Claude Oscar Monet, 'The Beach at Trouville', 1870.
London, The National Gallery.

Impression: Painting Quickly in France, 1860-1890

1 November 2000-28 January 2001
Sainsbury Wing

Sponsored by USB Warburg

This international loan exhibition re-examined Impressionist art and the role that rapid, improvisatory painting played in its development. In the 1860s Edouard Manet began to paint works in which he exploited the speed and immediacy characteristic of oil sketches. Audaciously, however, he signed and exhibited them as finished paintings, focusing aesthetic attention for a whole generation of young painters on the artist's touch and painterly gesture.

Over the next few decades, artists like Monet, Morisot, Renoir and Sisley, all of whom admired Manet as the leader of the modern school, experimented with this novel mode of painting. Not all their works were executed quickly, some involving several sessions. However, many were meant to look as if they had been dashed off in the white heat of inspiration. It was this quality that, some 125 years ago, early critics of Impressionism found disturbing and offensive. The exhibition included more than 60 paintings by this core group of adventurous young artists, including works loaned by major public collections around the world, and little-known masterpieces, rarely lent by private collectors in Europe and America.

When he arrived in Paris in 1886, Vincent van Gogh was anxious to learn the lessons that the most provocative and colourful French painters had to teach him. He too tried his hand at painting quickly and the exhibition concluded with a small group of Van Gogh's paintings, on loan from the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. The exhibition was organised by the National Gallery in collaboration with the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, and the Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, to which it travelled after London.

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