Lifeworks : Modern optics

Let us record atoms as they fall upon mind in order in which they fall, let us trace pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon consciousness. — Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction, 1925 The National Gallery of Canada's summer crowd-pleaser this year is Monet, Renoir and Impressionist Landscape, a selection of 70 canvases from extensive Impressionist collection of Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. This survey of French painting from 1850s to end of 19th century attests to depth of Boston collection, even if definition of landscape is somewhat strained by inclusion of Renoirs that in another context would be called portraits. But there is no need to quibble here. Those in mood for a bolus dose of Impressionist dazzle might find this show rather studious. The exhibition is framed by a roomful of paintings representing precursors to Impressionism, and by another roomful of works by contemporaries of Impressionists who found acceptance through official Salons rather than via harder (or higher) road of Salon des Refuses. But this contextualization illustrates how Impressionism was not a unitary movement. It was product of an infusion of ideas from a number of sources, and those ideas took a different shape in each practitioner. The flecked application of paint by Dutch marine artist Jongkind, whom young Claude Monet met in 1861, showed way for rendering of light in a raw form, as if to replicate moment of sensation that precedes moment of perception. What Virginia Woolf proposed some years later for writing, Impressionists accomplished in representation of light. The Impressionists' famed dedication to painting en plein air, where nuances of light and colour could be viewed with a new immediacy, was in part a legacy of Barbizon painters who preceded them by roughly a generation. And their interest in as a subject was both a revival of and a departure from earlier, classical traditions. But not all Impressionists were equally committed to landscape, and not all were equally happy in open air. Pissarro, Impressionist who more than any other stayed course, exhibiting at all eight Impressionist group exhibitions from 1874 to 1886, said that the unity that human mind gives to vision can only be found in studio. It is there that our impressions, scattered as they are at first, become coordinated.1 Perhaps he was making a virtue of necessity, for by time he made this remark Pissarro's chronic dacryocystitis was forcing him indoors, away from wind and dust.2 Degas' preference for working in studio may have been related to his sensitivity to light, perhaps as a result of macular degeneration.3 But it is arch-impressionist Monet whose failing eyesight is most well-known, and whose love of painting outdoors never faltered. We picture him in his last years, in his garden at Giverny, tormented by his distorted perception of colour as he struggled to produce his Waterlilies, tribute to glory of France exacted from him by statesman George Clemenceau.4 In end, Monet's art transcended affliction of his eyes. His paintings are a tribute to glory of subjectivity. Monet, Renoir and Impressionist Landscape continues at National Gallery in Ottawa until August 27.

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