From the rough seas and rugged cliffs of Penmarc’h to Belle-Île, with Monet, Signac, Berthe Morisot and other artists.
Monet
Fifteen images of paintings by twelve artists which were shown at the First Impressionist Exhibition present a more coherent overview. But history is capricious.
This brisk oil sketch of fog and the rising sun in Monet’s home port of Le Havre lent its name to that for the whole movement.
Missing from the First Impressionist Exhibition were the paintings of this promising figurative Impressionist who had been killed in the Franco-Prussian War.
With Claude Monet and others, one of the originators of Impressionist landscape painting. Successful portraitist and figurative painter too.
He first suggested the Impressionist exhibitions, co-founded their collective, and wrote their charter. Yet he didn’t achieve commercial success until he was in his sixties.
Probably the only French Impressionist who died poorer than he was when he started painting, he showed five paintings at the First Impressionist Exhibition.
Reflections seen in landscapes from Dürer’s pioneering watercolour, through Poussin and Turner to Monet, Sisley and Neo-Impressionists.
A prolific painter who was moderately successful in the Salon, a key influence on Impressionism, and Monet’s first mentor, yet is now almost forgotten.
Completing this river cruise, from Canaletto’s view of Westminster, through a Frost Fair, to John Constable’s Headlight Castle.
The Eclectic Light Company 