Impressionism and the Modern Landscape: Productivity, Technology, and Urbanization from Manet to Van Gogh 9780520932951, 9780520248014

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A H M A N S O N • M U R P H Y F I N E

T H E

A H M A N S O N

A R T S

I M P R I N T

F O U N D A T I O N

has endowed this imprint to honor the memory of F R A N K L I N

D.

M U R P H Y

who for half a century served arts and letters, beauty and learning, in equal measure by shaping with a brilliant devotion those institutions upon which they rely.

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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution toward the publication of this book provided by the Director's Circle of the University of California Press Foundation, whose members are: Robert and Alice Bridges Foundation Earl and June Cheit William K. Coblentz Lloyd Cotsen Grete Cubie, in memory of Esther Ann Kessel Jean E. Gold Ann Given Harmsen and Bill Harmsen Charlene Harvey Daniel Heartz Betty Hine Fred Levin and Nancy Livingston / Shenson Foundation, in memory of Ben and A. Jess Shenson Ruth A. Solie John and Donna Sussman The publisher also gratefully acknowledges the generous contributions to this book provided by the Art Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which is supported by a major gift from the Ahmanson Foundation, and by the Fine Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Research and Interdisciplinary Initiatives Fund of the State University of New York, Stony Brook.

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IMPRESSIONISM AND THE MODERN LANDSCAPE

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JAMES H. RUBIN

IMPRESSIONISM AND THE MODERN LANDSCAPE PRODUCTIVITY, TECHNOLOGY, AND URBANIZATION FROM MANET TO VAN GOGH

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

|

BERKELEY

LOS ANGELES

LONDON

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University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2008 by The Regents of the University of California The epigraphs on p. vi are from the following sources: Champfleury [Jules Husson], Les Sensations de Josquin (Paris: Michael Levy, 1859), p. 267 (for the French, see Chapter 4, note 20); Jules-Antoine Castagnary, “Salon de 1863,” in Salons (1857–79), ed. Eugène Spuller (Paris, 1892), vol. 1, p. 106 (for the original French, see Chapter 5, note 3); Charles Baudelaire, “Le Peintre de la vie moderne,” in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), vol. 2, pp. 683–724; Antony Valabrègue to Antoine-Fortuné Marion, April 12, 1866, quoted in Alfred Barr, “Cézanne d’après les letters de Marion à Morstatt, 1865–68,” Gazette des beaux-arts, 17, 6th ser. (January 1937): 46 (for the original French, see Introduction, note 31); Stéphane Mallarmé, “Les Impressionnistes et Edouard Manet,” in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), vol. 2, pp. 467–68. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rubin, James Henry. Impressionism and the modern landscape : productivity, technology, and urbanization from Manet to Van Gogh / James H. Rubin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-520-24801-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Impressionism (Art). 2. Industrialization in art. 3. Cities and towns in art. I. Title. N6465.I4R83 2008 2007039513 709.03'44—dc22 Manufactured in Canada 17 10

16 15 14 13 9 8 7 6 5

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11 10 09 3 2 1

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper ).

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FOR MY PARENTS In memoriam David L. Rubin 1917–2007

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Industry mixed with nature has its poetic side: the point is to see it and be inspired. —Champfleury, Les Sensations de Josquin, 1857

Naturalism thus reestablishes the broken bonds between man and nature. Through its dual effort to represent rural life, which it already interprets with such power, and the life of cities, which promises some of its most beautiful triumphs, painting renders all the forms of the visible world. —Jules-Antoine Castagnary, “Salon of 1863”

For the sketch of manners, the depiction of bourgeois life and the spectacles of fashion, the most expeditious and the least costly technical means is obviously the best. —Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” 1863

Let us wish only one thing, to produce. With production, success is certain . . . —Antony Valabrègue to Antoine-Fortuné Marion, 1866

The transition from the old imaginative artist and dreamer to the energetic modern worker is found in Impressionism. . . . Such, to those who can see in this the representative art of a period that cannot isolate itself from the equally characteristic politics and industry, must seem the meaning of the [Impressionist] manner of painting. —Stéphane Mallarmé, “The Impressionists and Edouard Manet,” 1876

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CONTENTS

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION: IMPRESSIONISM’S OTHER LANDSCAPE

ix

1

1.

Renovation and Modern Viewpoints: Roads, Bridges, and City Spaces

17

2.

Art and Technology: Impressionism and Photography

39

3.

Industrial Waterways: Ports, Rivers, and Canals

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4.

Railways and Stations: Trains and Tracks

91

5.

Factories and Work Sites: City and Country

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6.

Revival and Renewal in the Next Generation

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7.

Political Frames and Aspirations: Realism to Utopia

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8.

Performing Representation: Modernism and Modernity

189

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

197

NOTES

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

227

INDEX

231

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PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have loved Impressionist painting since childhood, when my mother used to take me to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and I was struck by its spectacular collection. Later, at Phillips Academy, I hung out at the Addison Gallery of Art between the commons and my dorm; and later still, the famous undergraduate courses at Yale led me to pursue art history as a career. As a historian of nineteenthcentury European art, I have taught Impressionism and followed its literature for approximately forty years. During much of that time I found there was no satisfactory book on the subject for advanced undergraduates and an informed general public. In the mid-1990s I was commissioned to write such a book by Phaidon Press in its “Art and Ideas” series. That book, Impressionism (1999), has been a gratifying success. In writing it, however, I realized that the pendulum in Impressionism studies had swung quite far from traditional preoccupations with form and style toward a concentration primarily on subject matter and a critical characterization of Impressionism as an art of bourgeois evasion. Although I have accepted a great deal from that point of view, I have come to believe it is not adequately balanced or complete. In my earlier book, I occasionally discussed and included examples of the kind of themes on which I focus in this new study. At that time I was not in a position to do the research necessary to propose a revised and reframed overview, but I resolved to do so. Sabbatical and research leaves from Stony Brook University have enabled me to accomplish my goal. The result is the present book. Briefly, what I call Impressionism’s “other landscape” is a major body of Impressionist landscape painting that represents economic and productive activities outside the realm of leisure and thus has been neglected in the current academic view of Impressionism. The paintings I identify are concentrated primarily in the late 1860s and the 1870s, the formative and defining years of Impressionism’s emergence into the public arena, which I call Impressionism’s “moment of modernity.” In enumerating these works and taking them into account, I show that there is evidence to propose a new view of Impressionism in which its relationship to leisure, as propounded by my scholarly predecessors, is symptomatic of something deeper that can be understood only by including the “other landscape.” This evidence allows me to bring the pendulum more toward the center to produce a concept of Impressionism where subject matter and form are inseparable and the art is symptomatic of a bourgeois culture grounded in productivity and innovation, of which leisure is only one by-product. These values are at the heart of modernity, even as we know it today. To reinforce the relationship between thematic and pictorial values, this book, in both its introduction and its conclusion, frames its study of themes with discussions of Impressionism’s pictorial characteristics and effects. My analysis thus

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helps explain both Impressionism’s radical reputation—how it appeared politically threatening in its time—and its continuing popularity today—how we still identify with its products and its artists. The book was still no more than an idea when Jean-Hubert Martin, my old friend from Paris university days, asked me to propose an exhibition in nineteenth-century art for the museum of which he had recently taken charge, the Kunst Palast Museum in Düsseldorf, Germany. Even though the exhibition proved unworkable, I owe to him the practical impetus and initial discussions that have resulted in this book. I still hope someday to work with him on an exhibition, but its scope will have to go beyond the relatively scholarly and limited chronological focus of this project. Others have been enormously helpful in seeing the book through. At the museums, I would especially like to thank Paloma Alorcó, Colin Bailey, Philip Conisbee, Denis Coutagne, Dorothy Kosinski, Tomás Llorenz, Henri Loyrette, x

Joachim Pissarro, and Gary Tinterow. Two young scholars, Jérôme Poggi and Jane E. Boyd, allowed me to cite their ideas and findings prior to their own publications. Others, both friends and scholars, have been extremely helpful in more ways than I can count, including Richard Brettell, Edith Delfiner, Therese Dolan, Paula Gabbard, Mary Tompkins Lewis, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Juliana and Bernard Montfort, Shelley Rice, Richard Shiff, Catherine Soussloff, and Jayne Warman. I am also grateful to three Stony Brook graduate students, Eva Hendricks Bares, Danielle Lenhard, and Kim Woltmann, who at various times offered invaluable assistance. At University of California Press, I thank Stephanie Fay, Nicole Hayward, Sue Heinemann, Elisabeth Magnus, Sigi Nacson, Eric Schmidt, and Lia Tjandra, as well as three anonymous readers who lent both encouragement and constructive suggestions for restructuring and clarification, most of which I have followed. Finally, but certainly not least, I must thank my wife, Liliane, who accompanied and helped me on many travels and who bore with me through the long period of gestation, writing, and revision.

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Many viewers do not realize that Claude Monet’s famous Impression: Sunrise represents the industrial port of Le Havre (1873, Plate 1). Its sketchy, unfinished look was what made this painting notorious in its own time and led to the naming of the movement Impressionism. Over time Impressionism became known for its depiction of leisure in the countryside, so it may be surprising to learn that more than half of the paintings Monet exhibited in the first Impressionist exhibition represent economic activity in urban settings. Most studies of Impressionism have concentrated on the former—on bourgeois pleasures—whereas many of the paintings by Monet gave an image to the conditions that made them possible. For that reason I call such pictures Impressionism’s “other landscape.” This book aims to change significantly the way we view Impressionism. Today, when we are increasingly aware that technological and demographic revolutions are transforming artistic vision, it seems appropriate to examine the impact of similar forces on the first art movement to embrace them— Impressionism. My selection of works emphasizes themes of productivity, technology, and urbanization to convey firsthand the Impressionists’ belief in the progress of civilization through science and industry. Past studies of Impressionist painting have focused primarily on scenes of pleasure, as exemplified by countryside locations and leisure activities,1 yet productivity is at least equally at the heart of Impressionism and the Impressionists’ modernist practices. Besides driving the economy that made the market for Impressionism possible, productivity is embodied in Impressionism’s styles and underlies its variety of subjects, especially in landscape. Leisure was not then and is not today modernity’s only or even primary feature. Indeed, the range of Impressionist art suggests that the artists were concerned less with the many outward signs of modernity that they represented than with the originating forces and ideals that lay behind them. By expanding the scope of Impressionism’s celebrations of the modern to include its “other landscape,” this book, for the first time, places images of industrial waterways, trains, and factories— as well as views of the modern city that use the innovative angles and vantage points of photography— at the heart of Impressionism’s pioneering artistic enterprise of the late 1860s and the 1870s. For Impressionists attempting to forge a modern landscape art, such scenes, at least as much as scenes of leisure, not only were novel elements deserving recognition but included the signs of modernity that defined their vision most clearly. To be modern was not simply to “be of one’s time,” as was often said, but to recognize that time as characterized by rapid economic and political change. Modernity became the raw material for modernist painting. Manet, Monet, Degas, and Renoir were all caught up in this theme, as were Sisley, Pissarro, Guillaumin, and Caillebotte, whose work acquires a new coher-

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ence from this perspective. To look at the emphasis on industrial advances rather than bourgeois leisure in Impressionist works is to adopt an approach more congruent with Impressionism’s reputation in its own time for being politically challenging. The signs of modernity that the Impressionists attempted to capture in their formative years were both broader and more deeply expressive of modern values than the bucolic and recreation imagery foregrounded in previous scholarship. Impressionism transformed Western landscape painting from timeless and nostalgic idealizations of distant places to brilliantly colored and seemingly accurate representations of existing, often familiar sites seen at particular moments. Responding to calls for modernity and naturalism—the reflection of contemporary environments—the Impressionists recorded people of their time at work and at play. Although we now take for granted the practice of painting on the spot directly from observation, 2

in the nineteenth century it was controversial. It was inseparable from the issue of the role of modern subjects in art, and it was pejoratively compared to photography, which was considered a mechanical and commercial, hence noncreative, pursuit. The Impressionists’ insistence on observing the contemporary was also fraught with political connotations, related to the democratic aspirations enabled by the new economy the evidence of which they represented. Whether set in Parisian cafés, flowery fields, or the productive realm, Impressionist scenes were sympathetic, inclusive, and often celebratory reflections of modernity. Whereas Romantic landscapes—those, for example, of the Barbizon School, which preceded and overlapped with Impressionism—often intimated a supernatural spirituality, conveying sublime awe through melodramatic lighting and the portrayal of nature at its most spectacular and “picturesque,” Impressionist landscapes made nature an exclusively secular realm. And whereas Romantic landscapes often evoked reflective solitude and melancholy alienation, those of the Impressionists tended to focus on human constructions and activities in the landscape in a way that embodied the humanistic optimism of their affluent time—a confidence that humanity could improve and even remake the world according to its desires. Impressionism gave birth to the modern landscape in art. A definition of modern landscape must emphasize two preeminent characteristics. First, the modern is a realm marked by signs of human progress and contemporary life. Even a contemporaneous landscape may appear timeless, as in the case of the wilderness scenes cultivated by previous generations of artists, and even portrayals of elements of antiquity accompanied by contemporary figures are most often nostalgic—looking backward rather than forward. Neither is modern, for a modern landscape contains “marks of modernity” that pull it into the modern temporal world being shaped by the very audience that views it. The second aspect of modern landscape pertains to art. A representation of a modern landscape scene that employs traditional techniques cannot be a work of modern art, despite its subject matter. That is because in modern landscape painting the mode of representation itself refers to modernity by utilizing strategies and techniques—for example, compositional or physical—that express progressive values. Those values are the same as those exhibited in the modern themes represented in Impressionism— the dominance of human will over matter, embodied by the creative gestures and transformative calculus of human productivity. As the avant-garde has become institutionalized, novelty is often no more than a marketing device. For the Impressionists, however, innovation was a compulsion as strong as the commitment to modern subject matter, in spite of its negative consequences for their commercial success. By choosing to represent the economic transformations wrought for the most

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part by their own social class, and by insistently rejecting academic artistic styles and methods in order to develop techniques concomitant with modern thought and practices, the Impressionists challenged traditional hierarchies and exercised the self-empowering ideology of private initiative and individual freedom.

MARKS AND MOMENTS OF MODERNITY As I began writing this book, France inaugurated its new Mediterranean high-speed train—the TGV

(train à grande vitesse) Méditérranée, which extends the north-south TGV line from Lyon to Marseille. Attaining speeds of over three hundred kilometers per hour (187.5 mph), it takes travelers from Paris to Mediterranean destinations in a mere three hours (ten times faster than in the mid–nineteenth century). Now, whether driving or hiking through the pristine Provençal scenery dominated by Mont SainteVictoire (a favorite motif of Paul Cézanne), one encounters fresh rail beds with overhead pylons and bright new viaducts where once there were only olive trees, brush, and silence (Figure 1). Cézanne’s seemingly classic landscape has been wrenched abruptly into the twenty-first century. Many regret the disruption of the countryside and the ugly functionality of reinforced concrete and high-tension wire; they yearn for the way things once were. A few may find aesthetic pleasure in the novel sight or even sense a moral or political beauty in such a national technological achievement. Most likely, a majority have mixed feelings, accepting the inevitability of progress while remaining nostalgic about a once unspoiled view.2 In Cézanne’s own day, the valley of the Arc River was crossed by a railroad right-of-way and its recently constructed viaduct (Figure 2).3 It is visible in a number of paintings and watercolors of Mont Sainte-Victoire (see Cézanne, La Montagne Sainte-

Victoire, ca. 1887, Figure 3).4 Cézanne’s native Provence had been the site of such constructions since Roman times, when the monumental aqueduct of the Pont du Gard was built near Avignon; it had fascinated painters since the eighteenth century. In Cézanne’s works, then, the railroad viaduct served as both a sign of modernity and a link with the ancient past. In addition, the straight diagonal path

FIGURE 1. TGV viaduct west of Aix-en-Provence, with Mont Sainte-Victoire in the background. Photo by James Rubin. FIGURE 2. Railroad viaduct south of Aix-en-Provence. Photo by James Rubin.

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FIGURE 3. Paul Cézanne, La Montagne Sainte-Victoire, ca. 1887. Courtauld Institute, London.

in the left foreground of the picture shown in Figure 3 is a right-of-way that Cézanne generalized by avoiding colors or other elements that would identify it clearly as a railroad track.5 Thus the general impression given is that the more things change, the more they remain the same. Yet it seems no accident that these manmade elements give Cézanne’s image its structural order, evincing the rational order that Cézanne’s own creative intelligence imposed. Impressionism’s representations of the modern landscape, unlike the nostalgic visions of previous generations, almost always include such marks of human intervention. It is true that in this painting of the mid-1880s, Cézanne’s distanced image reconciles modernity and the timelessness of the Provençal landscape through a strategy of assimilating the former. 6 But in the late 1860s to the mid-1870s, when he and other Impressionists were younger, they had forthrightly accepted modernity, even taking pride in its novel landscapes. They gave viaducts, trains, factories, new roads, industrial ports, bridges, and the like a far less ambiguous and less integrated presence in their work. Their celebrations of such new sights were especially plentiful in this earlier period as they were defining the imagery that they would first publicly present as a group in 1874. Here was Impressionism’s truest moment of modernity, a moment the Neo-Impressionists ten years

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later would try to recapture for their generation, sensing that most of their predecessors had abandoned it. Three of the five paintings exhibited by Claude Monet at the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874 can serve as introductory examples. Impression: Sunrise (1873), mentioned earlier, and Le Havre,

Fishing Boats Leaving the Port (1874, Figure 4) both show the booming industrial port of Le Havre. Boulevard des Capucines (1873–74, Plate 2) shows the bustling activity at the commercial center of Paris. Some seventy-five of Monet’s nearly three hundred landscapes painted between 1871, when he went to London, and 1878, when he left Argenteuil for Vétheuil, exemplify such themes. These paintings have not been ignored—indeed, isolated works and the Gare Saint-Lazare series have received much attention—but the fact that they are so numerous and the overall consequence of their quantity for the Impressionist concept of modern landscape have not been adequately considered. For the works of other Impressionists who, like Monet, painted mainly landscapes, the proportion representing commercial, industrial, and modern infrastructure landscapes is similar (Pissarro and Sisley) or higher (Guillaumin and Caillebotte) during the movement’s formative period. Suffused in mist and early morning sunlight, with activity just beginning as the first workers row out to the huge clipper cargo ships, Monet’s Impression: Sunrise has an idyllic character. Yet in the background at least two tugboats spew forth bluish clouds of smoke.7 In many of his paintings of industrial scenes Monet exercised aestheticizing options, such as blurring detail in fog. But that does not necessarily mean he was suppressing such elements; rather, he seems to have been trying to capture what for him was their invigorating beauty. The second painting, Le Havre, Fishing Boats Leaving

FIGURE 4. Claude Monet, Le Havre, Fishing Boats Leaving the Port, 1874. Los Angeles County Museum.

