The Work of Art: Plein Air Painting and Artistic Identity in Nineteenth-Century France

338 Pages·2015·14.17 MB·English

by  Anthea Callen

The Work of Art

THE WORK OF ART
Plein-air Painting and Artistic Identity
in Nineteenth-century France
Anthea Callen
reaktion books
For Vivienne Binns OAM, Ruth Waller and Jude Rae
Three great Australian painters whose work and ideas
have shaped my own
Published by
Reaktion Books Ltd
33Great Sutton Street
London ec1v 0dx, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published in 2015
Copyright© Anthea Callen2015
Design by Simon McFadden
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission
of the publishers
Printed and bound in China
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
isbn 978 1 78023 355 0
Contents
Introduction 7
one
The Origins of Plein-air Painting to 1850 33
two
Maître Courbet: The Worker–Painter 105
three
Cézanne, Pissarro and Knife Painting 159
four
Colour: The Material and the Ephemeral 211
References 271
Bibliography 313
Acknowledgements 319
Photo Acknowledgements 321
Index 325
1Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire and the Viaduct of the Arc River Valley,
1882–5, oil on canvas, 65.4× 81.6cm.
Introduction
It is hard for anyone who has never drawn or painted from
nature to have a fair idea of the interest the artist experiences,
when, choosing or rather ardently seizing a well-lit view
enriched with happy accidents, he prepares to make the por-
trait. From the first moment he readies his crayons or brushes,
he already sees the enterprise completed according to his
desires; with each mark grows a pleasure made all the more
intense by the difficulties he suffers, the resistances nature
seems to offer to his eagerness, the efforts he redoubles to seize
her, his pleasures [jouissances] finally at each favour he
obtains.
Thénot, Cours complet de Paysage(1834), p. 5
The landscape painter must study and observe throughout his
life; he should never lose the opportunity to consult nature,
with always a crayon in his hand.
Lecarpentier, 18171
The great era of French plein-air landscape painting that this book
considers spans the long nineteenth century, beginning in Rome in
the 1780s and closing in Paris with the advent of Cubism. Standard
practice for all French landscape painters from 1817 onwards,
plein-air painting became widespread and highly visible. Already
common during the 1820s, it was ubiquitous by the 1840s, when the
railways began to make travel easier. By the 1850s landscape paint-
ing was the most popular of all the genres in France, both as exhibits
at the Paris Salon and among many dealers and collectors. Perhaps
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the work of art
it is no coincidence that the radical plein-air painting associated
with the Impressionists in the 1870s had its origins in French art in
the period immediately before the revolution of 1789. The Work of
Artexplores the continuities and changes in methods and materials
of landscape painting over the century, and its role in the formation
of artistic identity.
Despite the wealth of evidence for early plein-air painting,
there still remains a widespread belief that this practice, and indeed
the advent of Impressionism, depended on the introduction of
modern artists’ materials – whether collapsible tin tubes or bright
new pigments. Yet the technical history of such practice, and the dates
when new materials and portable equipment emerged, tell a more
complex story. For in fact the idea that the rise of plein-air painting
depended on modern inventions is a theory invented by hind sight:
the colour merchants’ market, like any other, was driven by demand,
and requisites for plein-air oil painting were widely available well
before the Impressionist period. Important and increasingly system-
atic scient ific studies of nineteenth-century French paintings over
the past twenty years have provided essential new evidence of the
content and complexity of landscape painters’ palettes and supports,
which throw new light on innovation – and tradition – in their
materials and usage.2Beginning with the close studies of Courbet’s
paintings at the Louvre in the 1970s, advancing technologies in
scien tific conser vation research have permitted an increasingly sophis-
ticated analysis of painters’ methods that now informs art historical
knowledge of these works.3
I am interested in the concept of the workof art. How do parti-
cular kinds of painting practice denote different ideas of ‘labour’ in
the material processes of art rather than just in its imagery, its iconog-
raphy? Why did this issue become especially important during the
nineteenth century, when the modernity of an artwork could be found
in the artist’s material practice, in the physical processes of paint-
ing that became simultaneously its subject and its object, the ‘work
of art’?4The central relationships I consider in this book are between
eye and hand, vision and touch – the accumulative mental and
physical processes of looking and rendering, the work of making and
the materials this entailed. Bringing together a history of painters’
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