During the latter half of the 19th century a new wave of French artists began to look at landscapes – and their depiction – in a shockingly different manner. Three works – by 168开奖官方开奖网站查询:Claude Monet, 168开奖官方开奖网站查询:Pierre-Auguste Renoir and 168开奖官方开奖网站查询:Alfred Sisley, respectively – to be offered in our 16꧅8开奖官方开奖网站查询:Impressionis📖t & Modern Art Evening sale (London, 19 June) highlight t⛎his seismicꦉ shift in viewing vistas.
In 1876, the French critic Stéphane Mallarmé noted: “The represented subject, which being composed of a harmony of reflected and ever-changing lights, cannot be supposed always to look the same, but palpitates with move🐻ment, light, and life.”
Those palpitations were a matter of lively debate for Monet, Renoir and Sisley. As Monet put it, “Nothing could be more interesting than these causeries, with their perpetual clash of opiniౠons. They kept our wits sharpened.”
In Monet’s 168开奖官方开奖网站查询:Vue d’Argenteuil (1872) the artist produces a widescreen v𓆉iew of the town of Argenteuil, near Saint-Denis, where he spent much of the 1870s. This sleepy suburban town was just beginning to embrace industry, although for his composition Monet edited the landscape into three strips – sky, town, river – all seen from the waters of the Seine, with no figures present.
The work was most likely painted from his studio-boat. “A fair wind brought me jus𒆙t enough money,” he noted at the time, “to buy myself a boat and have a littꦅle wooden cabin built on it, just big enough to set up easel in.”
Renoir also eschewed figures in his country scene, 168开奖官方开奖网站查询:Après la tempête (temps d’orage) – painted in the same year as Monet’s view. There is a farmhouse barely visible; but this is really a brooding and elemental nature study: brush, 🎃hedges and trees under a changeable canvas of clouds. “You come to nature with all your theories, and she knocks them all flat,” he remarked.
As the century drew to a close, Alfred Sisley took Impressionism to its more joyous potential with 168开奖官方开奖网站查询:Les lilas dans mon jardin (1892), a luminous painting of his garden at Veneux-Nadon near Moret-sur-Loing. A solitary figure – perhaps the artist himself – walks among the blooming sunlit lilac trees. Movemen🍃t, light and life, indeed.
These three paintings all capture landscape at its most ephemeral. The sweet irony, perhaps, is that they were acquired by the renowned collector and art dealer Dr Fritz Nathan over fifty years ago and have rema𝄹ined in the same family collection ever since.
Explore more from 168开奖官方开奖网站查询:The Art of the Season at Sotheby's