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the Port, is more precisely delineated and finished than Impression: Sunrise and shows a more specific scene. Surely the two were intended as a stylistically differing pair, with the contrast emphasized by Monet’s choice of title for the one with the sunrise effect. The second painting shows the mix of boats more clearly: single- and dual-mast fishing rigs dominate the foreground, and the black and white smoke of different steam transport vessels can be seen behind them. Whereas Impression: Sunrise was singled out by reviewers to the point where it gave Impressionism its name, the second painting was hardly mentioned at all. Monet’s third painting, Boulevard des Capucines, shows a view of one of the Grands Boulevards, as they are still known. Originally built on ancient city walls during the seventeenth century, they were the site of extensive reconstruction in the 1850s and 1860s under the direction of Baron 6

Georges Haussmann. They became then and still are the main commercial arteries of Paris. In addition, new hundred-foot-wide swaths were cut for new thoroughfares through the maze of ancient streets of the old Paris, fulfilling the imperial and military ambitions of the French emperor Napoleon III. Monet’s painting places his viewer at the heart of the “new Paris,” which the novelist Emile Zola described as “glitzy and sun-filled.”8 From an upstairs window, Monet recorded cargo wagons and private carriages sharing the street while shoppers and vendors crowded the sidewalks. The picture thus connects commerce and the urban figure that the French call a flâneur—a promenader, who as a man of leisure has the time to stroll through the city crowds and is always a potential consumer for the shops whose windows line the streets. Monet makes the link through an aesthetic that combines the detachment and window frame compositions of photography—a decidedly modern technology—with the rapid gestural handling of the sketcher. The latter might be considered the flâneur’s artist-equivalent, as in the poetcritic Charles Baudelaire’s famous essay of 1863, “The Painter of Modern Life.” In that essay, Baudelaire also connected the sketcher’s technique—energetic, economical—to the ever-changing flows and activities of modern commercial life.9 By contrast, only one of Monet’s five exhibited oils, Wild Poppies at Argenteuil (1873, W 274, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), corresponds to what became and is now popularly considered the characteristic Impressionist theme, leisure in the countryside. The fifth picture, The Breakfast (1868, W 132, Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt), is a large bourgeois family interior scene of somewhat earlier date that displays Monet’s effort in the late 1860s to do Salon-sized figure painting. If Monet was trying to distinguish himself and display his full range at the exhibition of 1874, he did so by giving greater emphasis to industrial and urban imagery than to domesticity, leisure, and the countryside. He highlighted modernity by referring to commercial activity and technology, markers far more direct than any available to the painter of domestic or rural pleasures. Indeed, Wild Poppies and The

Breakfast, with their roots in seventeenth-century Dutch imagery or eighteenth-century Rococo paintings like those of Watteau or Chardin, were far less innovative than the other three paintings. The result was a redefinition of landscape that abandoned its traditional associations with timeless idealism or the idylls of the landed rich. Monet’s choice of three industrial/urban landscapes for the exhibition responded most fully to the call to embody the present moment. Indeed, few earlier schools of landscape painting anticipate Impressionism’s focus in the 1870s on humans’ transformation of nature and on human activities in nature rather than on nature itself.10 Leisure acquired modern

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forms, it is true; but steam vessels, factory chimneys, railroads, and the like were unmistakably modern, and their representation in art marked it with novelty, even when they were placed in the painting’s background. Images of industrial waterways, trains, and factories; views of the modern city; and the innovative angles and vantage points adopted from photography—these are general and often overlapping categories that have been noticed in Impressionist painting for many years. But their centrality, interrelation, and impact in Impressionism are rarely recognized. They embody the artists’ direct responses to the economic and technological conditions that underlay contemporary prosperity and leisure and that the Impressionists believed created the basis for a new landscape art. A fresh look at these sometimes lesser-known—and less ostentatiously pleasure-oriented—Impressionist paintings reveals not only their subtle beauties but also the painters’ admiration for the sites they represented and for the values associated with them. Such imagery was at the core of the self-definition of Impressionism at its “moment of modernity”—that is, as it became a modern movement in the early to mid-1870s. It also contributed to the Impressionists’ early reputation for radicalism. The Impressionists’ new subject matter and unconventional techniques were aligned with the exhilarating development and modernization of contemporary France. In this book I hope to recover some of the ability to see such scenes as the artists did—with pride in their subjects and sensitivity to their forms—so that readers can not only understand Impressionism’s modernity through the eyes of the artists’ contemporaries but also better assess its historical significance. The principal artists in this study are Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Armand Guillaumin, and Gustave Caillebotte, but I also consider a smaller number of pictures by Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Edouard Manet, Auguste Renoir, Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, and Vincent Van Gogh.11 The array of Impressionist pictures in this book is different from the usual one. Many are familiar, but many others are not. Nineteenth-century photographs and graphic works illuminate the Impressionists’ “vision,” which was set in a burgeoning visual culture permeated by visual documentation. When I reproduce the paintings alongside other documents of visual culture, I do so less to demonstrate the specificity of the Impressionists’ observations—as is so often the case in scholarship—than to reveal similarities and differences in conception. Contemporary photographers such as Hippolyte Collard and Edouard Baldus exemplified the extent to which Impressionist views were allied with modern technology, in both its often camera-like compositions and choices of subject matter. In the 1870s, for example, the Ministry of Bridges and Roads assembled a compendium of photographs of public works that included works by Collard and Baldus. It is no coincidence that the themes of at least four of my chapters correspond roughly to the divisions of the first four of the ministry’s volumes.12 Grounding Impressionism in socioeconomic, technological, and political modernity makes it possible to reevaluate and strengthen the movement’s claim to avant-garde status on far more than aesthetic grounds. Studying their sites and iconography clarifies the coherence of the Impressionists’ attitudes and commitments, including political ones, and their choices, both thematic and stylistic— all of which shaped their relation to Modernism.

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IMPRESSIONISM’S REPUTATIONS One of the early defenders of Impressionism, Théodore Duret, noted in his groundbreaking essay of 1878 that some critics had called the new young artists “communists and rascals.”13 The context for such a reaction to Impressionism was the repressive political regime of the mid-1870s. In contrast, more recent writings on Impressionism associate it with bourgeois leisure linked to the expansion of capitalism during some of France’s years of greatest prosperity. Thus in 1937 the art historian Meyer Schapiro wrote: It is remarkable how many pictures we have in early Impressionism of informal and spontaneous 8

sociability, of breakfasts, picnics, promenades, boating trips, holidays and vacation travel. These urban idylls not only present the objective forms of bourgeois recreation in the 1860s and 1870s; they also reflect in the very choice of subjects and in the new aesthetic devices the conception of art as solely a field of individual enjoyment, without reference to ideas and motives, and they presupposed the cultivation of these pleasures as the highest field of freedom for an enlightened bourgeois detached from the official beliefs of his class. In enjoying realistic pictures of his surroundings as a spectacle of traffic and changing atmosphere, the cultivated rentier was experiencing in its phenomenal aspect that mobility of the environment, of the market and of industry to which he owed his income and freedom. And in the new Impressionist techniques which broke things up into finely discriminated points of color, as well as in the “accidental” momentary vision, he found, in a degree hitherto unknown in art, conditions of sensibility closely related to those of the urban promenader and the refined consumer of luxury goods.14 In this eloquent formulation of the social meaning of Impressionism, Schapiro broke with aesthetic appreciations focused on formal innovation and stylistic development, commenting instead on the subject matter of Impressionist pictures. It was a long time, however, before Schapiro’s approach was taken up by other scholars, and his own complete writings on Impressionism were not published until 1997, well after social and contextual art historians had made his observations central to academic interpretations of Impressionism.15 The Marxist art historian Timothy Clark, who acknowledged a debt to Schapiro in his book The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet

and His Followers (1984), interpreted paintings’ juxtapositions of leisure and industry—such as the appearance of factory chimneys in the increasingly urbanized villages beyond the Paris city limits— as signs of dislocation and encroachment brought about by a new social order. 16 Slightly later, in his still exemplary studies of Impressionism, Robert L. Herbert examined subject matter relating to urban leisure and its rural counterpart, vacation tourism.17 The appeal of Impressionism today is certainly rooted in the essentially urban, upper-middle-class, consumer-oriented vision of the world that these scholars identified. In this book I build upon the foundation of Clark’s and Herbert’s work and sometimes use a similar methodology. But I do so with the intention of seeking more balance and inclusiveness in the works and canon considered by the scholarship on Impressionism, as well as greater depth regarding

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the meanings of its style and techniques. To do so, I introduce works that are often overlooked when bourgeois leisure and consumer ideology are the focus. The same primary sources that have so effectively revealed Impressionism’s relationship to tourism and leisure can also reveal its relationship to productivity and industry. Central to Schapiro’s arguments and those of his successors is the notion that Impressionism’s pleasing imagery is not value free, even though it implies disinterested freedom and enjoyment. A critique of Impressionism is implicit in their interpretation since, for them, Impressionism was the artistic expression of a social class toward which, as committed leftist scholars, they were suspicious. Yet this class critique, however justified and fruitful, has not considered with sufficient gravity that in their own time, as Duret and others recorded, Impressionist artistic challenges to tradition were perceived as politically extreme. The prevailing overview has also made the many Impressionist scenes of industry and modernization in the 1870s appear subordinate and peripheral to those of consumption and leisure. The former have become the “repressed other” in characterizations of the movement, whereas I propose that they are actually central to Impressionism’s self-fashioning. Finally, Herbert’s and Clark’s reintroduction of the urban figure paintings of Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas to their rightful place in the mainstream of Impressionism has inadvertently diverted attention from the defining role of a new landscape imagery and increasingly relegated certain paintings by Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, as well as the careers of Alfred Sisley and Armand Guillaumin, to secondary status.18 In contrast, this book establishes a new balance among works within individual careers as well as among the major painters and among their themes. In its effort to embody modernity, Impressionism encompassed far more than consumerism and leisure. Modernity, another word for which is innovation, was driven by economic forces in which both production and consumption mattered; indeed, the wealth created by increasing production was the condition for consumption. Meyer Schapiro noted connections between Impressionism and economic productivity, and themes of industrial modernity have been recognized for over twenty years by Robert L. Herbert, Paul Tucker, and Richard Brettell.19 No one, however, has brought together works by different Impressionist painters that focus on those themes as defining aspects of the Impressionist vision and its moment of modernity in the late 1860s and 1870s.20 It is time to tie these already existing threads together and to examine their consequences. My hope is that the number of examples in this book will force, by sheer weight of evidence, the revision of a tenacious point of view that now dominates the academy and will restore landscape to center stage in interpretations of Impressionist modernity. In figure painting it is perhaps easier than in landscape to identify activities and explain relationships. In landscape paintings the human presence can seem less important than that of nature; yet it can be found through human works and transformations of the land as well as through the inclusion of figures themselves. Claude Monet’s works at the first Impressionist exhibition, mentioned earlier, provide an example not only of his group’s strategy but also of the misreadings (or, better, limited readings) of that strategy by some of his contemporaries. The name Impressionism, which has become so familiar to us today, is generally attributed to the ironic remarks of a boulevard journalist, Louis Leroy, in a satirical review ten days after the exhibition opened: “Impression: I was sure of it. I was telling myself, since I’m so impressed, there must be an impression in it. And what freedom, what ease in the handling! A

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sketch for wallpaper is more finished than that seascape!”21 Leroy was reacting to Monet’s painting

Impression: Sunrise. In his review he refers to what many regarded as an unfinished, shoddily crafted style practiced at the time by Cézanne, Guillaumin, Monet, Morisot, Pissarro, Sisley, and Renoir.22 For such critics, a mere “impression” was a superficial and incomplete take on nature, an impediment to proper realistic representation that undermined the painters’ naturalist claims.23 A few days later several more serious reviews appeared, by critics who also adopted some version of the name “Impressionism,” “the Impression School,” or “the Impressionists.” For those who supported the young artists’ representations of modernity, such as Jules-Antoine Castagnary, a thoughtful advocate of Naturalism,

impression meant simply a generalized and subjective characterization; it was not necessarily a negative formulation.24 10

Monet’s Impression: Sunrise was indeed a rapidly painted, sketchy work, even compared with other canvases in the exhibit. Accordingly, the painter’s choice of the term impression, which, as Richard Brettell and others have noted, artists before him had used to indicate a tentative view or sketch, was modest and hardly unusual.25 Le Havre was in fact a place familiar to Monet, who had grown up and painted there or nearby for about ten years. Who better to render accurate “impressions” of such a scene, whether from memory or from life? Yet the picture’s loose handling had the unintended effect of focusing critics’ attention entirely on the aesthetic, stylistic, and technical elements of Impressionists’ originality and diverting it from the originality of their subject matter. Leroy’s tongue-in-cheek discussion never mentioned that Impression: Sunrise was a view of an industrial port filled with steampowered and sailing vessels. In the absence of the slightly older Edouard Manet, Monet emerged as the visible leader of the new school. (Manet refused to join the independent Impressionist exhibitions because he believed in confronting the traditionalists on their own territory at the official Salon, and the Impressionists did not allow their members to exhibit simultaneously at both venues.) In an article in the leftist journal

L’Avenir national, the young writer Paul Alexis, a friend of Paul Cézanne and Emile Zola, asserted that “the contemporary artist, to be worthy of the name,” must come down from his ivory tower and “plant his feet in modern life so as to share its struggles, measure its forces, and appreciate its greatness.”26 For many, the mere presence of modernity in art had political ramifications, so the appearance of this article in a political journal would not have been surprising. In it, Alexis alluded to the Impressionists’ plan for an independent cooperative group and anticipated their choice of location. Monet responded publicly to Alexis with a grateful letter to the journal, saying, “We are happy to see that you defend ideas that are ours too.”27 Monet’s choices for the exhibition therefore suggest his artistic response to Alexis’s call. Technology, commerce, leisure, and the urban environment merge in Impressionist painting. Indeed, the link to technology and commerce was implicit in the very location of the first Impressionist exhibition in the former studio of the famous photographer Félix Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon). Monet made his Boulevard des Capucines from Nadar’s window. The address, 35 Boulevard des Capucines, was near many other private photographic ateliers at the center of the commercial and popular entertainment district created by Haussmann’s urban renovations (Figure 5).28 This site thus itself suggested a vital modernity opposed to the stuffy traditionalism of the official exhibitions, called

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FIGURE 5. Paris street plan, 1867. A. Vuillemin, Paris nouveau: Plan de Paris et des communes de la banlieu

(Paris: Achille Faure, 1867).

Salons, which were still organized under elitist government authority in pavilions erected for the purpose in a more residential part of the city. By announcing that they had formed a business cooperative and using the term société anonyme (limited liability corporation) to designate their venture, the Impressionists presented their artistic association as an open economic enterprise, thus further partaking of the commercial and democratic spirit of the Boulevard des Capucines seen from Nadar’s windows. It is no surprise, then, that Impressionism’s eventual success both resulted from and led to its appropriation by upper-middle-class consumers. The Impressionist viewpoint, however, was an idealistically broad-based and diverse vision of society. It was driven not simply by resistance to artistic and political authority but by a desire to produce an authentic and inclusive vision of the modern world. Their strategy, however tied to their social attitudes, was to choose a range of themes and forms expressive of France’s new industrial age. Many of their paintings of leisure at the same time represented new businesses in newly popular places, such as La Grenouillère, Chatou, Argenteuil, and the Normandy coast. All of these destinations depended on the accessibility made possible by the railroad, perhaps the most important technological achievement of the time. While such works clearly show bourgeois recreation— restaurants, hotels, cafés, boat rentals, and other forms of sport—they also represent commercial expan-

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sion and the development of an industry of leisure.29 Such modern forms of leisure differ, moreover, from traditional ones in ways that further relate them to a focus on productivity. The very word recreation— literally “re-creation”—suggests investments of energy, athletic and creative activities far from the rustic solitude and meditative repose of earlier landscape art. Improved health and personal well-being were thought to be among the “dividends” produced through such expenditures in sports and recreation. Still, contemporaries of the Impressionist painters were struck primarily by the artworks’ unconventional execution. The Impressionist brushstroke was associated by many, following Leroy, with an undisciplined, casual—hence leisure-oriented—practice. This view has prevailed not only because its purveyor had the wit to establish the name Impressionism but because it corresponds to Impressionism’s general appeal. For others, however, the Impressionist brushstroke was the sign of positively 12

viewed processes and energies associated with productive labor. The latter view is not so much an alternative theory as the less recognized and less studied other side of the coin to interpretations of Impressionism. As I will suggest, the Impressionist technique enacts its representations of modernity as much as it describes them. It performs and embodies its values as well as illustrating them. The powerful combination of novel technique and modern subject matter, each indispensable, seized attention and proclaimed a new relationship between viewer and artwork that conveyed to the Impressionists’ contemporaries the forces of modernity. Crudely put, the imprint on the world left by the Impressionist artists’ technical processes was not simply a sign of artistic agency. It acted out the instrumentality inherent in modernity’s imposition of change on its environment. Hence, Impressionism’s representation of a modern naturalist landscape in an ostentatiously proactive style is inextricably bound up with the metatheme of productivity.

