Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix and some Neoclassicists in the 1830s. Later, it had an impact on the Impressionists and particularly the Neo-Impressionist Paul Signac. Monet used Chevreul's ideas in the 1870s. In the painting shown here, there is overall complementarity between the white and blue steam and the hints of orange and red on the ground. In a typical Impressionist fashion, Monet used complex mixtures of blues, greens, reds, and yellows when creating dark colors, rather than simple browns and grays. This practice expressed the Impressionist mantra that "even the murkiest shadows are full of color" [quoted after Ball (3 )].
Clearly, to treat Impressionist paintings as an application of science would be an exaggeration; however, to say that they were completely divergent from scientific ideas would not be accurate either.