Fifteen images of paintings by twelve artists which were shown at the First Impressionist Exhibition present a more coherent overview. But history is capricious.
Renoir
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.
Shipwreck in The Tempest, forgotten Impressionists, a threshing machine, a weekend on the River Seine, a pair of portraits of Thomas and Susan Eakins, a pair of clowns, and more.
He didn’t start painting in Impressionist style until about 1870, and a decade later was migrating towards what became Post-Impressionism.
Pierrot and Harlequin went on to be clowns in the circus, and Pulcinella became Mr Punch in popular Punch and Judy shows. And they live on still.
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.
Resuming the trip at Argenteuil, with Caillebotte and Monet, we pass Renoir at Chatou, La Grenouillère, on to Les Andelys, then to the sea at Honfleur, with Monet again.