IMPRESSIONISM’S DUALITY Surely one reason Leroy’s name Impressionism stuck is that the word has a double meaning. The word

impression itself echoes both the tentative process of immediate apprehension and the ostensibly indelible and objective process of the new technology in which light left its imprint on the photographic plate. I said earlier that there is a direct connection between Impressionist technique and the modern remaking of the world. The brushwork for which Impressionism is so well known acts out the artist’s spontaneous response to nature: it combines both the external world and the artist’s individual vision of it—the objective and the subjective simultaneously. Thus the Impressionist artist is a performer; one is conscious of the artist’s body as the point of origin for the artwork because the artwork physically flaunts the processes that underlie its making. Yet this performance respects nature’s literal appearance even as it re-creates it with hands-on materiality. The self-referentiality of Impressionist art— that is, the reference of its technique to the actions or performance that produced the work—ensured a challenge to the authority of traditional institutions and their figural conventions. To be sure, all art embodies and conveys the principles, ideologies, and values that underlie it. All art authenticates these foundations by its own example. But Impressionism, unlike the normative art of its own time, was revolutionary because its principles were transformative, embodying modern values based on the change and innovation that anyone could see molding and shaping the world around them. It reversed the tra-

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ditional relationship between art and labor, now presenting the work ethic as fulfilled not by academic studies and the smoothed surfaces of studio work but by the evidence of on-the-spot experience and the physical traces of creative productivity. The Impressionist’s moral authority seemed inescapable because it claimed to be based on no more than plain, honest, and pragmatic observation made legitimate by the free exercise of selfexpression. Impressionism’s duality of “objective” vision and “subjective” will is profoundly human— it is at the heart of the modern self. On a philosophical plane, its roots can be found in the Enlightenment, which advocated both the rights of the individual and the validity of free thought along with the necessity for verifiably objective empirical knowledge and its reasoned application to practice. These were the key principles driving an idealistic belief in progress. They were addressed by nineteenthcentury philosophers and other thinkers, such as Arthur Schopenhauer, Charles Baudelaire, Hippolyte Taine, and Emile Zola. This parallel between honest vision and physical productivity was central to the Impressionists’ earliest conceptions of art in the late 1860s. For example, Zola, writing of the new artists, hailed Camille Pissarro as “a worker, a man who is truly a painter,” as opposed to “impotent fabricators” of conventional academic painting. He regarded each of Pissarro’s paintings as “the act of an honest man.”30 Believing profoundly in the value of productive labor, Antony Valabrègue, a poet friend of Zola and Cézanne, wrote: “We are confident. Let us wish only one thing, to produce. With production, success is certain.”31 These values still inform modern economic and political ideology. At the time of the Impressionists, productivity was a concept associated with the industrializing and modernizing impulse of utopian and Positivist thinkers, such as Henri de Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte.32 Knowledge obtained through research combines with individual initiative and effort to produce innovation. Academicism, with its acceptance of received knowledge and cultivation of a group style, stifles innovation and individual expression. Impressionism convincingly articulated modernity by combining naturalism of effect with the ostentatious display of the technical means used to produce it. The latter involved both artifice, with its aestheticizing connotations, and craft, with its more workaday, labor-oriented implication. Although this combination of naturalism and display of technical means pleases today’s viewer with its inherent tensions, it turned the conventions of the day on their head. It was nevertheless congruent with social and political thinking of the time, in which humanity was defined by work. Labor was characterized as the intervention in the material realm necessary for humanity to achieve, in its earliest historical stage, survival, and, in its final stage, art.33 It was the means by which humanity expressed its moral superiority to its purely material constitution. Through labor, the human subject produced value. The correspondences that critics perceived between Impressionist painting and photography reinforced Impressionism’s “evidential force,” a term Roland Barthes used for photography.34 The term

Impressionism itself contains the notion of indexicality that gave photography its authority as a new and technologically objective, empirical standard for naturalism. An “index” is a literal or physical sign of that to which it refers, like a fingerprint or the result of light on the photosensitive surface. What is an impression but a similarly immediate imprint? “Seeing is believing,” it is said, and the more directly and self-evidently the visible is revealed, the closer one is to “truth.” Indeed, those portrait pho-

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tographs that were considered the best likenesses were also said to reveal something of the subject’s interiority.35 Light, with its long metaphorical association with enlightenment, is in a sense the physical carrier of knowledge—of objectivity, transparency, and accessibility. It is the condition for vision, understood both in its literal physiological dimension and in its metaphorical reference to understanding. Yet the notion that Impressionism was merely mimetic, ostensibly emptied of the symbolic charge associated with Romantic forms of representation, left critics little to discuss but issues of technique and craft, as in the dialogues of Louis Leroy. In calling attention to the artwork’s physical properties, such critics implicitly characterized the artist as a physical and proactive individual producer. In other words, Impressionism had a double indexicality. The picture’s evidence of the working process further grounded it in the context of a present materiality rather than in the realm of universals expected from 14

academic painting. This book proposes that Impressionist paintings indeed have profound meanings that extend beyond their surfaces—or that are embedded in and exemplified by those surfaces, as well as by their mimetic choices. How else could they have been so upsetting to so many when they first appeared? I hold, then, that themes relating to humans’ imposition of will on nature and their exploitation of nature for their own purposes were the most direct vehicle for expressing and instituting the modern ideology of progress through knowledge and individual initiative. Impressionism enacted that ideology upon its audience through its performance of an indexical “evidential force” made possible by its freedom from institutionally imposed conventions of representation. In that sense it was performative.36 That the artist’s physical intervention was so visibly imprinted on the canvas in the broken brushwork that scandalized so many of the Impressionists’ contemporaries instantly raised the question of what was acceptable as art. It put viewers’ assumptions on the spot; it placed ideology at stake. It performed, in other words, what Louis Althusser called an interpellation.37 Impressionism was thus doubly indexical in that it bore witness both to a singular unmediated exterior reality and to an internal process of perception and production of a material object that was unique to each artist. Unlike photography, which by reputation at the time was passive, involving little or no artistic contribution, Impressionism’s explicit pictorial processes combined authenticity of description with unbridled subjectivity in molding and shaping representation. The themes on which I focus in this book throw light on the values underlying this novel fusion of interior and exterior—of the appearance of the modern world and the productive and transformative processes that made it modern. Impressionism at its origins is integrative rather than divisive; in it, seemingly opposed interpretations can coexist. What unites them is the theme of modernity. Impressionism embodies an optimism and confidence springing from economic prosperity and technological innovations that seemed to subjugate nature to human will. Thus it embodies not so much the dislocations associated with modernity—though these are certainly present in Impressionist imagery—as the ideal of progress that in the capitalist version of the utopian social myth would lead to universal harmony. As the art critic Castagnary put it, a modern landscape art would be a “dual effort to represent [both] rural life . . . and the life of cities.”38 The place where the usually antipodal topoi of city and country met was the suburbs, where many of the Impressionist landscape painters lived and painted. 39 A modern Positivist rather than nostalgic utopia thus could have a specific location and new imagery, in

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which the contradictions of contemporary life might find resolution. City and country would coexist harmoniously in this reconception of landscape meant to reflect the modern world. Such a vision may be criticized on social or political grounds, but it should nonetheless be represented fairly and completely; its explication reveals the connections to both Modernism and modern constructions of the self that have endowed Impressionism with its durability as the favorite and most accessible artistic movement of modern times.

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1 RENOVATION AND MODERN VIEWPOINTS ROADS, BRIDGES, AND CITY SPACES

The new European currency, the euro, carries the schematic image of an ultramodern suspension bridge on its paper banknotes. According to the European Central Bank, the bridge symbolizes connectedness and efficient communication between the various members of the European Union—effects the new currency is intended to enhance.1 In the nineteenth century, bridge building was an important feature of infrastructure creation and improvement. Impressionist images of bridges were common, and whether the bridges were brand-new or simply recent, for railways or for roads, they displayed similar attitudes, though on a national rather than an international scale. In addition to serving social and economic functions, bridge building exemplified modernity in its use of the recent cast-iron technology. Bridges, as well as other types of infrastructure, physically embodied the convergence of innovative elements that were both causes and effects of modern change. Progress in bridge construction and urban development was monitored by photographers, sometimes working on state commission but sometimes taking their own pictures of Paris, where their studios were located. For the French government, documentation of industrial progress was a matter of national pride, and a number of exhibitions featured photographs of public works. These images were made possible by the invention of various negative processes, which in the 1850s began to replace the daguerreotype, invented by Louis Daguerre in 1839. The paper negative had been devised around the same time as the daguerreotype by Henry Fox Talbot; the collodion-on-glass (wet-plate) negative process was invented by Frederick Scott Archer in 1851. The daguerreotype produced a highly detailed image etched directly onto a silver-plated surface, but the process was slow and expensive, and its unique image could not be reproduced. Negative processes allowed photographers to work at diverse locations away from their permanent studios, as well as to produce multiple images. Paris was the site of modernity, the place where modern vision was developed. For students of the nineteenth century, such statements come as nothing new. The pertinent point is that in Impressionism the urban landscape was for the first time at the center of the vision of landscape because that vision sought to represent modernity. And that vision was shaped both by the modernization of the cityscape and by the new photographic technology through which it was so frequently represented. The signs of modernity in landscape were not only new buildings, boulevards, bridges, factories, railroads, and canals but also topoi and points of view that had been unthinkable before illustrated journals and photography revealed a more inclusive artistic horizon than ever before. Scholars have certainly commented on the obvious economic growth and activity reflected in the Impressionists’ urban scenes of the 1870s. For the most part, however, these images have been

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considered in relation to leisure or cited as examples of Impressionism’s realist specificity, which is often proved by comparison of these images to photographs. From a different perspective, we can consider the role played by urban views and photography in redefining landscape to encompass, as Castagnary advocated, the city and the country as well as modern ways of seeing. I therefore place urban landscape at the heart of Impressionism’s enterprise of representing the modern landscape, just as the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire placed Paris at the center of modernity.

SI(GH)TING MODERNITY In his seminal essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” Baudelaire equated modernity with change, the 18

principal characteristics of which were “the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent.”2 Similar adjectives are often associated with Impressionism. Nowhere were signs of modernity and transformation, such as bridge and road construction or river and rail traffic, more visible than in Paris, where demolition, expansion, and renewal work took over the city for nearly two decades. The protagonist of Baudelaire’s essay, the watercolorist and illustrator Constantin Guys (discussed further below), “admires the eternal beauty and amazing harmony of life in the capital cities, a harmony so miraculously maintained amidst the tumult of human freedom.”3 The history of the renovations of Paris is well documented, but a summary may be useful here. Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte (1808–73, r. 1848–70), nephew of Napoleon the Great (1769–1821, r. 1799–1815), had been elected president of France following the democratic revolution of 1848. Prevented by the Constitution of 1848 from reelection in 1852, he seized absolute power in a coup d’état in December 1851. On proclaiming himself emperor, he took the name Napoleon III. Through economic growth and a cultural politics that sponsored public spectacle and grandeur, the new emperor hoped to place France at the forefront of Europe and at the same time to ensure his popularity and power. These goals converged in projects for the modernization of Paris, implemented during the 1850s and 1860s by his Paris prefect, a single-minded bureaucrat of Alsatian origin named Georges Haussmann.4 Napoleon III was spiritual heir to the legacy of his uncle, who had begun transforming Paris into an imperial capital. Napoleon I was responsible for thoroughfares such as the arcaded Rue de Rivoli, public spaces such as a redesigned Place Vendôme and the Place Saint-Sulpice, public buildings such as the Bourse (Stock Exchange), and new bridges such as the Pont Saint-Louis, the Pont d’Austerlitz, and the famous Pont des Arts, a cast-iron footbridge that was the first of its kind in Paris. Under Haussmann, expenditures of more than forty times the city’s usual annual budget were lavished on clearing thousands of buildings from congested areas populated mainly by the working classes, who were displaced to less central locations. Haussmann ruthlessly declared that his aim was to “tear open Old Paris, the district of riots and barricades, with a wide, central thoroughfare that would pierce this almost impenetrable labyrinth from one side to the other.”5 He is said to have considered himself an “artist in demolition.”6 Many photographs, such as those by Henri Le Secq, recorded this process (Figure 6). In 1860 Paris annexed its surrounding suburbs so that neighborhoods in northern Paris like Les Batignolles (site of Manet’s studio) and Montmartre (site of Renoir’s studio) became a part of the city’s tentacular urban extension. The gigantic whole was intended to function as an efficient centralized machine.

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FIGURE 6. Henri Le Secq, Demolitions, Rue Saint-Martin, photograph, 1853. From Henri Le Secq, Album Berger, 1853. Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris.

Haussmann extended the Rue de Rivoli and built many new boulevards; he created public parks such as the Bois de Boulogne, the Bois de Vincennes, and the Parc Monceau. Continuing the projects or plans of previous dynasties, he endowed the city with new sewers, gas lighting, and municipal buildings, including the Halles Centrales (Central Markets), built of cast iron on Victor Baltard’s design of 1847. The new cast-iron and glass style of architecture, used heretofore in utilitarian buildings such as railway stations, was also celebrated in the exhibition halls erected for the Universal Exposition of 1855 (see Chapter 5). The most famous of Paris’s modern buildings was the new Opéra, designed by the young Charles Garnier in 1861, though not completed until 1874. The photographers Hyacinthe-César Delmaet and Louis-Emile Durandelle documented the many phases of its construction (Figure 7), as well as that of other public buildings. Progress and modernity were thus clearly identified with Paris, which attracted more and more people, from foreign tourists and aspiring artists to workers anxious for higher wages after years of struggling on provincial farms. The city’s population nearly doubled during the Second Empire, placing increasing demands on infrastructure for communication both within the city and with the outside. Even without Napoleon III’s visions of glory, sanitary conditions and traffic congestion had so deteriorated that urban renewal was long overdue. Paris had been an impassable warren of dingy and malodorous habitations that bred disease (nineteen thousand cholera deaths in 1847) and crime. Hard as it is to believe today, the grand spaces surrounding the Louvre, as well as almost the entire Ile de la Cité, where government edifices and Notre-Dame Cathedral now have primary place, were once densely packed with medieval buildings. But in addition to a healthy opening up, the renovations of Paris facilitated the takeover of prime city center land from its lower-class inhabitants by real estate speculators and their middle- and upper-class clientele. The long straight avenues, with their imposing perspectives and allusions to the imperial urbanism of Rome, cut right through old neighborhoods. Gas and eventually electric arc lighting contributed not only to security but to the city’s reputation for “glitz,” as Zola put it, and its moniker as the City of Light. To finance construction, Haussmann granted concessions to builders, who lined the avenues with apartment houses that included shops at street level.

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FIGURE 7. Hyacinthe-César Delmaet and Louis-Emile Durandelle, photograph of the construction

of the Opéra, 1860s. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

Obviously, only a small percentage of the original neighborhood residents could afford the higher rents, and wealthier families moved into the fashionably bright, airy, and centrally located new flats, as is happening in many of today’s cities. Doubtless the liberal poet Victor Hugo and others were right that the new thoroughfares had deliberately been made too wide for raising insurrectionary barricades and straight enough for artillery to fire easily at protest gatherings. The so-called “dangerous classes”—workers and other disenfranchised folk who tended to take their complaints to the streets—and the squalid living conditions underlying so much political dissent since the 1790s were exiled to the periphery. After all, Napoleon III’s regime followed a series of uprisings, from the revolt of July 1830, which led to the abdication of the Bourbon Charles X in favor of Louis-Philippe d’Orléans, to the left-wing revolution of February 1848 that put an end to the monarchy once and for all. Louis-Napoleon could argue that his coup and its authoritarian regime were the needed response to continuing instability, as had been the case for his uncle. Indeed, plans for the new Opéra, built on its separate, easily securable city block, were partly motivated by a bombing attempt on the emperor’s carriage that had injured hundreds in front of the old opera house on the narrower Rue Lafitte. What had the potential to serve military and political purposes, however, also introduced freedom of circulation—of air to dispel foul vapors, of healthier waste

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drainage, and of commercial traffic enhancing business efficiency and trade. And as an enormous public works program, following the depression of 1847, the renovation employed some 20 percent of Parisian laborers at its height in the 1860s.7 It was the engine of a prosperity that temporarily helped smooth over social conflicts and permanently laid the foundation for industrial France. Real estate investors like the Péreire family and railroad barons (the Rothschilds, among others) accumulated vast riches under imperial financing. Even when favoritism and corruption were exposed prior to the regime’s collapse under Prussian attack in 1870, fortunes had been made. It was a gilded age.8 This teeming but more open, cleaner, and better-lit metropolis is largely the one so admired today. Not only was it the subject of many Impressionist paintings, but the new urban experience it afforded was the context within which key ideas underlying Impressionism arose. Baudelaire’s “The Painter of Modern Life” is essential to understanding the relationship of that experience to Impressionist art. Although Baudelaire died in 1867, just as Impressionism was developing its early group identity, and years before it was given its name, he was one of the first to argue cogently that modern life was the only worthy subject matter for the modern artist and that visual art could be its primary expressive medium. He was the first to identify the forms through which its representations would operate, for he saw how rapid execution and informal painterly technique expressed both personal vision and progressive efficiency. No one so deeply understood how the combination of naturalism and subjectivity now taken for granted in Impressionism was grounded in experiences of the modern city. It is often pointed out that these ideals were embodied in Baudelaire’s notion of the flâneur. This modern citizen-hero was an indigenous by-product of the new urban society. Baudelaire saw him as an enviable sort of being, a gentleman-dandy whose financial independence allowed him to cultivate the aesthetic and rise above the mere crowd. The flâneur was the model for a new kind of vision. He would stroll about the town, through its new parks or along its endless boulevards, without particular direction, for the purpose of enjoyment, as one might do when taking a break from work, except that time off could last all day. Infiltrating society to see up close but maintaining distance as if observing through a spyglass, a flâneur would experience in the crowds a strange combination of anonymity and intimacy very similar to the fascinating combination of directness and detachment that one often senses in Impressionist work. For Baudelaire, this detached but inquisitive gaze embodied the modern human condition because it originated in the need to maintain individual integrity against the threat of anonymity in densely populated and democratically accessible urban spaces. Some art historians attribute what is perceived as Impressionist anomie—a sense of randomness and indifference— to the unfamiliarity of these surroundings and the alienating experience that accompanied them. But few paintings are made literally from the flâneur’s viewpoint, and many urban views seem to affirm the viewer’s power over the environment. Nor can one assume that the flâneur’s experience of urban spaces was negative.9 The artist through whom Baudelaire exemplified his theories was the illustrator Constantin Guys (1802–92). According to Baudelaire, Guys’s rapid, sketchlike style (see Meeting in the Park, ca. 1860, Figure 8) embodied both the volatile passion and rapt fascination of the naive observer (one unencumbered by outworn conventions) and the modern ideal of efficiency (the greatest effect produced with the most economy of means). At the time Baudelaire was writing, no painter had yet grasped this connection, although the Impressionists would eventually express it. Baudelaire had for at least a decade

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been praising illustrators and authors of the occasional piece—journalists like himself, for that was how he made his own meager living. He knew firsthand, from the writer’s point of view, that a certain short, rapid form of article, the feuilleton rather than the extended tome or pedantic dissertation, was required by the economic realities of modern publishing. The literate—though not necessarily cultivated—public, which increasingly meant the middle classes, demanded succinct, incisive, and entertaining work. In the best of such writing, Baudelaire admired agile summarization and witty expression, for through them an individual could leave a stamp on mere journalistic reportage that transformed it into art. This, for him, was the manner of modern writing. In visual media Baudelaire sought similar traits, discovering equivalents in graphic works— caricature and outdoor sketching—both of which are directly tied to observation yet express the artist’s 22

personal temperament. Baudelaire’s attitude was that reality could be only the basis for art, not the substance of it. On these grounds, he abhorred photography and presumably would have disparaged those aspects of Impressionist naturalism associated with its ostensible literalism. In the 1870s the imagery that Baudelaire held to be modern had come to be associated with the urban manifestations of naturalism, but he would have demanded that the temptations of photographic realism be resisted and transcended through the imaginative and aestheticizing means that he admired in graphic and journalistic arts. Photography was anchored in the present. Any painting that echoed photography would be similarly bound to temporality and hence incapable of providing the lift to imagination that Baudelaire required of art. For Baudelaire, the true medium for visual art was color, which had the ability not only to represent the world in a way related to actual seeing rather than conventional training but also to cele-

FIGURE 8. Constantin Guys, Meeting in the Park, ca. 1860. Pen and watercolor. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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brate quasi-musically an imaginative interpretation of it. As early as 1846 Baudelaire had urged “colorists” to exercise the “symphonic” effects of their art in portraying the “spectacle of elegance and the thousands of floating existences . . . that circulate . . . in a great city.”10 By symphonic, he was alluding to a kind of direct psychological impact of visual stimuli that bypassed the usual academic narratives, conveyed through sharply delineated forms and burnished surfaces. An art of color, in other words, embodied both a performative process of creativity and the psychological effect of its reception because of its physical stimulus to the act of viewing. Using their brilliant colors to enact their experience of vision, the Impressionists both represented and reshaped the world through new and optimistic eyes.

