Impressionism and Early Photography

The fast, roaring approach of the 20th Century compelled artists to seek new ways of recording and interpreting the world around them. The Industrial Revolution, which brought radical economic, social, and cultural change to growing urban centers across Europe, infiltrated contemporary visual culture, jolting artists’ worldviews—almost requiring new ways of seeing. Within the broader category of modern art, there are two peculiarly linked movements that seem to be direct products of the ever-onward, ever-upward spirit of this changing time. 

Impressionist painting, in its controversial departure from the Paris establishment in the 1870s, emphasized the achievement of particular light atmospheres through visible brush strokes and freely mixed colors while deemphasizing subject matter, line, and contour. At the figurative helm of this movement was Monet, whose Rouen Cathedral series exemplifies this new obsession with light. As you soak in the whole composition, the architecture recedes and the feeling of a specific, fleeting moment of light becomes preeminent. Light is the subject. 

Just a few decades before Impressionism, photography began its explosion in European culture. Early photographic movements would inevitably follow the medium’s invention. What is surprising and unexpected is the influence this brand new technology had on the avant-garde endeavor of Impressionism. For the first time, light could be accurately captured on a two-dimensional surface; some painters would embrace the camera and its unique cropping, zooming, and perspectival sensibilities. It was yet another, albeit innovative way of seeing.

Remember that the advancement of art does not occur in a vacuum; peer ideas continually inform one another. Might the Impressionists have influenced early photographers as well? 

This exhibition attempts to discover traces of symbiosis between the two mediums and their respective movements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral: The Portal (Sunlight), 1894, oil on canvas, 30.95.250

At the figurative helm of the Impressionist movement was Claude Monet, whose philosophy of painting emphasized the transcription of natural light sensations onto the canvas. He would often return to the same location or subject numerous times, capturing perceived light atmospheres from diverse moments of daylight. One such series of paintings focused on the west façade of the Rouen Cathedral in over thirty different settings. The distinctly Gothic architecture recedes as a moment of sunlight, perhaps just before or just after noon, colorfully interacts with the stone face and becomes the most pertinent compositional element. This interest in the “aesthetic of the instant” should remind us of photography, a technology that could immediately record light data. 

Edouard Baldus, Cathédrale Notre-Dame de l’Assomption de Rouen, 1858, 

albumen silver print from glass negative, Museum Folkwang, Essen, 100.5.72

Edouard Baldus is considered one of the first photographers to combine aesthetic sensitivity with exceptional technical prowess. Leaving his fine art painting aspirations to pursue negative and paper photographic processes, he would become the most widely respected French architectural and landscape photographer in the medium’s early years. There are immediate similarities between this particular composition and the selection from Monet’s Rouen series. The architectural subject. The cropping. The floating vantage point from across the street. High sunlight. Further, there is also a shared French nationalistic interest; both had an affection for their homeland and cultural icons like the Rouen Cathedral. However, this photograph does not produce a color-driven, impressionistic atmosphere. It is meant to be a highly detailed, sharp, and infinitely precise document for reproduction and public circulation. 

Claude Monet, Boulevard des Capucines, 1873-1874, oil on canvas, 

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, F75-32

The Paris boulevard was a recurring theme for Impressionists. Monet painted from above in famous French photographer Nadars’s apartment in order to achieve a high, floating vantage point, level with the trees that fill center frame, above a bustling crowd of Parisians and snow-capped taxis. The whole scene is descriptive of the new urban experience. The way the small, hazy figures moving through the cold, damp weather are painted is reminiscent of camera blur. Monet’s use of cropping and the arrangement of major elements around a distant vanishing point should remind us of a photograph. Monet’s artistic “lens” creates a delicately framed snapshot of city life. When you squint and look at this piece, you might even imagine it as a black and white print.

Kobayashi Ikuhide, Famous Places in Tokyo: True View of the Post Office at Edobashi, 1889, woodblock print, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2000.509

After Japan entered the vast western trade market in the 1850s, an abundance of Japanese goods rushed in for consumption by Europe’s eager and growing middle class. Japanese woodblock prints seemed to be of particular interest to forward-looking Impressionist painters. Monet, for example, is said to have become a collector of such prints after first encountering them at a spice shop in Holland. This particular print by Ikudhide is representative of the Ukiyo-e school of traditional Japanese art. Notice the high vantage point, deep focal range, panorama effect, and bold cropping choice. The similarities Ikuhide’s piece has with other selections proves that seeing the fast-changing world in new ways was a global phenomenon.

Gustave Le Gray, The Great Wave, Sète, 1857, albumen silver print from glass negative, 1976.646

This piece from another highly innovative French photographer brings to mind popular landscape and seascape paintings seen in the portfolios of artists like Monet, Degas, Pissarro, and Manet. The dramatic effect of sunlight shared between the ocean and sky was the result of multiple exposures (one for the darker sea and a second for the much brighter sky) combined on a single sheet of paper. His innovation results in a poetic, almost painterly view of the Normandy coast reminiscent of Impressionist en plein air paintings. The overall composition is photographic yet sublime; there is an active foreground, a prominent mid-ground, and crisp, detailed background.

Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street; Rainy Day, 1877, oil on canvas, 

The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, 1964.336

In this masterpiece by Caillebotte, a younger but still prominent Impressionist painter, we have moved down from the floating balcony vantage to meet the citizens at eye level. The arrangement of objects within the frame is again evocative of photography: A couple fills the foreground at right. Other figures, frozen mid-step, create a middle ground. The background slowly pulls out of focus. The unexpected, panoramic perspective anticipates a wide angle lens that makes room for two vanishing points and an ever-extending cobblestone road that washes off frame across the bottom third. Caillebotte is pioneering yet another way of seeing—this time with a strikingly photorealistic approach.

Edward Steichen, The Flatiron, 1909, gum bichromate over platinum print, 33.43.39

Painting or photograph? At first, it may be difficult to tell. Edward Steichen and other skilled photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and F. Holland Day formed the Photo Secession movement. Its members argued that an image could be manipulated by an artist-photographer to achieve a subjective vision, just like the painter and his paintbrush, thus elevating the photograph as fine art. Pictorialist creations like The Flatiron liberate the finished print from the camera’s mechanical, scientific roots—the end result seems to blur the line between the two mediums. The hazy street scene, with blurred figures, tall buildings, and overall atmospheric quality recalls the familiar Paris boulevard and other Impressionist imagery. The added pigmentation further liberates the photograph. The silhouetted trees and layered flatness should bring to mind Japanese woodblock prints, which were still in vogue by 1909.