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1 November 2000 - 28 January 2001
Admission Charge
Sponsored by UBS Warburg
Impressionism was the most important pictorial development of the 19th century: not only did it profoundly influence the art that followed, it also changed public taste. But when the French Impressionists first presented their work to the public they were derided for their slap-dash canvases which the critics dismissed as 'impressions'. However, the term remained and was used to describe the art movement which was soon to sweep Europe and America. This major international exhibition takes a close look at the most radical aspect of the Impressionist movement: its rapid, improvisatory technique. It includes 60 paintings by Manet, Monet, Renoir, Morisot, Sisley, Pissarro and Van Gogh, among them famous works from major public collections around the world, and little-known masterpieces lent by private collectors in Europe and America.
Edouard Manet was the first artist to paint and exhibit works that exploited the immediacy of the rapidly executed oil-sketch. Among the paintings by him in this show is his famous 'Racecourse at Longchamps' of 1864 (Art Institute of Chicago), a brilliant example of his groundbreaking technique which shows the horses hurtling towards the viewer.
Other artists were quick to respond to Manet's example. Over the next few decades, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Berthe Morisot and Alfred Sisley experimented with this new way of painting in their scenes of contemporary life. They captured changing effects of weather and light on water in freely painted canvases which look as though they were dashed off in the white heat of sudden inspiration, even if they were sometimes painted in several sessions. In the summer of 1869, Monet and Renoir worked side by side on the banks of the Seine, and the exhibition brings together for the first time two views they made of the same light-filled scene: Monet's 'Bathers at La Grenouillère' (National Gallery) and Renoir's 'La Grenouillère' (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm). When Vincent van Gogh arrived in Paris in 1886 he was keen to learn the lesson of the Impressionists, and his own distinctive style evolved from their bold and colourful approach. The exhibition culminates with a group of his rapidly painted works on loan from the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
The exhibition at the National Gallery is sponsored by UBS Warburg, the global financial services business of UBS AG. It is accompanied by a catalogue written by Richard R. Bretell, curator of the exhibition and distinguished American historian of late 19th-century French art, and published by Yale University Press. 'Impression: Painting Quickly in France, 1860 - 1890' has been organised by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, in association with the National Gallery, London, and the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, and travels to Amsterdam and Williamstown after its London showing.
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