URBAN LANDSCAPE AND THE NEW PARIS 23

The urban landscapes produced by the Impressionists are perhaps the most perfect expressions of the interdependence of leisure and productivity, embodied formally through a technique that conveys both the energies of city life and the leisurely glances of Baudelaire’s flâneur. City views were hardly new in art, but in Impressionism urban landscape emerged as a significant genre. Compared to eighteenth-century views of Rome featuring ancient ruins or the vedute of Venice by artists like Canaletto, which appealed to the nostalgia of primarily British patrons for the faraway Mediterranean, Impressionist views dwelt far more on the modern aspects of both city and countryside. Even Jan Vermeer’s famous and ostensibly accurate View of Delft (ca. 1662, Mauritshuis, The Hague), with its stillness and relatively few figures, seems to freeze its subject into a peaceful ideal rather than emphasize the transitory elements now associated with the contemporary. Closer to Impressionism in form and in time is View of the Forum from the Farnese Gardens, Evening (1826, Musée du Louvre, Paris), by the celebrated landscapist Camille Corot, the Impressionists’ immediate predecessor and sometime mentor, but its focus is a place that is heavily charged with nostalgia rather than somewhere local and contemporary. One can make similar comparisons between Impressionist and Dutch paintings of country roads, or between Corot’s painting Route de Sèvres of 1864 (Figure 9) and Alfred Sisley’s Route de la

Machine, Louveciennes of 1873 (Figure 10). Although the Corot overlooks Paris from the Sèvres hilltop, the view is suffused in atmospheric perspective. The rustic fence along the road and Corot’s peasants suggest the timeless harmony of the countryside, even emphasizing its nostalgic attraction by placing the city in a sort of ineffable distance. The figure riding on a donkey hardly exemplifies a modern form of transportation. By contrast, Sisley’s painting is notable for its straight, wide stretch of road, which ran toward a local attraction, the mechanical wonder of the Machine of Marly (see Chapter 3). Its newly laid curbstones lend crispness to its geometry, emphasized in the vertical by the freshly planted trees along its edge.11 Whether brand-new or a renovation, the road is a capacious corridor, allowing for speedy coaches and considerable traffic, and its breadth is emphasized by its emptiness. Even Armand Guillaumin’s winding Route de Clamart à Issy (ca. 1876, Plate 3) has the specificity of the modern. Its carefully graded S-curve is counterpointed by bordering saplings, evenly spaced. From near Issy-les-Moulineaux, where he sometimes painted with Cézanne, Guillaumin is looking northeast. Western Paris—as yet not fully developed—lies in the distance, identifiable by the dome of the Invalides Church, four or five kilometers (approximately two and a half to three miles) away. The gray shape to

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the right, just visible above some trees, is probably the fort of Issy; a house of recent design is at the center of the picture, and a train headed to Montparnasse Station on the Orléans line, for which Guillaumin once worked, crosses from left to right behind it in the middle distance. These road scenes contrast markedly with the previous generation of landscapes, located in solitary woodlands, away from all but the most primitive and rustic lanes. For painters of earlier generations, the road, when present at all, was secondary to the picturesque experience of an outlying village, country estate, or geological curiosity. In Impressionism, suburban roads and city streets are themselves places of meaningful activity; however banal they may appear to us today, they usually signified modernity to the nineteenth-century viewer. Even when empty, perhaps especially when empty, as in these images, the road implies the potential for the mobility and access at the heart of the mod24

ern economy. Like trains, roads suggest the freedom to travel and expand one’s range. In focusing on manmade elements in the landscape, Impressionist paintings imply the extension of human control over nature through the creation of an infrastructure for transportation and commerce over and through it. Although Impressionists seldom portrayed heavily traveled thoroughfares except inside the city, the theme of the road is inextricably linked to these ideas. As relative newcomers to the suburban sites they portrayed, the artists availed themselves of both the autonomy and the anonymity that these public spaces provided. Roads outside town were often unbounded by stone walls or the fences of private property holdings, as well as free from encumbering vegetation. Here the artists could concentrate, relatively undisturbed, whereas in the narrower and more populated streets at the center of the villages their presence would have been more conspicuous. The improved roads not only carried goods to ever-expanding Parisian markets but, as in Renoir’s charming Route de Louveciennes (1873, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), opened the countryside to the bourgeoisie, giving them access to the expanding weekend commerce of restaurants and recreation spots, as well as safe fresh-air promenades, without losing their connection to the familiar and secure modern urban world. In city views the specificity of the modern landscape was far more visible and recognizable to the public than in suburban or country scenes, so the former were even better vehicles for redefining

FIGURE 9. Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot,

Route de Sèvres, 1864. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

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FIGURE 10. Alfred Sisley, Route de la Machine, Louveciennes, 1873. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

landscape painting. Armand Guillaumin was a pioneer of urban landscape, in which he very often featured the activity of public workers and infrastructure renovations. Bridge construction and the reshaping of the Seine embankments had been among the imperial improvements to the capital under Napoleon I, who contributed four new bridges across the Seine. Under the Second Empire and then under the Third Republic, further renovations and additions strengthened the investment in infrastructure, advancing plans to open the flow of traffic on both the river and the city streets. Widening of the embankments to provide access to the river as an open space at street level was a high priority in Haussmann’s projects. Stairways to lower-level embankments (les berges) and to the river itself were also built. Two plates from T. J. H. Hoffbauer’s Paris à travers les âges compare the Petit Pont and the Place du Petit Pont in 1830 and 1880 (Figure 11).12 Buildings that had been constructed right to the edge of the river, preventing access other than from cross streets, were removed, and wide streets were built along the river’s length. Even the bridges themselves, with their broad central piers, were replaced by far less bulky designs that allowed for more unobstructed river traffic. Haussmann also added two new bridges, bringing the city’s total to twenty-eight. The Pont National (originally named the Pont Napoléon III) to the southeast, one of Paris’s longest bridges, and the Pont du Point du Jour with the Viaduc d’Auteuil (replaced in 1966 and now called Pont de Garigliano) to the southwest were added at the extremities of Paris, where new exterior boulevards crossed the Seine. The Pont de Bercy and the Pont des Invalides were both converted from suspension bridges to stone and iron structures in 1854–55. Some of Paris’s most central bridges, such as the Pont SaintMichel, rebuilt in 1857, had to be widened to accommodate Haussmann’s plan for a main north-south

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FIGURE 11. The Petit Pont and adjacent riverbanks before (ca. 1830) and after (ca. 1880) Haussmann’s renovations.

26

T. J. H. Hoffbauer, Paris à travers les âges, vol. 2 (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1885), plates 4 and 5 (following p. 60).

axis along the Boulevard Saint-Michel, across L’Ile de la Cité to the Pont au Change (rebuilt 1858–59) and the Place du Châtelet to the Boulevard de Sébastopol. The Pont de Solférino (1858–59, replaced by a pedestrian bridge in 1960) was added, and the Pont d’Arcole (1854–55) and Pont Saint-Louis (1861), formerly the Passerelle de la Cité, were reconstructed, using wide cast-iron spans. The Pont Louis-Philippe was replaced in 1861 by a new bridge built of stone immediately next to it on the upriver side, and a new street was cut through the Ile Saint-Louis to join with the Pont Saint-Louis.13 The majority of these projects took place in Armand Guillaumin’s territory, for his studio was on the Quai d’Anjou of the Ile Saint-Louis, the smaller and quieter sister island of the Ile de la Cité. He made several paintings that record embankment construction and other river activity (see Chapter 3) in these areas of Paris, as well as along the more industrial parts of the Seine near the city limits toward Bercy, Charenton, and Ivry to the east and over by Grenelle and Le Point du Jour to the west. As an employee of the Department of Bridges and Roads (Ponts et Chaussées), Guillaumin took a special interest in and had special access to such places and projects. A painting of Le Pont Marie (ca. 1875, SF 108, Musée du Petit-Palais, Geneva) shows digging on the Quai de l’Hôtel de Ville, opposite the Ile Saint-Louis. Visible at an angle under one of its arches is the old pedestrian crossing at the end of the Ile Saint-Louis. It was replaced by the Pont de Sully in 1876.14 Several other paintings are set along the embankments of the Ile Saint-Louis itself—Quai d’Anjou and Quai de Béthune. Guillaumin’s painting of the new Pont Louis-Philippe (Pont Louis-Philippe with Laundry Boats, 1875, Figure 12) is one of his most interesting pictures from this general period. The bridge itself, connecting the Ile SaintLouis to the Right Bank west of the Pont Marie, replaced a span of older design that had proven too narrow and whose heavy piers obstructed river traffic. The new construction had been the subject of an album of photographs published by Hippolyte-Auguste Collard in 1862 (Figure 13). Collard’s album had been commissioned by the Ponts et Chaussées administration. Guillaumin’s location is the Quai Bourbon on the Ile Saint-Louis looking west. To the left, buildings from the neighboring Ile de la Cité jut out behind the bridge. In his painting, Guillaumin’s primary interest is in the activity of the docking and loading area in the foreground. The unusually large and heavily loaded barges in the foreground, with their slatted compartments, are laundry-washing boats, toward which some washerwomen are moving. In this case, the boats seem somewhat far from the embankment, and a worker carrying a large board may indicate that they are being moved or renovated. Although several such craft along

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FIGURE 12 (TOP). Armand Guillaumin, Pont Louis-Philippe with Laundry Boats, 1875. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. FIGURE 13 (LEFT). Hippolyte Collard, View of the Pont Louis-Philippe, photograph, 1861. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. FIGURE 14 (RIGHT). Hippolyte Collard, Floating Storage Barges on the Canal de Saint-Ouen, photograph, ca. 1864. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

the river can be seen in numerous photographs of the Paris Seine, Guillaumin’s close-up composition is rare, anticipated only by an unusual photograph by Collard from the 1860s, Floating Storage Barges

on the Canal de Saint-Ouen (Figure 14). Both images document the new accessibility of the river to such massive vehicles, thanks to the modernization of the Paris bridges.15 A painting previously misidentified as representing the Pont Marie along the Quai Sully actually shows the new Haussmannian Pont d’Arcole (Pont d’Arcole from the Quai de l’Hôtel de Ville, ca. 1875, Figure 15). Here Guillaumin has traveled past the Pont Louis-Philippe along the same embankment from which he painted Le Pont Marie and is looking west rather than east. The Pont d’Arcole

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(1854–55) was a bridge of bold design that used a single span of cast-iron arches across the Seine. In fact, bridges had been among the first structures to utilize cast-iron elements. The earliest example was erected in England in the late 1770s. A lithograph of 1863 from Paris dans sa splendeur shows the Pont d’Arcole span, with a single stone arch on the embankment, as in Guillaumin’s painting.16 Similar spans were celebrated in photographs by Collard, including one from a startling viewpoint showing off the underside of the structure of the Pont de Grenelle during its reconstruction (Figure 16). Collard captured similar views for the Pont Louis-Philippe and others. But Guillaumin never resorted to such visual dramatics, and here he employs a more traditional composition that concentrates on the actual labor of reconfiguring the embankment rather than on the modern bridge behind it. His style in this and other paintings of the 1870s often seems like a compromise between the elegance of Monet 28

and the more laboriously heavy-handed early Impressionist style of Cézanne, with whom Guillaumin had close ties in the late 1860s and early 1870s (see Chapter 3). Nonetheless, his seemingly endless line of horse-drawn wagons ready to remove sand dredged from the river testifies to continuing efforts under the Third Republic to complete Haussmann’s vision for modernizing Paris. In a relatively early work, The Garden of the Infanta (1867, Plate 4), Claude Monet gazed out across the Seine to the Left Bank of Paris from a window of the Louvre colonnade—the great museum’s famous eastern façade, designed in the seventeenth century by the architect Claude Perrault. This ostensibly simple painting embodies several principles dear to Haussmann and declares the presence of a novel, urban form of landscape painting. For one thing, Monet was quite visibly turning his back on the old master works inside the Louvre. When he entered the museum, undoubtedly with a special artist’s permit, as well as his palette, easel, and other equipment, it would have been presumed that he had come there to make study copies of the venerated pictures in the galleries. But The Garden of

the Infanta, as well as two other pictures he made from the same vantage point, ostentatiously flouts that presumption to look out upon the city in its bright and colorful daylight. In the immediate foreground of The Garden of the Infanta lies the garden itself, named for the Spanish princess who came to France to marry Louis XV in 1721. It has a smooth lawn, manicured flowerbeds, and newly planted trees. Thanks to Haussmann, Paris now had many similar small green spaces, even though this one was not originally of his making. Beyond the garden fence, to the left in the painting, is a tree-lined urban space that Haussmann did create in 1854, enhancing the garden by demolishing buildings across from the Louvre. His purpose was to open up the area between the palace and the Church of Saint-Germain L’Auxerrois in order to create better vistas and to proportion the area in relation to the newly widened and evened embankments alongside the Louvre. All were attractive gathering places for promenades. The church, and even more the islands of trees in front of it, were represented in one of the two other paintings Monet made from this same colonnade perch (Saint-

Germain L’Auxerrois, 1866, W 84, Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin). The widened Quai du Louvre is the subject of the third painting (Quai du Louvre, 1867, W 83, Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague), which has the same skyline as The Garden of the Infanta but is shown in early spring. All three pictures are similar in size, their principal difference being that the latter two were done in horizontal format.17 The angle of Monet’s view in both The Garden of the Infanta and the Quai du Louvre is from the Right Bank of Paris looking over to the Left Bank and the Ile de la Cité, where the Cathedral of Notre-Dame is located on the left. In the center of these pictures, on the hill of Sainte-Geneviève, rises

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FIGURE 15. Armand Guillaumin, Pont d’Arcole from the Quai de l’Hôtel de Ville, ca. 1875. Musée du Petit-Palais, Geneva. FIGURE 16. Hippolyte Collard, Pont de Grenelle from Below, photograph, 1874. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

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the Panthéon, where heroes of French culture and democracy were interred. It is framed by the Church of Val-de-Grâce to the right. It seems no accident that the French flag waves proudly on a tall pole on the quay in the middle ground. The new Paris was a matter of national pride, and Monet’s picture declares a new genre of painting to celebrate it. Haussmann’s planning of new streets and open spaces featured sight lines toward Paris’s revered monuments—a perspective thus shared by these paintings. Monet made two paintings of the Boulevard des Capucines (one, shown in Plate 2, at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the other, W 292, at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow), again essaying both vertical and horizontal formats. The boulevards had special symbolic as well as commercial importance in the new Paris. According to Adolphe Joanne’s Paris illustré, great cities were known by their gardens, their public spaces, and their promenades. London had its squares and Saint Peters30

burg its vistas, but Paris had, above all, its boulevards.18 The Boulevard des Capucines was one of the Grands Boulevards, which run from the Church of La Madeleine to the Place de la Bastille. Like the English word bulwark or the German word Bollwerk, the term originally referred to the fortifications on the traces of which these earliest grand avenues were built. Even though they are much identified with Haussmann’s Paris, the Grands Boulevards were in fact laid out from 1670 to 1680 under Louis XIV, replacing the old city gates and walls maintained under previous reigns.19 The five-hundred-meterlong (just under a third of a mile) Boulevard des Capucines had been built up from approximately 1685 to 1705 with imposing private residences, most of which were destroyed under Haussmann to make way for what are now considered typical Paris apartment blocks with large stores on the high-ceilinged ground floor.20 Both of Monet’s versions of his composition include often ignored figures at the right edge who gaze out upon the crowds from the shallow balconies of such buildings. These residences combined luxury living and landlord profit, offering large apartments on their second and third floors (premier and deuxième étages, by French count) above the commercial locales, with progressively smaller lodgings higher up—the opposite of today’s high-rise elevator buildings. Monet’s well-dressed observers seem, from their location just above the awnings that protect the ground-floor shopping display windows, to be occupying one of the better apartments. Monet’s viewpoint implies a sympathy with theirs. Gazing out upon the urban spectacle, they embody a self-confidence and pride of ownership, facilitated by the rise of such new buildings and access to their balconies. The most notable feature of the Boulevard des Capucines in Monet’s day was the young architect Charles Garnier’s daring new opera house, the façades of which had already been revealed to the Parisian public even though its interior was still under construction in 1873–74, at the time of Monet’s painting. With the opening up in 1862 of the Place de l’Opéra, which is traversed by the Boulevard des Capucines, Paris’s luxury and commercial trade began a pronounced westward migration toward the Boulevard de la Madeleine. Under the Second Empire, stores such as La Maison de Blanc, Aux Trois Quartiers, La Maison Alphonse Giroux, and Auguste Klein de Vienne offered their extraordinary arrays to shoppers.21 During the Third Republic, which began in 1871, the Boulevard des Capucines, Boulevard des Italiens, and Rue de la Paix were called the Golden Triangle.22 In the early 1860s, the Compagnie Immobilière de Paris, owned by the Péreire brothers, built the Grand Hôtel on the entire triangular block at the corner of the Place de l’Opéra. It created a sensation and became a fashionable center of café society and dandyism. Writing in 1885, Phillip Gilbert Hamerton stated, with a certain Anglo-Saxon skepticism:

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The true lovers of Paris . . . take a keen delight in those broad trottoirs [sidewalks] of the Boulevards. They walk upon them for the mere pleasure of being there, till absolute weariness compels them to sit down before a café; and when the feelings of exhaustion are over, they rise to tire themselves again, like a girl at a ball. They tell one that the mere sensation of the Parisian asphaltum under the feet is an excitement itself, so that when aided by “little glasses” in the moments of rest at the cafés, it must be positively intoxicating. These true lovers of Paris are most enchanted with those parts of the Boulevards where the crowd is always so dense that all freedom of motion is impossible; where half the foot-way is occupied by thousands of café chairs and the other half by a closely packed multitude of loungers.23 In 1867 Alfred Delvau described a boulevard as “a place lined with trees and smiling women.”24 He left unclear whether the women were courtesans or shoppers, but the term haute bicherie has been used by one historian to describe this environment.25 Delvau specified that the greatest crowds were out between two and six in the afternoon, then again from nine o’clock to midnight.26 During the day, according to Emile de La Bédollière, from the Porte de Saint-Denis to the Church of La Madeleine, “it is commerce that dominates. . . . In the stores that line the pavement important business dealings are brewing in porcelains, made-to-measure clothing, perfumes, bronzes, rugs, furs, travel accessories, and glass wares.”27 Farther east along the boulevards, theaters and music halls proliferated, although in 1866–68 the Théâtre du Vaudeville was built on Boulevard des Capucines itself on the site of the Duke de Sommavira’s former residence at the corner of the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin.28 Such establishments attracted the nighttime crowd, about which Delvau warned: “Watch out, sir or dear foreigner, watch out! Little white-skinned women are watching you; your golden glasses are making them cross-eyed.” He advised those who wanted to observe “this amusing spectacle” to be seated at “one of the numerous cafés with which the genie of Speculation has ornamented our boulevards.”29 Opinions thus agreed in presenting the boulevard as a place of spectacle that was tied to commercial activity. In 1867 Adolphe Joanne expressed a democratic pride in the mixture of social classes that the boulevards attracted.30 In 1868 the Boulevard des Capucines was traversed by approximately twenty-three thousand horses daily.31 In Monet’s paintings one sees this traffic from an upstairs window rather than a café table. Some pedestrians are flâneurs, to be sure, but most are probably walking with purpose and direction.32 Movement is suggested by the blur of Monet’s sketchlike handling, for which the critic Louis Leroy showed distaste by satirically dismissing it as “black tongue-lickings.”33 Since Monet was painting from Nadar’s studio at 35 Boulevard des Capucines, he would have been looking northeast toward the Place de l’Opéra. The critic Castagnary was so sure of Monet’s accuracy that he tried to locate his exact optical point of view.34 The street that opens onto the boulevard from the left is the Rue Scribe (after Eugène Scribe, 1791–1861), one of three streets named after composers and librettists built in the Opéra’s vicinity by Haussmann.35 The building to the right of it, in the center of the Pushkin Museum painting’s horizontal composition and center left in the Nelson-Atkins Museum painting’s vertical format, is the recent Grand Hôtel itself. The open space to the right, just above the top-hatted observers, is the Place de l’Opéra. Judging by the relatively long shadow cast halfway across the street in the Pushkin Museum painting, the time is midafternoon in winter. The Impressionist exhibition held

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in Nadar’s studio was being planned as early as January 1874. Thus it seems likely that Monet would have made his views in winter 1873–74. The Nelson-Atkins Museum painting is a snow scene, and, rare as snow may be in Paris, it is certainly like Monet to portray varied weather conditions, lighting, and times of day, just as he experimented with horizontal and vertical formats.36 By comparison, Auguste Renoir’s slightly later painting The Grands Boulevards (1875, Figure 17) is more generalized in its representation of both the location and the season. The painter seems to be looking westward down the Boulevard des Capucines away from the Opéra. As is so often the case in Renoir’s paintings, the viewer is closer to individual figures than in Monet’s work, and there is a greater sense of interaction among them, as shown by the mother with her children in Renoir’s foreground. Perhaps the painting is more about the shoppers themselves than about the general topic of 32

crowds or commerce. Bourgeois women were rarely flâneuses because to stroll the city alone was considered improper. Shopping in family or other groups was their pretext.37 More than the Monets, Renoir’s picture gives a sense of the boulevards’ reputation for light and air, with blurred forms suggesting almost the physicality of the atmosphere itself. Setting their sights, so to speak, to include the bustling scene of carriages and bourgeois crowds, both Monet and Renoir captured the attractive and prosperous life of those same upper middle classes whose leisure permitted their enjoyment of the amenities that Haussmann’s renovations introduced. It is in such views that crowds of flâneurs and shoppers appear, evoking the interdependence of commerce and leisure. Another neighborhood closely identified with Haussmann’s renovations was the Quartier de l’Europe, behind the Saint-Lazare Station and part of the former village of Batignolles, annexed to Paris under the Second Empire. Manet’s studio was in the heart of this area, which provided the background for his painting of The Railroad (see Chapter 4). In at least three other paintings as well as a few drawings, Manet showed the Rue Mosnier, named for its developer when it was built along the edge of the rail yard in the early 1870s.38 The street was later renamed Rue de Berne, in keeping with the neighborhood’s European international theme. In one view of the Rue Mosnier, done from his studio window, Manet depicted workers laying paving stones (Rue Mosnier with Pavers, 1878, Figure 18), thus recording actual urban construction and echoing Guillaumin’s themes, though not his style. In Rue

Mosnier with Flags (1878, RW 216, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles), Manet contrasted the sharp clean lines of the new street with a one-legged man on crutches in the foreground. The flags indicate a national holiday, but one cannot be sure that Manet’s view is celebratory. Is one to understand modern urbanization as a heartless imposition by a state-sponsored oligarchy over the needs of frailer human beings?39 In an ink drawing from a slightly different angle, Manet showed a new gas lamp fixture and part of a locomotive beyond the fence to the left (Rue Mosnier with Gas Lamp, brush with lithographic ink, 1878, Art Institute of Chicago). From this drawing, one may surmise that behind the fence in Rue Mosnier with Flags, as in his Railroad, steam is rising upward from the tracks. Gustave Caillebotte created a reputation for himself based on scenes located along nearby Haussmannian streets. His pictures have become much better known over the past twenty years, but they are still considered strange or anomalous within Impressionism unless one considers urban landscape to be at the heart of the modern landscape vision and the shock of the new to be among its sought-after effects, enhanced by innovative viewpoints adopted from photography. Caillebotte’s Pont

de l’Europe (1876, Plate 5) celebrated the complicated intersection of bridges over the Saint-Lazare

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FIGURE 17. Auguste Renoir, The Grands Boulevards, 1875. Philadelphia Museum of Art. FIGURE 18. Edouard Manet, Rue Mosnier with Pavers, 1878. Private collection

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railroad yards (see Chapter 4). Its glaring light on a sunny day heightens the sense of ruthless geometric rigor underlying both the iron trestle structure and the streets that run across it. Recently constructed apartment houses, like the one in which Caillebotte, his mother, and his brother lived (his father had died in 1874), can be seen in the distance. They are also in the background of several of Monet’s pictures of the Gare Saint-Lazare (see Chapter 4). In 1866 the Caillebotte family had purchased a parcel of land on the corner of the Rue de Miromesnil and the Rue de Lisbonne, west of the Place de l’Europe and thus behind the viewer. Hence, the male figure to the left in the painting, a self-portrait, is heading homeward, possibly soliciting a lady on his way. At this borderline between a residential area and a railway station, one encounters a mix of individuals, including workers in their smocks, clerks in bowler hats, and women of the world. Similarly, Caillebotte’s representation of the built environ34

ment reflects the bold new lines of industrial construction and the imposing new housing blocks surrounding it. The painting’s rapidly foreshortened perspective pulls the viewer inward, suggesting through spatial dynamism rather than sketchy brushstrokes the rush and movement of modern life. Caillebotte’s Paris Street: Rainy Weather (1877, Figure 19) places the viewer among the residential streets seen in the background of Pont de l’Europe. According to Juliet Wilson-Bareau, this view, carefully prepared through drawings, which may be tracings of photographs, looks north from the Rue de Turin, in front of the building numbered 16.40 In the distance, directly behind the gas lamp in the center of the composition, is the Rue Clapeyron; to the right is the continuation of the Rue de Turin; to the left of the pharmacy on the corner with the Rue Clapeyron is the Rue de Moscou (see Figure 5). Hidden by the corner of the building at the right is the Rue de Saint-Petersbourg, where Manet lived. Descending from the Place de Clichy, it crossed through the intersection and continued, beyond the frame to the left, toward the Place de l’Europe. This was one of those star intersections beloved by Haussmann, the most famous of which is the Place de l’Etoile, which he designed around the Arch of Triumph at what is now called the Place Charles de Gaulle. Although now a pedestrian nightmare, such intersections—the one in Caillebotte’s picture being a mere eight streets compared to l’Etoile’s eleven grand avenues—gave the city clear-cut focal points and imposing vistas. Caillebotte’s painting optically emphasizes this environment’s visual impact through its pronounced perspective. Its vast expanse of pavement and seemingly interminable blocks of buildings with uniform elevations surely contribute to a sense of anonymity that upset many of Haussmann’s critics. Even the painter Renoir, writing in 1877, complained to the editor of L’Impressionniste, his friend Georges Rivière, that Paris’s quaint old buildings had been replaced by structures that were “cold and lined up like soldiers at a review.”41 If nothing else, Renoir’s comment pays tribute to the rational and ordering impetus of such reconfigurations of the natural environment. If Caillebotte’s painting was intended to celebrate such effects, a comparison with Renoir’s The Grands Boulevards reveals the degree to which the latter had softened their harshness. There are several picture types within Caillebotte’s urban views of the later 1870s, but almost all of them look back to A Young Man at His Window (1875, Figure 20). In this painting, Caillebotte’s brother René is shown from behind gazing out from the family’s third-floor apartment at 77 Rue Miromesnil, on the corner of the Rue de Lisbonne. Prominent in his field of vision is a solitary woman crossing into the Boulevard Malesherbes.42 The young man’s gaze at her provides a concrete instance of the presiding urban vision of the age—that of the upper-middle-class professionals whose city their

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FIGURE 19. Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street: Rainy Weather, 1877. Art Institute of Chicago. FIGURE 20. Gustave Caillebotte, A Young Man at His Window, 1875. Private collection.

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confrere Haussmann had delivered to them. Later, following the death of René in 1876 and his mother in 1878, Gustave and his younger brother Martial moved to a fourth-floor apartment on the Boulevard Haussmann just behind the new Opéra. From there the painter executed most of his other urban views.43 They include figures looking down from outdoor balconies—like those at the right-hand edge of Monet’s

Boulevard des Capucines. Some examples are Man on a Balcony (1880, B 149, private collection, Switzerland) and A Balcony (1880, B 146, private collection, Paris), both of which were done from Caillebotte’s apartment overlooking the Boulevard Haussmann. In the former, a gentleman looks up toward the Place Saint-Augustin from the corner behind the Opéra, where the Rue Scribe and the Rue Gluck converge as they enter the Boulevard Haussmann. The latter was painted from a position on Caillebotte’s balcony along the Boulevard Haussmann. Through the foliage to the left, one can just make out the Rue 36

Lafayette where it merges with the Chaussée d’Antin as they encounter the Boulevard Haussmann. Although done from higher up than A Young Man at His Window, these views embody less of a domineering and anonymous vision, now suggesting a pleasurable participation in the aesthetic enjoyments afforded by clean and leafy thoroughfares.

FIGURE 21. Gustave Caillebotte, Rue Halévy, Seen from the Sixth Floor, 1878. Private collection.

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37

FIGURE 22. Gustave Caillebotte, Rooftops: Snow Effect, 1878. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

A comparison between Rue Halévy, Seen from the Sixth Floor (1878, Figure 21) and Rooftops:

Snow Effect (1878, Figure 22) suggests the contrast between new and old Paris visible from servants’ room windows on the top floor. The former was done from the corner of the Rue Lafayette and the Boulevard Haussmann, diagonally across from Caillebotte’s building, which is on the right.44 Carpeaux’s rooftop statues on the Opéra are visible beyond it. Rue Halévy, bearing the name of the opera composer Jacques-Fromental Halévy (1799–1862), was one of the new streets surrounding the opera house; like the Rue Scribe, which it parallels to the east of the opera house, it runs from the Boulevard Haussmann to the Boulevard des Capucines. Even though Caillebotte’s handling is softer and the effect more atmospheric than in his Pont de l’Europe or Paris Street: Rainy Weather, the geometric blocks, their shapes emphasized by balcony railings, and the near-monochromatic tonality lend some support to the arguments of those who saw Haussmann’s new Paris as impersonal and monotonous. By contrast,

Rooftops and Caillebotte’s similar compositions in this category present a disorganized jumble of buildings, doubtless from the interior streets untouched by Haussmann’s wrecking crew. Caillebotte must have worked from a window at the rear of a Haussmann-period building—one that did not overlook a new street or boulevard but was nonetheless higher up than older houses.45

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2 ART AND TECHNOLOGY IMPRESSIONISM AND PHOTOGRAPHY

For photographers, Paris—the modern center of the cultural universe—was a commodity their lenses and plates could package for sale and thus for a sort of vicarious ownership. What railroads were to communication and national commerce, photography was to vision—a revolutionary technology that would alter perception and enhance the human sense of power over space and time. So when Impressionist paintings somehow evoked photographic vision, they displayed their contemporaneousness as much as they did by including a railroad or a factory in the landscape. For better or for worse, depending on the viewer, the relation to photography signaled modernity. Photography, even when aimed at preserving the old and certainly when celebrating the new, produced an image indelibly linked by its authentic detail to its present—to the “moment” of its creation, of which it was quite literally the index—the physical imprint. This “punctum,” to use Roland Barthes’s term, endowed photography with its power. By relating to this photographic vision, Impressionist representations displayed both ideals of naturalism and modernity—two notions that were exemplified by photography. The alliance between urban themes and photographic vision points to a deep symbiosis between the choice of subject and the aesthetics of its representation in Impressionism’s development. Not only could photography claim chronological priority for the kinds of city views found in Impressionist painting, but the “photographic” quality itself was as much a key to the modernity of these views as the themes. It was in pictures of Paris that photography most clearly displayed its modernity, rather than in more traditional scenes of nature, such as the Fontainebleau Forest, where photographers and painters also worked side by side. Whether or not Caillebotte’s works celebrate the new Paris, they are inconceivable without the vantage points that were essential ingredients of Haussmannian design, whether for military purposes or scopic pleasures. Additionally, their combination of estrangement and panoramic domination not only embodies the psychological effect of optics but lies at the heart of experiences of the modern city as explored already by Monet and then in the 1890s by Pissarro. Their relationship to photography is obvious as well, and, taken as a group, Caillebotte’s urban landscapes can be said to thematize the interrelationship of modern vision, the urban setting, and photography.

DOCUMENTS AND DANGERS Although this relationship is most obvious in Caillebotte’s works, it was also central to the novelty and contemporaneousness in Monet’s urban landscapes, all of which preceded Caillebotte’s, some by nearly a decade. The best known of Monet’s early cityscapes discussed earlier, The Garden of the Infanta,

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echoes the structure of many of the photographic views of the city that were proliferating at the time in stereographic versions, where spatial illusionism could be quite effective and the compositions were mostly vertical (Figure 23). The sense of the windowlike frame of The Garden of the Infanta is similar to the movable rectangle of the stereoscopic camera viewfinder. It contrasts with the horizontal treatment of Quai du Louvre, which has a more traditional feel, though it evokes wide horizontal panoramic views, such as one taken from exactly the same spot at approximately the same time by the photographer Charles Soulier (Figure 24). Panoramic photographs were the successors to the popular painted panoramas and dioramas of the 1830s. Louis Daguerre, the French inventor of photography, had been trained as a panorama painter; his diorama was located on the Boulevard des Capucines. All these forms of representation reinforced the sense of the city as a mass ensemble, a work of urbanism with 40

an overall plan, whereas in earlier generations city dwellers had stayed primarily within their own fragmented neighborhoods. The photographer’s tripod, like the painter’s folding easel and portable palette and paint box, implied increasing mobility within both the countryside and the city, a phenomenon that brought the modern city equal status with the countryside as a site of aesthetic experience. With

FIGURE 23. Anonymous stereocard of the Boulevard des

Italiens, n.d. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. FIGURE 24. Charles Soulier, Panorama of Paris from the

Colonnade of the Louvre, photograph taken before 1867. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

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FIGURE 25. Alfred Sisley, The Bridge at Villeneuve-la-Garenne, 1872. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

rare exceptions, only places like Rome or Venice could have previously claimed such a reputation. Thus the photographer, in his mobility and his aesthetic orientation to city life, corresponds to Baudelaire’s peripatetic flâneur, even though Baudelaire disparaged photography as a means of representation. But the point is not that Monet copied photographs; he did not. Rather, his vision of central Paris and its monuments paralleled that of photographs that were setting the new standard for naturalism— representations of everyday experience that embodied the city’s modernity Although Armand Guillaumin did not especially emulate the novel viewpoints introduced by photographs of public works, Alfred Sisley took cues from them on more than one occasion. One of Sisley’s best paintings of the early 1870s, The Bridge at Villeneuve-la-Garenne, shows the bridge from the side and below at an acute angle (1872, Figure 25). That structure, which dated from 1844, connected the village of Villeneuve, north of Paris where the Seine curves back on itself, to the industrial suburb of Saint-Denis. The location was near the main access to the Canal de l’Ourq through the Canal Saint-Denis, where barges could leave the Seine to head directly toward the Canal Saint-Martin into central Paris (see Chapter 3). The bridge also opened up the Ile Saint-Denis, an island in the middle of the Seine across which it was built. In this picture, the island lies behind the viewer. Like the island of La Grande Jatte, which Seurat’s painting has made famous (see Chapter 6), the Ile Saint-Denis attracted fishermen and weekend boaters, such as the two women in a hired skiff floating in the middle ground or the couple relaxing under the bridge’s shadow on the village side. Small bars and restaurants flourished in the area.1 Although the bridge was not especially recent, its stone and iron sus-

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pension structure exemplified modern techniques that came into use during the 1830s and 1840s. Thus it is distinguished from the old-fashioned masonry bridges in the nostalgic work of predecessors such as Corot. Sisley silhouettes the suspension cable work against the sky and cuts the bridge’s stone pier off at the left-hand edge of his painting, implying an indefinite mass beyond the frame. The span cuts decisively across the composition, dominating its entire left side. If this work embodies Sisley’s conception of modernity, its aesthetic is both dramatic and yet harmonious, as conveyed by its use of angled viewpoint, bright color, and novel handling to juxtapose themes of modernization and of leisure.2 Sisley’s Bridge at Villeneuve-la-Garenne represents its subject from a sharp angle, as do many of Collard’s photographs of bridges and aqueducts. To it, one must compare Sisley’s startling and un42

usual Under the Bridge at Hampton Court (1874, Plate 6), with its powerful viewpoint from below. Sisley had accompanied the famous baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure to London, and Faure paid the painter’s expenses in exchange for six paintings he would produce, most of which were scenes along the Thames. As in the Villeneuve painting, the portrayal of Hampton Bridge is accompanied by signs of river sport and leisure—the popular British rowing competition. A couple of racing sculls pass under its vaults. In the foreground, a single scull lies empty, almost as if awaiting the viewer’s return. But here the bridge itself is truly the subject of the composition. Constructed of cast-iron elements and brick, it had been completed in 1865. We know from drawings that Sisley’s effects were carefully planned; here was his opportunity to be experimental.3 Yet the composition is unthinkable without Collard’s photographs from similar vantage points, not only those from below Paris bridges but his Pedestrian Pas-

sage under the Viaduc d’Auteil, from an album of the 1860s (Figure 26). Sisley had represented this same viaduct (Figure 27) from a conventional viewpoint, in a painting whose whereabouts are unknown. 4 Not only is Sisley’s vantage point for The Bridge at Hampton Court strikingly photographic, but its absolute symmetry and emphasis on mass embody the mathematical and structural concerns of engineers, whose technical drawings certainly underlie the photographer’s aesthetic, commissioned as the latter’s albums were by the Ponts et Chaussées builders. Yet the point is not that Sisley, any more than Monet, was imitating photographs; rather, it is that in these images where modern bridges themselves became the subject matter, the strategies for representing them were determined by engineering and

FIGURE 26. Hippolyte Collard, Pedestrian Passage under the Viaduc d’Auteil, photograph, 1860s. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. FIGURE 27. The Pont-Viaduc du Point du Jour at Auteuil, 1866. From Le Magasin pittoresque 34 (October 1866): 325.

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photography. Indeed, in courses on photography given at the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées between 1872 and 1886, Alphonse Davanne pointed out the many ways photography served engineering.5 Such strategies surely also lie behind Caillebotte’s The Argenteuil Bridge and the Seine (ca. 1883, private collection), a composition in which the carefully observed Argenteuil highway bridge, seen from below, frames a paddle-wheel steamer towing a small barge and in which a factory is visible on the shore.6 But whether either painter saw specific paintings or photographs is not relevant here. As was the case for urban views from upper-story windows, photography introduced an aesthetic for the representation of such structures, an aesthetic that certainly underlies both the Sisley and the Caillebotte bridge paintings and was identifiably modern along with the structures themselves. In many of their important studies of Impressionist landscape over the past generation, scholars have fruitfully juxtaposed photographs of sites with paintings to demonstrate the accuracy with which the Impressionists represented what they saw.7 Correct and useful, such connections are nevertheless usually made without discussion of the issue so often raised by contemporary critics of Impressionism, namely the relationship between photography and the Impressionist vision itself. Like the paintings of panoramic city views, Impressionist paintings of bridges have a clear visual connection to photography in which photography must be credited with chronological priority and with introducing innovative angles and vantage points.8 In the public mind, this apparent visual relationship surely led to a conceptual connection—one that was, to many critics, disturbing. Photographs had been exhibited publicly for years, not only in industrial sections of the universal expositions, but, beginning in 1859, at a Salon de la Photographie, which was located next door to the Salon of artworks but had a separate entrance. In that year it received some 1,295 entries and approximately 20,000 visitors.9 This event sparked Baudelaire’s polemic against photography, and with it realism, as the bane of art. Art, the poet believed, derived from imagination, whereas photography was mere mechanical reproduction. For him “the invasion of photography and the great industrial madness of our time” cheapened “the products of the beautiful” and “diminished [human] faculties of judging and of feeling.”10 “I am convinced,” Baudelaire wrote, “that the ill-applied developments of photography, like all other purely material developments of progress, have contributed much to the impoverishment of the French artistic genius, which is already so scarce.”11 Many agreed with him that photography was contaminating the higher arts. Despite the legal claims of photographers seeking to protect their work on the basis of its originality, the distinction between photography and true art was still very much taken for granted by the general public.12 Indeed, photographers were far more concerned with the relationship between art and photography than were painters. The celebrated artists Eugène Delacroix and Gustave Courbet had both painted from photographs to study the human figure and, in Courbet’s case, to capture the specific likenesses of contemporary individuals he could not otherwise get to pose. Yet for Delacroix, the random and unselective result of photography in general could never compare to art: “When a photographer takes a picture, you never see more than a portion cut out from the whole: the edge of the scene is as interesting as its center. . . . Details are as important as the principal subject; they present themselves first and interfere with the view.”13 Nevertheless, photography could be a useful tool. Delacroix noted, following a discussion with the amateur and advocate of photography Eugène Durieu, that photographs could be of considerable help to artists who used them properly to correct artistic

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deficiencies in the representation of nature.14 This opinion was shared by many. And for many artists, photographs were simply a cheaper way than live models to study anatomy. When Durieu reported on the first exhibition of the Société Française de Photographie in 1855, he stated that the challenge for photographers was “to express, realize, and communicate the feeling that the sight of nature inspires in our soul,” something art had always done.15 Similarly, in a series of articles defending photography, including its utility for artists, Francis Wey, the Realist writer and friend of Courbet, wrote that “as soon as it is a question of interpreting the life of the thinking man . . . art assumes its superiority [over photography].” A “soul” was necessary; however admirable, a mechanical device could not suffice.16 Much of the mid-nineteenth-century writing on photography similarly mentioned the support that photography could lend painters, as long as photography was recognized 44

to be a utilitarian form of representation. That debates over the artistic role and value of photography existed in the first place, and that photographers were forced at times to defend their creative rights in court, attests to the public skepticism they had to overcome. As Elizabeth Ann McCauley observes, “Photographers’ assertions that they were artists and should be respected as such suggest that the opposing idea was held by the public.”17 For Emile Zola, writing in 1868, one of the praiseworthy characteristics of landscapists of the new school was their appreciation of every aspect of nature: they “barely choos[e] their motifs, since they find lively horizons everywhere.”18 Yet for others, including many who responded to the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874, lack of discrimination was the characteristic that the Impressionists shared with photographers. Inevitably, this comparison called the creative value of Impressionist painting into question. In comparing Impressionism to photography, one Henri Polday, echoing Baudelaire’s earlier diatribes, saw a refusal to go beyond the compositional arrangements of nature itself. “A photographer is no less an artist than you,” Polday exclaimed, addressing the Impressionists. “The day when photography will be capable of color, its proofs colored by solar action will be incontestably superior to your paintings as faithful copies of nature.” The Impressionists were like “a school of photographers who plant their easels in the same way that photographers brace their tripods.”19 E. Drumont made a more positive comparison to photography in his comments on Monet’s painting of 1868, The Break-

fast, which was part of the Impressionist exhibition of 1874, four years after the Salon jury had rejected it. “Mr. Monet’s The Breakfast, vigorously and broadly painted, is the faithful reproduction of a scene from real life; it is a photograph with color, movement, and light.”20 By this remark, Drumont meant that Monet’s painting was an improvement on photography, adding elements that the merely passive apparatus could not contribute. Yet for Drumont to have made this comparison in the first place, Monet’s painting had to remind him of photographic naturalism. Edmond Duranty took the compliment further in his essay “The New Painting,” for he argued that portraying the single moment—the way a photograph did—made a painting superior, since only this practice could give an image complete coherence. Bringing in details from pictures taken at other moments, as in academic “composition,” spoiled the natural harmony.21 It can be said that for both writers, photographs provided a standard for naturalism, though they lacked color and though their own pictorial attributes might not be valued. The kind of photography this study has directly linked to Impressionism aimed principally at journalistic documentation of the moment and hence objective naturalism rather than the making of art. During the years when Impressionism was in its formative stages, photographers recorded the construction not only of railroads and bridges but also of Parisian buildings, including hospitals, train

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stations, hotels, and most notably the Paris Opera House.22 There was, in other words, a widespread culture of such representations in which the new technology of photography was allied with the modernity of cast-iron construction and other renovations of Paris. Other associations between photography and the technological avant-garde would include the famous photographs of galloping horses by Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904), which are widely known to have interested Edgar Degas, himself an amateur photographer.23 Thus connections between Impressionism and photography have important underlying suppositions. In the mind of a skeptical public, they implied a debasement of art toward an unimaginative, mainly utilitarian form of visual representation founded on the notion of impersonal indexicality, as mentioned in the Introduction. As already demonstrated, Impressionists’ most noticeable connections with photography appear in urban subjects. McCauley places the discourses on photography within the broader debates on industrialization and progress, in which conservatives often saw the machine age and mass production as portending an abandonment of spirituality. 24 Baudelaire’s remarks on “industrial madness” and the “invasion of photography” certainly suggest this point of view. By contrast, to the mind of the painter heeding the call of naturalism, Impressionism and photography were allied in their progressive and scientific aims. They responded to Castagnary’s call for an art that would truthfully document the face of contemporary France, one in which society, as he wrote, “deposits its image . . . on the canvas”—a metaphor that evokes the indexical essence of photography.25 The widely respected science writer Louis Figuier, author of Les Merveilles de la science (1867–70) and himself an amateur photographer, proposed an ingenious argument in favor of photography that could certainly have strengthened the Impressionists’ interest in it while at the same time encouraging their stylistic departures from its crisp, prolific detail.26 In his essay “La Photographie au point de vue des arts,” Figuier immediately conceded the photograph’s absolute inferiority to painting as a work of imagination. Since photographs were mechanical facsimiles, they lacked artistic composition, the creative process through which artists emphasized certain aspects over others to convey impressions made by nature on their “soul.” The human as opposed to the mechanical response to a landscape, for example, was not “the isolated impression of all aspects of the landscape, but only the general effect that is the result of the ensemble.”27 Distinguishing between impression and effect—between undifferentiated experience and the human processing of it—Figuier implicitly denigrated an art of pure impression, like those critics who at Impressionism’s origins disparagingly coined the new movement’s name. Indeed, for some the connection between Impressionism and photography was inherent in the name itself. Photograph, meaning literally a drawing (graphos) made by light (photo), could be seen as a synonym for impression, which referred to the immediate effect on perception created by unanalyzed nature. But according to Figuier, the relationship of photography to painting was hardly detrimental. To the contrary, he advocated photography as painting’s indispensable auxiliary, “an instrument like the pencil or the brush; a process like drawing or engraving,” for the purpose of accurate representation of “monuments, edifices, and landscapes” or “anatomical detail.”28 Although this opinion merely repeated those of several of his predecessors,29 Figuier then took his argument a step further. Noting that good photographers always had their own style—that individual operators, as they were often called, would reproduce the same site differently—Figuier argued that individualism in photography held a lesson for the fine arts. While urging that photography move even further in the direction of artistic individualism, he argued that it had stimulated that movement in art. First, with its far greater repro-

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ductive skills, photography did a service by putting mediocre artists out of business, for their only goal was exact imitation. Second, “comparisons between beautiful photographs and works of painting and drawing will both rectify public taste and force great artists to surpass themselves. . . . The artist will have to give greater importance to interpretation. . . . In thus forcing the painter to heighten the personal imprint upon his works, in bringing him to raise interpretation and poetry above material imitation, photography will have happily collaborated in the advancement of the fine arts.”30 Figuier is one of the first to have articulated a theory of the relationship between photography and the fine arts similar to that called for by Walter Benjamin, who pointed out the futility of the debate over whether photography was an art as compared to the “primary question—whether the very invention of photography had not transformed the entire nature of art.”31 In the ongoing discussion 46

comparing art and photography, Figuier shifted the terms of debate from the aspirations of the latter to the status of the former: the historical impact and long-term effects of the new and unimpeachable form of realistic representation on the traditional fine arts. For him, photography’s accuracy would stimulate art to focus more on the subjective expression of the artist’s responses to nature. Such subjectivity could already be found even in shots of the same scene by different photographers. This was the inevitable subjectivization of “reality” that Zola referred to when he defined painting as “a corner of nature seen through a temperament.”32 Painting had to record not only the exteriority of the object of its representation but the interiority or “temperament” of the agent of representation, the artist. Baudelaire’s emphasis on imagination can be considered a traditionalist’s response to visual forms that he felt placed excessive value on realistic “reproduction,” of which the most dangerous kind was photography. Zola naturalized Baudelaire’s Romantic terminology (though Baudelaire also spoke of temperament) by placing it more in the realm of psychology, drawing from Hippolyte Taine and science.33 Hence Figuier’s formulation constitutes a skillful and unthreatening incorporation of photography, as a progressive medium, into the framework of art for art’s sake. Consequently, the role of photography in Impressionist images and their reception cannot be separated from the question of naturalism and its limitations. Because the Impressionists’ personalized sketchlike handling appeared to defy the standard that art should be authentic, in the sense of producing an accurate record of the landscape, the naturalist critic Castagnary characterized Impressionism as an art of subjectivity: “They are impressionists in the sense that they render not the landscape, but the sensation produced by the landscape. . . . On this side, they leave reality behind and enter fully into idealism.”34 Recall that these were differences between art and photography cited by the early writers on photography. Although Castagnary’s remark might appear to express reservations about Impressionism, it can also be read as a defense of their works as art—that is, as works that do more than copy reality.35 It was this personal level of expression, which even individual photographers revealed, that Figuier, writing at about the same time, was encouraging. Painting, unlike photography, held the possibility of fusing the interior life of the artist, so important for Zola, with the scientific processes whose increasing predominance Zola hailed in contemporary culture (see Chapter 8). When the critic Louis Leroy attacked Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines for its representation of figures on the street as “black tongue-lickings,” he used an image calculated to create disgust.36 The thought of saliva on the canvas surface must have heightened feelings of revulsion at what Leroy presented as sloppy and unfinished crafting. Yet a look at photographs of street scenes, with their multi-

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FIGURE 28. Adolphe Braun, Pont Neuf,

photograph taken 1855 or after. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

second exposure times (Figure 28), reveals the blurred edges of figures who moved during the take. In an article on the three paintings that Monet did from the Louvre colonnade, Joel Isaacson points out that only the last of them, The Garden of the Infanta, shows the blur effect that is recognizable in both versions of the Boulevard des Capucines, executed some six years later.37 The change allowed Monet to suggest the motion characteristic of the modern street as well as the motion of his hand. Paradoxically, by introducing effects that could be observed in photographs, Monet followed Figuier’s advice to go beyond the unparalleled accuracy of photography toward more expressive means. On the one hand, photography supplied information and standards for the representation of reality. On the other hand, imprinting pictures with photographic effects called attention to the artist’s individuality and personal interpretation of what he saw, to the point where the critic Leroy felt interpellated by what he understood as violations of realism.

THE PHOTOGRAPHIC PARADOX This paradox lies at the heart of Impressionism’s urban landscape. Edgar Degas is the Impressionist artist most frequently and overtly associated with photography, and although he made only a few pictures that fall within this book’s purview, his strategies certainly inspired Caillebotte and possibly others. Degas’s sharply angled viewpoints, unexpected juxtapositions of foreground and background, and abrupt cutting off of forms constitute a repertory of quasi-photographic effects.38 His famous Place de la Con-

corde: Vicomte Ludovic Lepic and His Daughters (1875, Figure 29) exemplifies them. The scene is located at the heart of monumental and aristocratic Paris, with the posh Rue de Rivoli—a key thoroughfare in Haussmann’s renovations, though its construction had begun under Napoleon I—in the background to the left of the Tuileries Gardens. Structurally, though not psychologically, Place de la Concorde has a great deal in common with Caillebotte’s Paris Street: Rainy Weather, which followed it by two years. Degas’s suppression of detail in most of the area surrounding Lepic’s family and pet greyhound guar-

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FIGURE 29. Edgar Degas, Place de

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la Concorde: Vicomte Ludovic Lepic and His Daughters, 1875. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

antees that it works more as a portrait than as an urban landscape. But cutting off his figures at the composition’s edges calls attention to the frame in ways that allude ostentatiously to the movable viewfinder of photography.39 The viewpoint is that of a fellow flâneur, like Lepic himself, thereby reinforcing the association between photography and the authenticity of the urban stroller’s passing glance. Only Caillebotte used the edges of his compositions as boldly as Degas. The flaunting of such devices called attention to their producer’s decisive intervention in the process of representation. Such pictures have little in common with the reputedly passive, randomly noncompositional clutter associated with actual photographs; instead, they speak of the deliberate way such “cropping” was used in Japanese prints. Like Monet and Caillebotte, then, Degas used these strategies to imprint his images with signs of modernity—via the allusion to a technology that set a standard for realist objectivity. Perhaps he actually subverted that technology by using its effects as marks of the artistic individuality that Figuier believed photography would force the best artists to display. His approach proclaims the naturalist vision as anything but the product of a machine. Yet its performance is modern, for it displays his own productive and conceptual energies much as other Impressionists displayed theirs through brushwork and other compositional strategies. It was already noted how Caillebotte used photographic effects in urban landscape even more systematically than Monet. I would add, with less ironic self-consciousness than Degas. Caillebotte was educated as an engineer, so he would presumably have been in sympathy with the aesthetic of modernity and infrastructure renovation. He inherited his father’s textile fortune in 1874, but his desire to be an artist led him to train with the academic Realist painter Léon Bonnat, a background not so far from that of Degas, who had trained under an even more conservative academic artist.40 Caillebotte’s sensitivity to optical effects of light and space places him entirely within the realm of Impressionism, yet his studio practice was most in sympathy with Degas’s method of careful preparation and execution indoors. Both believed that the basis of artistic creativity should be intellectual reflection rather than naive spontaneity, of which Degas accused the Impressionists.

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In Caillebotte’s case, there is significant evidence that he used photographs to lay out his compositions. Both of his major paintings mentioned so far, Pont de l’Europe and Paris Street: Rainy

Weather, must have been conceived with the aid either of photography or of an optical device such as the camera lucida. A study for the former shows a rectangle superimposed on a sketch that extends beyond it, in the manner of a movable frame.41 Peter Galassi has determined that several of Caillebotte’s preparatory drawings on tracing paper correspond to photographic plate sizes used by his brother Martial, an amateur photographer, or to other common photographic formats.42 What is important here, however, is not so much the extent of Caillebotte’s use of photography but his acceptance and selfconscious display of photographic vision as a basis for his art. Indeed, for the most part, the aspects of visual experience celebrated in Caillebotte’s paintings are identifiably photographic. That is, his paintings systematically embody and legitimize a way of seeing made possible through technology; hence, his vision of the world is willfully stamped and proffered as modern. Caillebotte’s and Degas’s alignment with Impressionism went deeper than sensitivity to effects of light or the use of color. They shared a commitment to naturalist modernity, as evidenced not only through choices of contemporary themes and places but through markers of inventiveness that fused modern technologies and individual creativity. As noted earlier, Caillebotte’s work is also filled with conspicuously novel viewpoints that declare their modernity through their location in the city’s new neighborhoods. The congruence between the placement of his scenes and their photographic character is indeed so complete that one might speculate that Haussmann’s city planning at some level itself embodies the vision of the city propagated by photography. Vistas, focal monuments, light and open spaces were constructed for the gaze and were fodder for the photographer, who was emerging as a ubiquitous Parisian type at precisely the time of Haussmann’s renovations. Although spread over more time than Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare series and less concentrated on a single building complex, Caillebotte’s urban views of 1878 to 1880 do loosely cohere as a series. They may also be compared to photographic albums that include diverse views under general headings. Examples such as Collard’s Album of Paris Bridges Constructed or Reconstructed since

1852 (1867, forty plates) and Baldus’s Southern Network of the P.L.M. Rail Company (1869, sixty-nine plates) clearly set a precedent for Guillaumin and Monet’s early series too. But with his daring viewpoints and strange compositional novelties, Caillebotte was moving away from Monet’s still-naturalistic aims and toward Degas’s creation of an idiosyncratic aesthetic that calls as much attention to its author’s devices as to its subjects. This is true on the psychological level too, for at the same time as Caillebotte’s views express dominance and power over both the city and the medium of painting, a few more examples suggest that their peculiarity also expresses its costs in alienation and solitude. In Rue Halévy, the leaded edging of the roof into which the attic window is set cuts intrusively across the left side of the composition. In Rooftops: Snow Effect, the view is disconnected from the street and nearly merges with the gray winter sky, with little relation to topography, unlike the easily identifiable sites of most Impressionist urban scenes. The picture becomes a compositional abstraction, like a still life. Such effects are even more pronounced in Caillebotte’s plunging studies of pedestrian islands and views through balcony ironwork. In this, they share the visual psychology of Degas’s both isolated and probing “opera glass” views of the ballet or his famous picture of Mademoiselle La

La at the Cirque Fernando (1879, L 522, National Gallery, London). For example, A Pedestrian Island,

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FIGURE 30. Gustave Caillebotte, A Pedestrian Island, Boulevard Haussmann, ca. 1880. Private collection. FIGURE 31. Hippolyte Jouvin, Place des Victoires, half of stereocard, n.d. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

Boulevard Haussmann (ca. 1880, Figure 30), portraying a boulevard that once existed immediately below the window of Man on a Balcony and directly behind the Opéra, shares with Rooftops: Snow Effect its cutting off and psychological remoteness from the larger context. Aaron Scharf compared A Pedes-

trian Island to a photograph by Hippolyte Jouvin of the Place des Victoires in Paris (Figure 31).43 Such an image might indeed have been Caillebotte’s compositional source, but there are fundamental differences. First, the Place des Victoires was an important historical monument, an example of seventeenth-century urbanism under Louis XIV, whose equestrian statue (a nineteenth-century bronze replacing the original destroyed during the revolution) occupies its center. Jouvin’s intention must have been to photograph something historically significant. Caillebotte’s pedestrian island is more ordinary and strictly utilitarian, having to do with traffic and public convenience, both of which are modern concepts. Second, Caillebotte’s far more plunging view emphasizes strangeness rather than the neutral naturalism of photography. An even more radical picture, Boulevard Seen from Above (1880, Figure 32), focuses on the geometry of single motifs apart from their surroundings but at angles and as if cut out in ways unimaginable without photography or portable optical glasses. In emphasizing its compositional originality more than its banal motif, it is more akin to still life and a true example of Modernism (see Chapter 8). By the same token, the strange studies made through the wrought-iron railings of upper-story balconies both simulate the voyeurism of photography and introduce a graphic abstraction that goes well beyond what was common in photographs of Caillebotte’s day—to say nothing of Caillebotte’s vigorous brushwork in these particular works.44 It has often been pointed out that Japanese prints were a popular and potent source for aesthetic innovation at the same time as photography. But, as mentioned earlier, views from the heights of buildings had been the stock in trade of photographers since Daguerre’s first experiments. Although undoubtedly encouraged by the bold, abstracting juxtapositions found in Japanese prints, Caillebotte’s views are first and foremost inventive variants on types vulgarized by urban photography, inconceivable without the movable camera viewfinder set up in apartment windows.

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As such, they exemplify Figuier’s argument that photography would encourage painters to focus on originality. Degas and Caillebotte did so by deploying photographic effects in ways that photographers, especially those interested in being accepted as artists, would never have done. Three final examples of bridges may stand as a conclusion for this chapter. Views of the PontNeuf by both Monet (ca. 1872, W 193, Dallas Museum of Art) and Renoir (The Pont-Neuf, 1872, Figure 33) celebrate modern Paris because they are located at its busy center, cleared out for both vehicular and pedestrian traffic by Haussmann. Both paintings represent not so much the bridge—in fact, the oldest in Paris rather than the most modern—as the street and its activity. The raised point of view from a second-story café window again suggests photography, though somewhat less than in Monet’s and Caillebotte’s vertical formats envisioned from upper floors. In any case, as we know, street scenes such as these were at the origins of photography. Compared to Monet’s sketchy and smaller painting of the Pont-Neuf, Renoir’s has more of the precision of the photographic—although it still is far from the sharpness for which photographs were reputed (unless the subject was moving). The painter looks from the Right Bank across to the Left; on the river with the tricolor flag to the immediate right are public baths. With the denser concentration of vehicles in the foreground on Monet’s street and the presence of a steamboat on the river, one senses Monet’s interest in traffic and movement. Renoir, by comparison, is more interested in the people, some of whom interact in groups that include children and lapdogs out to stretch their tiny legs. As in his Grands Boulevards, Renoir adapts the viewpoint and location of modernity to his still narrative and emotional concerns. Nowhere is the contrast between Renoir and painters such as Monet, Caillebotte, and Guillaumin so evident as in Renoir’s Pont des Arts (1867, Plate 7). Probably done at the same time as or just after Monet’s Garden of the Infanta, this painting shares several of Monet’s concerns. Like Monet,

FIGURE 32. Gustave Caillebotte, Boulevard

Seen from Above, 1880. Private collection.

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FIGURE 33. Auguste Renoir,

The Pont-Neuf, 1872. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Renoir places the viewer at the heart of renovated and artistic Paris. The viewer looks down the Left Bank of the Seine on the Quai Malaquais, recently cleared by Haussmann’s renovations, which created views toward major monuments such as the Institut de France, housed in the seventeenth-century Palais Mazarin with its elegant statues and cupola, to the right. On the opposite riverbank, the vast but dull curved roofs of the modern theater buildings offer a pointed contrast. The Pont-Neuf is partly hidden behind the Pont des Arts; the Ile de la Cité is visible only by the trees of the Vert Galant promontory and the flag atop the Palais de Justice. To the left is the tiny spire of the old Hôtel de Ville (destroyed by the Commune in 1871) with the church of Saint-Gervais behind it. The Pont des Arts (Bridge of the Arts), a cast-iron pedestrian bridge built from 1801 to 1803 under Napoleon I, linked the Louvre on the Right Bank of the Seine with the Left Bank at a spot across from the Académie des BeauxArts. Both landmarks are outside the picture’s field of vision, yet the well-informed viewer would have perfectly understood their relationship to the scene, indicated by the footbridge name. Echoing Monet’s device of placing the Louvre galleries at his back, Renoir overtly declared his plein air position against the absent framework of these hallowed institutions. In his foreground, Renoir used a strongly contrasting line of sunlight and shadow, another motif pioneered by Monet (as in the latter’s Women in the Garden, 1866, W 67, Musée d’Orsay, Paris). Renoir actually took the device a step further by suggesting the silhouette of a painter at his easel. By placing such motifs along his picture’s bottom edge, Renoir framed his composition within the signs of plein air practice. However, compared to Monet’s Garden of the Infanta, Renoir’s picture used anecdotal detail to lend a narrative interest. Fashionably dressed tourists line up to take the open air on excursion boats that cruise the Seine. They are contrasted to a less prosperous mother and daughter and idle boys to the left, who may be begging. A couple of puppies playfully sniffing at each other in

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the composition’s center suggest the freedom of the place.45 While declaring his commitment to painting outdoors and on the spot, Renoir produced a more traditional effect. This effect is supported by Renoir’s traditional, as opposed to modern and photographic, composition of space. As in Renoir’s Pont-Neuf, whose cottony clouds seem almost too perfect, the city of Paris in Pont des Arts is primarily a picturesque, almost stagelike and temporally static setting for tourist leisure rather than a quintessentially urban place of constant change. The painting’s organization echoes long-standing traditions of classicizing or nostalgic landscapes, such as Vermeer’s View of Delft. By comparison to Monet’s compressed, windowlike composition made from the Louvre colonnade, Renoir adopted a balanced horizontal structure reminiscent of Corot’s evocative scenes of bridges over the River Tiber in Rome (Corot, Castel Sant’Angelo, ca. 1826, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts). The comparison to Monet’s position at the Louvre is the more telling when one considers what Renoir’s location must have been. The only possible explanation for his position overlooking the lower embankment is that he was at the Left Bank end of the Pont du Carrousel, built of three cast-iron spans from 1832–34, some 250 meters (about 315 yards) from the Pont des Arts. A photograph of about 1865 by Edouard Baldus (Figure 34), taken from the Right Bank, shows the western part of the Grande Galerie of the Louvre, designed by Hector Lefuel, under construction. Renoir studiously avoided showing the renovations; they were not finished until 1869. By contrast, Guillaumin’s paintings of modern Paris bridges parallel the Baldus photograph, focusing often on continuing urban renewal projects. This particular photograph shows the relative distance between the Pont du Carrousel, in its foreground, and the Pont des Arts. Although it does not show where the Pont du Carrousel meets the Left Bank, it does capture the boat docks floating at the embankment. At the four corners of the Pont du Carrousel were monumental female allegories by the sculptor Petitot, installed in 1847 and restored in 1862.46 Renoir would have been sitting at the foot of the statue of the City of Paris. Baldus’s photograph shows many figures on the Pont du Carrousel looking toward the Pont des Arts. Renoir’s

FIGURE 34. Edouard Baldus, The Grande Galerie of the Louvre under Construction, photograph, ca. 1865. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

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painting truncates the distance by about two-thirds to make the Pont des Arts appear much closer; his shadows actually overlap a rope mooring a boat to the shore, right near the tourist embarkation. But this foreshortening of space, rather than being photographic, reduces the contrast between foreground and middle ground, making the two appear more continuous with one another than abruptly juxtaposed. A painting from early in Van Gogh’s stay in Paris confirms Renoir’s device (The Pont du Car-

rousel and the Louvre, 1885, F 221, private collection, Los Angeles). Although Van Gogh was looking toward the Pont du Carrousel with the Pont des Arts at his back, his representation of the space between them still appears much wider, given that we cannot see where the span of the Pont du Carrousel meets the embankment. Renoir, combining his shadows with a sense of deep recession, produced a spatial transformation that was decidedly nonphotographic. Monet, on the other hand, if one 54

compares his painting to the photograph by Soulier, may have lowered the trees along the Quai du Louvre embankment in Garden of the Infanta to better reveal the Left Bank skyline. But by contrast to Renoir, he thus actually enhanced the flattening effect found in much panoramic photography. Just as photographic effects can impart a refreshing modern look to the traditional, so more conventional compositional tactics can impart a reassuringly traditional look to the modern. The relationship between Impressionism and photography is therefore as complex and varied as individual artists. Its importance is that it was present and noticeable to many viewers of Impressionist art and was an undeniable marker of modernity, however controversial. Undoubtedly, it strengthened negative predispositions toward Impressionism for the way it suggested mechanical reproduction and lack of imagination. But for those who tried to make the art of painting more responsive to modernity, as well as more open democratically, the technology used to document the construction of modern France and to make such imagery accessible to the masses provided a crucial progressive stimulus. On the one hand, its panoramas and close-ups offered new compositional possibilities that could enhance Impressionism’s association with naturalist accuracy and reinforce its ties to progressive technological modernity. On the other hand, it undoubtedly encouraged artists toward more personal forms of expression, as Louis Figuier had predicted. Degas and Caillebotte even used photographic effects to create highly personal compositions that were understood as such rather than as neutrally mechanical. Foregrounding photographic effects produced links both to naturalism and to subjective creativity, intensifying both of these principal features of Impressionism—Zola’s “corner of nature seen through a temperament”—to the point of making Impressionist pictures performances of modernity as well as representations of it. Baudelaire’s relationship to photography illuminates the dualistic and paradoxical relationship between Impressionism and photography, for that relationship was more complex and subtle than he admitted. Readers of Baudelaire’s essays and poems recognize both his anguish over the inevitability of change and his obstinate resistance to it. Both the “Salon of 1846” and “The Painter of Modern Life” reveal the poet’s grudging respect for the bourgeoisie’s achievements as well as his ambivalence over whether to challenge or accommodate them. Walter Benjamin attributed Baudelaire’s attitudes to the powerful shock of modernity. The poet mourned the loss of values engendered by the rapid rise of bourgeois society. He felt that its attitudes and aesthetics compromised the creativity and imagination he so admired.47 Certainly an underlying element of his anxiety and alienation was his own financial condition, for which he blamed bourgeois society, embodied by the stepfather who was the trustee of the poet’s late father’s bequest. Baudelaire’s penury forced him to labor on reviews and criticism

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rather than on extended projects that more fully exemplified his artistic ideals. In both his personal and his professional life, he was forced to depend on people he held in contempt. In “The Painter of Modern Life,” Baudelaire wistfully identified with the dandy, whom he claimed heroically resisted the rising tide of democracy and the triviality of everyday life. Yet in dedicating the introduction for his earlier “Salon of 1846” “To the Bourgeois,” he had recognized, however wryly, the ascendancy of a social class based on productivity—its main characteristic as described by Baudelaire himself. While fixated on the disappearance of a cultured and literary form of leisure and creative imagination, Baudelaire was thus aware of the economic conditions underlying its evolution. Though with profound irony, he dreamed of a utopian role for art within this new world. Another word for change as the defining characteristic of modernity is innovation, the driving force of change. The shocks of modernity experienced by Baudelaire were symptoms of the chain reaction unleashed by the French industrial revolution based on technological development and the creation of national infrastructures. Photography was part of this development, since its practice responded to an increasing demand for naturalist veracity in an inexpensive product manufactured by repeatable mechanical means. Baudelaire was faced with the situation described by Benjamin’s famous essay on mechanical reproduction: visual representation was losing the uniqueness essential to its “aura,” so the authenticity and authority associated with the individual artist were in decline.48 Visual culture was becoming impersonal: the artist was becoming a fabricator, to use Zola’s word, rather than a creator, whereas Baudelaire wanted the writer to be a poet rather than a journalist and wanted the artist to be an imaginative painter rather than a photographer.49 The photographer, like the journalist wage earner Baudelaire knew so well from his own experience, was both subject to and produced by those very forces that lay at the heart of Baudelaire’s unease. The poet’s abhorrence of photography thus had a personal edge: his discomfort lay in a deep-seated understanding of and resistance to those conditions that eroded his own self-esteem. He was unwilling to accept that the invention of photography also embodied knowledge and ingenuity that might be interpreted as expressions of human creative imagination and that enhanced Impressionism’s claims to visual authority. He did not live long enough to see that painting stamped with photography’s visual effects might say as much about an artist’s instrumentality as it did about the world he chose to depict. Similarly, those who attacked Impressionism for its parallel with photography saw the painters as journeymen who “plant their easels in the same way that photographers brace their tripods,” according to Henri Polday’s critique of the 1874 exhibition.50 To integrate both the material practice of on-the-spot image taking and documentary literalism into painting was more than simply a denial of past traditions; it was a challenge to the underlying values associated with artistic authenticity and “aura.” Yet it can also be seen as a celebration of innovation and productivity, the driving forces of modernity, in which the Impressionist participated by becoming an active producer of novel forms marked by signs of technological modernity. No form of visual representation bore the indexical imprint of its moment in time and place more than photography. The quality that we now celebrate in Impressionist paintings as “the moment” was yet another reminder to its critics of the pervasiveness of that much-feared process of reproduction spawned by modern technology. Such visual signs of modern technology signaled the advent of an entirely new regime, not just of vision, but of bourgeois society as a whole.

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3 INDUSTRIAL WATERWAYS PORTS, RIVERS, AND CANALS

Representations of waterways were an especially important theme in Impressionism from its very beginning.1 Of course, since bodies of water appear in landscape throughout the ages, they may seem to be a more traditional topos than the modern cityscape. In Impressionism of the 1870s, however, they appear frequently as sites of urban and industrial activity and transportation, as well as sites of pleasure. Even beaches like Trouville and sailing places like Argenteuil included some industrial development. The Normandy coast and Paris with its suburbs—two regions that can be said to have given birth to Impressionism—are defined by their relationship to water: from the river Seine, which winds northwestward, to the port of Le Havre, where the Seine empties into the English Channel, which the French less chauvinistically call La Manche. Indeed, the shipping lanes off the Normandy coast, visible in Claude Monet’s early masterpiece Terrace at Sainte-Adresse (1866, Figure 35), led to Le Havre as well as onward up the Seine to the port of Rouen, still important at the time. Farther inland were Port-Marly and the river lock at Bougival, then finally Paris itself. The Seine, as it flows past the suburbs of Paris identified with Impressionism—places like Argenteuil, Asnières, Bougival, Chatou, Croissy, Gennevilliers, Louveciennes, and Marly—links them to one another and to Paris; these locations served as bathing places, boating basins, washing stations, or barge unloading zones.2 But a number of other locations along the Seine appear in Impressionist paintings, too, especially in the 1870s: Arcueil, Boulogne-Billancourt, Clichy, Grenelle, Issyles-Moulineaux, Villeneuve-la-Garenne, and even Bercy, Charenton, Ivry, and Nogent to the east. They are less celebrated, no doubt because of their more industrial and working-class connotations, but at the moment the Impressionists were defining their art a number of the artists painted frequently at these locations too. The reasons for their interest in sites that rarely attracted tourists or swimmers lay in their concept of modernity and its impact on the landscape. They represented ports, rivers, and canals not only as settings for recreation but also as important arteries of commerce. When one includes Le Havre and Paris among the sites of water scenes in the 1870s, leisure seems almost secondary.

SEAPORTS AND LE HAVRE Claude Monet’s seascapes of the 1860s most often represented boats on the open sea or at the small and still picturesque fishing harbor of Honfleur. By contrast, his port scenes of 1871 to 1874 are located within the modern breakwaters of Le Havre or along the rivers in industrial London and Rouen. They show crowds of boats docked, starting out, maneuvering, or under repair. Two exceptional pictures of 1866 presage this later concentration. The first is The Port of Honfleur (1866, presumed destroyed but

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FIGURE 35. Claude Monet, Terrace at Sainte-Adresse, 1866. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

known from the Durand-Ruel Archives), in which Monet emphasized the fishing vessels arriving in port with their catch. Fishmongers gather on the pier to the right. Off to the left, in the middle ground, the steam ferry transporting visitors and commuters to and fro along the coast from Le Havre to Trouville has glided to its stop.3 Honfleur–Le Havre was the first steam route in France, dating from the trials of the Bostonian Edward Church’s Triton in 1819.4 The second picture of 1866 is the famous Terrace

at Sainte-Adresse, just mentioned, with the harbor traffic at Le Havre visible in the distance, seen from the elevated position of the second-floor window of Monet’s aunt’s villa on the Sainte-Adresse cliffs. The painting includes at least four steamers, one ship with an external paddle wheel, several frigates or clipper ships, and many pleasure sailboats at their moorings near the suburban shore. Hence, the great port city of Le Havre (literally The Haven) was a significant presence on the coast even when unseen. Although these two paintings show a mixture of modern and timeless labors and pleasures, the first is clearly closer in style to the work of Monet’s mentor, Johann Barthold Jongkind, who often included evidence of modernity in his plein air works, but in ways that deliberately evoked the traditions of Dutch sea painting (Jongkind, Entrée de Port, Honfleur, 1866, Musée du Louvre).5 It is also closer to Manet, with whom Monet was sometimes confused because of the similarity of his name, and whose many sea and port pictures during the 1860s and 1870s sometimes show the distinct imprint of mod-

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ern commerce and industry.6 In the Terrace at Sainte-Adresse, Monet’s representation of a decidedly modern scene emerges fully, as does as his debt to the explicitly modern artistic vocabulary signaled by the bold colors and powerful flattening geometry of Manet and Japanese prints. Unlike Monet’s pictures of fishing boats at sea, or on shore at Honfleur and Fécamp, the ten paintings he did at Le Havre from 1872 to 1874 have a manifestly urban setting, indicated by the concentration of boats, including those at moorings, or the presence of city buildings in the foreground or background. The Le Havre group followed a number of paintings of bustling ports, especially those of Rouen and London, the latter where Monet spent several months during the Franco-Prussian War. Only five paintings from the London sojourn are known. When he set up his easel outdoors in London, Monet portrayed the city’s green spaces, Hyde Park and Green Park, each in one painting, and the river Thames in the three others. Two of the three Thames pictures show the busy port of London. They are the predecessors of the Le Havre series, more than the pictures he made at Zaandam, Holland (near Amsterdam), or at Rouen in 1871–72, in which the industrial element was far less evident. Britain had a head start over France in the industrial revolution, and early-nineteenth-century London was renowned as a city where modernization could be experienced. On a visit there in the early 1820s the Romantic painter Théodore Géricault took an interest in working-class poverty. The Alsatian graphic artist Gustave Doré, in London at about the same time as Monet, opened his highly original book London: A Pilgrimage (1872) by celebrating London as the world’s greatest port.7 Whether any of the Impressionists were inspired by this large album, filled with imagery of the modern city, such as commercial traffic on major streets and industrial scenes, it demonstrated the pictorial power of modern urban landscapes. Vincent Van Gogh, a later visitor to London, took Doré’s imagery quite seriously.8 In addition, James McNeill Whistler’s series of etchings of the Thames were certainly known. In one of Monet’s London harbor pictures, The Port of London, Low Tide (1871, Figure 36), the foreground displays stages in the unloading of large bales of white cotton. Imported primarily from Egypt, cotton was the raw material for the booming British textile industry. One- or two-man rowboats transport the boxy packages to shore, where small cranes lift them to the dock. On the right, factories spew smoke, which blends into the famously gray atmosphere. In the middle ground, the London Customs House and a large transport ship at its moorings fade into the heavy mist. In the background is London Bridge, with a small steam-driven tug just in front of it. Port of London, High Tide (1871, Figure 37) shows the same scene at higher water and under clearer conditions. The two masts of the boat tied to the dock rise straight upward rather than leaning to the left, as they did when the boat sat at low tide. The picture’s emptier foreground, with less shore and fewer workers, gives the impression of greater distance than its companion, even though the viewpoint is practically identical. That distance, combined with its greater clarity and the near-perfect verticality of the docked ship, makes the picture seem more formal and finished, hence perhaps somewhat less authentic as an expression of the workaday intensity of the port, but more presentable as an echo of Canaletto’s great paintings of the London Thames.9 As a pair, Monet’s paintings imply his understanding that a single state is necessarily transitory and cannot represent the whole of an experience; in them he experiments to achieve such different effects as well as to rival his historical predecessors. It is worth comparing these two paintings to Alfred Sisley’s London Harbor Scene (1874, Figure 38), presumably painted on Sisley’s trip to England with Faure three years later. Sisley’s view is more

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FIGURE 36. Claude Monet, The Port of London, Low Tide, 1871. Private collection. FIGURE 37. Claude Monet, The Port of London, High Tide, 1871. National Museum of Wales, Cardiff.

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panoramic than Monet’s, with a magnificent skyline dominated by Sir Christopher Wren’s St. Paul’s Cathedral on Ludgate Hill just north of the Thames. In fact, Sisley modified the topography, raising it along the lines of Monet’s Garden of the Infanta, to emphasize the city’s grandeur. Although, like Monet, Sisley shows the river as commercial, busy, and congested, he seems less interested in either the details of individual ships or the activities of cargo handling. Monet, raised in a seaport city, would have been more familiar with such activities and surely understood boat types and their rigging better than his landlocked contemporaries. Sisley, however, can claim to have given a better sense of the interdependence of the prosperous urban center and its port activities than Monet. A railroad bridge, ostensibly to Charing Cross Station, although Sisley has placed it too far downstream, is the main horizontal axis of his composition and reiterates London’s centrality as a transportation hub. Finally, Sisley’s steam-driven vessels, with their billowing smoke, far outnumber other types; Monet focused primarily on more traditional sailing ships in his pictures. Could it be that in just the few years that separate these pictures, the number of steam vessels had so much increased? In any case, Sisley, although representing the harbor from the broader, more touristic point of view, seems to have included the industrial interests manifested in the years between 1871 and 1874 by Monet and also, as we shall see, by Pissarro, Cézanne, and Guillaumin. One of Monet’s largest and most ambitious paintings prior to his departure for London had been located at Le Havre, but it showed the wind and wave-battered jetty (Jetty at Le Havre, 1867–68; W 109, private collection) rather than the activity of a busy commercial harbor. Monet had submitted the picture to the Salon of 1868, but the jury refused it. Returning from England, after a side trip to Holland, Monet settled in the Parisian suburb of Argenteuil-sur-Seine, a place renowned for its sailing basin and regattas but only nine kilometers by railroad from Paris’s Saint-Lazare Station. Shortly after settling in Argenteuil, Monet traveled to Rouen, where he participated in a municipal art exhibition. He also engaged in an intense bout of work that resulted in eleven paintings, eight of which show Rouen’s harbor along the Seine. There Monet found imagery closer to that of the port of London than he had found at Zaandam or at the pleasure port of Argenteuil. Rouen was a railroad and shipping crossroads—the traditional capital of Monet’s native Normandy and the heart of its early commercial development. Since the construc-

FIGURE 38. Alfred Sisley, London Harbor

Scene, 1874. National Gallery, London.

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tion of the railroad link to Le Havre, however, Rouen’s port traffic had fallen off, and, if Monet’s images give an accurate record, few steam-driven vessels were present even though by the 1870s there were nearly as many steam-powered as wind-sail ships at major ports like Le Havre.10 That Monet would have ignored or avoided representing them is unlikely, given the evidence of steam power in other works he painted during the same period (see Chapter 4). So Rouen could not help him pursue the interests he had developed in London and earlier in Le Havre, and the painter returned to his hometown of Le Havre as many as three times to paint the harbor. The dated paintings he did there range from 1872 to 1874.11 The Paris railroad had reached its terminus at Le Havre in 1847.12 In the 1850s and 1860s Le Havre’s expansion was ensured by the demolition of restrictive city walls and the construction of a large military barracks, which bolstered the local economy. Its population in 1875 approached seventy-five 62

thousand.13 In 1860 the port registered some 460 companies whose destinations lay all over the globe. In 1866, 5,088 vessels carrying 1,654,650 tons entered or departed.14 According to some measures, Le Havre was France’s busiest center for foreign trade at the time, even busier than Marseille, although the latter has always been a larger city.15 Its basins covered sixty-four hectares (approximately 160 acres), and it comprised approximately ten kilometers (six miles) of embankment.16 As many as eleven thousand individuals—mostly Germans—left the European continent for the United States each year from Le Havre, making it the principal port for emigration there. During the American Civil War, Le Havre was an important client for Southern cotton; it became the principal French port for all transatlantic transport. Throughout the nineteenth century, it benefited from improvements, including during the 1860s the widening and deepening of the entrance and breakwater seen in two of Monet’s pictures.17 On June 11, 1864, the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique inaugurated the first of its ocean liners, the Washington.18 The company’s colors, red and black, are visible on one of the ships in the background of Terrace at Sainte-Adresse. They were notable enough to be reproduced in an illustration to C. F. Aubert’s Le Littoral de la France in 1885.19 The glory of Le Havre’s manufacturing sector was its production of such ocean vessels, including commercial frigates and steamers. During the Franco-Prussian War, Le Havre’s residents were proud and relieved that the enemy did not occupy the port, which may have been saved by the threat of an organized French land defense and the strength of the French navy.20 Nonetheless, the French, defeated at Sedan, surrendered soon enough, and immediately after the armistice Le Havre, unscathed, resumed full commercial activity. In 1875 Larousse’s Dictionnaire universelle du

XIXe siècle stated: “There is perhaps no other city in existence whose commercial position is as admirable as Le Havre’s. . . . Le Havre’s commerce today equals one-fifth to one-quarter that of all France.”21 Monet’s ten views of Le Havre serve as a catalog of vantage points, times of day (and night), and activities inside the port.22 Five of them concentrate primarily on boats in the harbor, with only sketchy suggestions of their surroundings; the five others clearly indicate the urban environment, with identifiable buildings in the background or a large portion of embankment in the foreground. The former include Impression: Sunrise and the extraordinary night scene Port of Le Havre, Night Effect (W 264, private collection). A third painting, Sunrise in the Port of Le Havre (W 262, Getty Museum, Los Angeles), is clearly related to Impression: Sunrise and has occasionally been confused with it. It shows a single fishing boat readying to sail; nearby is a skiff with three figures. Despite its title, the scene seems to capture a time later in the morning than its more famous cousin. The view, though cloudy, is brighter and less shrouded in a near-monochrome mist. A fourth painting, Study of Boats (W 259,

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Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), suggests a midday light and is related to the two morning pictures in its sketchy execution. It features a large commercial sailing vessel among several smaller boats. The location of these scenes is probably the wide outer harbor or Avant-Port (see Figure 39), given the lack of indication of buildings in the background. In a fifth picture, Ships under Repair (1873, Figure 40), the central ship, wedged between two others, is surrounded by men dressed in workers’ blue. It too shows little of the urban surroundings, but the close juxtaposition of ships, with the presence of workers, indicates the harbor setting. The location was probably the Bassin de la Barre, a central channel that extended the main harbor and was used for repairs.23 In the second category, characterized by identifiably urban backgrounds, a pair of compositions show the principal outer harbor from the same vantage point under differing conditions. In Fish-

ing Boats Leaving the Port of Le Havre, shown at the 1874 exhibition, the late afternoon sky is partly cloudy following a rain shower as fishing vessels head west, out of the harbor. In View of the Outer Har-

bor at Le Havre (1874, W 297, Philadelphia Museum of Art), the same view is considerably brighter, with shadows cast by the afternoon sun. A small boat sails into the harbor, while a twin paddle-wheel steamer on the right heads out, flying the French flag. Monet painted both views from near the outermost point

FIGURE 39. Auguste Thiollet, map of Le Havre, 1866, engraved by F. Lefèvre. From Adolphe Joanne, Normandie, avec 7 cartes et 4 plans, v. 6 of Collection Itinéraire générale de France (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1866).

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FIGURE 40. Claude Monet, Ships under Repair, 1873.

National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.

of the harbor, on the Jetée du Nord, with the lighthouse at his back. Photographers appreciated this vantage point as well.24 In the middle distance, across the water at the right, is a small utility building near the Jetée du Sud. In the right center foreground is the top of a stairway that leads down to the water. At least two steamers are docked in the distance. In Fishing Boats Leaving the Port of Le Havre, smoke coming from the same general area is partially obscured by the sails of a two-mast boat. A third painting, The Grand Quai at Le Havre (1874, Plate 8), places the viewer farther up the embankment, after it angles right from the extreme left shown in the first and second compositions. The signage identifies the offices of the Le Havre–Caen line. In the foreground, stacks of cotton bales are piled up in front of the offices, and the many workers locate the viewer nearer to the heart of the industrial port than the two previous views. At the upper center of the composition is a huge clipper ship. The harbor passageway is considerably narrower here and more congested than in the Getty Museum and Philadelphia Museum of Art pictures. A fourth painting shows the Le Havre Museum (building destroyed during World War II) in the background, with a great traffic of fishing boats in the water in front of it, one of which has its sails partly lowered and hence is moving up to anchor (The Museum

at Le Havre, W 261, National Gallery, London). The museum faced the outer harbor. One wonders if Monet meant his painting’s plein air view to contrast with that of the pictures presumably in the museum’s collection at the time, much as he seems to have deliberately evoked a contrast between his pictures of 1867 made from the Louvre and the pictures inside it. He would have had to paint this view from the opposite side of the entrance to the harbor, close to the building visible in the Los Angeles picture near the Jetée du Sud. The fifth picture, Bassin du Commerce (W 294, Musée d’Art Moderne, Liège), shows two large cargo ships tied up to the pier, one of them a three-mast vessel capable of

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transatlantic travel. The vast Bassin du Commerce was the main interior basin in the heart of the city. According to Aubert, it could handle as many as two hundred ships at a time.25 These ten paintings tell a story of the various round-the-clock activities at France’s busiest international port, which made a major contribution to the nation’s economic viability, especially in the postwar period. It was in the periphery of such trade that the Monet family earned its living, so there may be a biographical element in Monet’s identification with this activity that parallels—yet contrasts in its modernity—to Gustave Courbet’s many representations of life in his hometown of Ornans. In their deliberate variety, they constitute an industrial portrait, anticipating the group of eleven paintings of the Gare Saint-Lazare that Monet produced in 1877. These two groups—Le Havre and Saint-Lazare Station—come respectively near the beginning and toward the end of Monet’s numerous representations of industrial and commercial activity, as well as at the origin and terminus of the all-important rail line itself. As such they both frame and are at the heart of the Impressionism of the 1870s, chronologically, geographically, and thematically. In relation to Impression: Sunrise, the art historian Paul Tucker has called attention to the spirit of national revival and patriotism following the French defeat and the loss of its eastern provinces to the Prussians.26 The other paintings of Le Havre exemplify this relationship even better. If parts of France lay in ruins following the war and if Paris lay devastated by the civil conflict surrounding the Commune (see Chapter 7), at least the arts could show that the French spirit was unbroken. Tucker cites several articles devoted to the arts that made this point: according to a writer for L’Artiste, “The nation is wounded [but] it is by the miracles of art that she will console herself,” and the Gazette des beaux-arts stated that it was a “common duty to revive France’s fortune,” to which end the magazine would “devote more attention to . . . the role of art . . . in the nation’s economy, politics, and education.”27 In L’Avenir national, Paul Alexis spoke of the need to “inject new blood into the anemic old world.” Monet’s Le Havre series proposes precisely that. His representations of London, Le Havre, Rouen, and Amsterdam echo on an international scale the eighteenth-century marine painter Joseph Vernet’s series of paintings of the ports of France.28 Tucker has emphasized Monet’s introduction of the novel beauties of smoke mixing with cloud and reflections off the water. I would add that Monet conveyed such beauties by combining the directness and specificity of documentary description, emulating photography, with the constructive and animating process of the artist’s broad handwork. Already in 1866 Emile Zola admired the “energy and truth” of Monet’s work.29 In 1868 Zola’s encouraging words already seem to understand and prophesy Monet’s paintings of a few years later. He wrote: In [Monet] we have a painter of marine landscapes of the first order. But he conceives the genre in his own way, and there again I find his profound love for the realities of the present. One always notices the end of a breakwater or the corner of a pier, something that indicates the time and place. He seems to have a weakness for steam boats. . . . What strikes me . . . is the frankness, even the roughness of his touch. The water is acrid, the horizon is grimly distant; . . . we hear the muffled, gasping voice of the steam, which fills the air with its nauseating smoke. I have seen these raw tones, I have inhaled these salt smells.30 Zola’s words uncannily anticipate those of Georges Rivière’s appreciation of Monet’s SaintLazare series (see Chapter 4), which Zola also admired. The painting of which Zola primarily wrote

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was Boats Leaving the Harbor of Le Havre, which Monet exhibited at the Salon of 1868 but later destroyed. Perhaps that painting should be considered the earliest of Monet’s Le Havre series, and thus the rest of the series follows on Zola’s encouragement. In any case, exuberant and seemingly chaotic, like the harbor life that this first series traces, Monet’s dynamic paint handling intuits rhythms and effects that envelop the body and bombard the senses. In earlier paintings of the sea, Monet’s brushwork was both describing and imitating the constant movement of water. In the Le Havre series, he expands his concept to an overriding sense of liveliness, atmosphere, and performative effects. The commercial energies of his ports, and by extension of France’s economic potential, are enacted through the vibrant movement and proactive form building of the artist’s personal artistic drives and force. His willingness to display such personal characteristics—his pride in them—is legitimated because they 66

fit so well with the productive environment surrounding him and the ideologies that support it.

PORTS OF PARIS The navigable rivers of France offered a natural transportation network, rationalized by the building of canals and rivaling the system of national highways begun under Napoleon. Until the advent of the railroad, commercial traffic on these inland waterways grew tremendously. From today’s perspective, transportation by boat seems traditional, even archaic, compared with the railroad (to say nothing of air travel). Inland barges now are vehicles for romantic summer cruises along ancient riverbanks and canals rather than a significant way to deliver goods. Only rising oil prices will resuscitate long-delayed projects such as a new Rhine-Rhône Canal. During the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, however, the advent of steam power fueled the expansion of interior maritime traffic; beginning in the 1830s, this expansion was also driven by improvements in river navigability and the construction of canals financed by the state. Even in the 1870s water transport was considered modern, a full participant in the French economy. Table 1, based on a contemporary source, and Table 2, based on a modern source, show these developments. The former shows the extent of infrastructure development. The latter is limited to transport and shows kilometer tonnage (number of tons multiplied by kilometers, in millions), giving an idea of the relationship of the three principal modes of transport and their growth during the nineteenth century.31 Excepting the section of the Seine from the Channel to the inland port of Rouen, which could receive oceangoing vessels, commercial traffic on the rivers was dominated by barges: the larger ones either horse drawn or towed by steam tugs; the smaller ones, called chalands, powered by sail as well as steam. The word péniche is used generically to designate barges, but when distinguished from cha-

land, it refers to the larger vessels, which were often towed rather than self-powered. The variety of boats is suggested by a list of other types, most of which have no direct translation into English: bar-

ques, gabarits, cizelandes, penelles, savoyardes, barquettes.32 In addition to the Seine and its tributaries near Paris, the Marne and the Oise, the Moselle in the east and the Rhône to the south were major riverways. But navigability and location at the center of Paris made the Seine not only the most important inland waterway but the most accessible to artists, who pursued their careers in Paris, after all, and were reviewed there even if they resided and painted elsewhere. The master painter of Seine river life was Alfred Sisley, who worked from its banks or along canals of the Seine and its tributaries almost his entire career. If Monet’s work at Argenteuil is reputed to render

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TABLE 1

Infrastructure Development in France, 1830–76 Type of Infrastructure

1830

1876

Canals

1,812 km

4,421 km

Railroads

22 km

22,673 km

Paris sewers

38 km

600 km

Public lighting

20,712 candles

201,412 candles

Maritime works

Negligible

3,214 diverse works

Paris water supply

600 cubic meters

291,000 cubic meters 67

TABLE 2

Growth of Three Modes of Transport in France, as Shown by Kilometer Tonnage (in Millions) of Goods Transported, 1835–82 Mode of Transport

1835

1851

1882

Roads

1,860

2,400 (+29%)

2,800 (+17%)

Waterways

900

1,700 (+88%)

2,400 (+41%)

Railroads

n.a.

462

10,700 (+2,216%)

the recreational pleasures of the river, Sisley’s pictures of the Seine reflect the less immediately seductive but nonetheless aesthetically rich activities of its everyday work life. Sisley must be considered a predecessor and originator of urban water views, for among his best and earliest visions of commercial waterways are pictures of the quintessentially urban Canal Saint-Martin, which bisected Paris’s Right Bank. In his Canal Saint-Martin (1870, Figure 41), the foreground is empty; both barges and figures are in the middle distance and off to the sides. The canal is primarily a large geometrically regular opening that ends abruptly (in the picture) at a lock at the center of the composition. Its swath is similar to that of Sisley’s Route de la Machine, Louveciennes (Figure 10), with similar implications of capacity and mobility. This is not the Paris of the Grands Boulevards, crowded with flâneurs and shoppers, but a workingclass neighborhood cut through by a modern functional artery. In Barges on the Canal Saint-Martin (1870, Figure 42), Sisley presents an unusual close-up view of three smaller barges (chalands) tied together at a mooring. On the pathway at the left, two figures, probably owners or supervisors, converse while workers unload on the ramp behind them. In another work titled Canal Saint-Martin (1872, D 35, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, Moreau-Nélaton Collection), Sisley focuses on the locks and bridges along the canal’s route. Construction of the Canal Saint-Martin was part of a long-standing plan to augment the water supply and facilitate transport deep into the heart of Paris.33 The project was begun under Napoleon I. The Ourq, a small tributary of the Marne northeast of Paris, was diverted by a canal built from 1802 to 1808; its waters were brought to the Bassin de la Villette in northern Paris. In 1821 the Canal SaintDenis linked the Villette Basin to the wide loop of the Seine just beyond Paris to the north. The Canal

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FIGURE 41. Alfred Sisley, Canal Saint-Martin, 1870. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. FIGURE 42. Alfred Sisley, Barges on the Canal Saint-Martin, 1870. Oskar Reinhardt Foundation, Winterthur.

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Saint-Martin, built subsequently under the direction of the engineer Devilliers, was the last section of this system; it extended four and a half kilometers from the Bassin de la Villette to the Port de l’Arsenal, next to the Place de la Bastille, bringing its waters to the Seine just behind the Ile Saint-Louis. Opened in 1825, it shortened the route to central Paris by twelve kilometers. The Canal Saint-Martin had nine locks to accommodate its twenty-five-meter drop; it was crossed by five stone bridges, two pedestrian overpasses, and seven turntable bridges. Navigation on the Seine in the heart of Paris had been rendered difficult by many obstacles, including bridges, washhouses, and bathhouses. The shortcut via Saint Denis and the Canal Saint-Martin seemed a solution that could compete with rising rail traffic, though eventually the twenty-one stops necessary to go its full length made the economics of the connection untenable.34 During the 1860s the canal underwent extensive modifications and improvements. For example, from 1859 to 1861 a vault was built over it and the water level was lowered to facilitate communication across its banks at the level of the Boulevard Voltaire. Like many of Baron Haussmann’s urban projects, this cover was meant as much to make insurgent use of the canal as a barrier impossible as to facilitate commercial circulation over it and provide new green space between the dual north-south roadway of the Boulevard Richard Lenoir, which covered it.35 Sisley therefore painted the results of major investment and recent modernization. The Canal Saint-Martin and its renovations were only the most local examples of a vast effort to improve the system of canals and riverways in France during the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century. In 1851 France could count 4,170 kilometers of canals, as compared to only 1,200 in 1812. An investment of over eight hundred million francs explains this expansion and the concomitant increase in merchandise transported by water, as indicated in Table 2. Although construction slowed in the 1840s and 1850s because it was believed that railroads made water transportation obsolete, in 1860 Napoleon III declared that the excessive cost of transport was holding back the French economy. He therefore began reinvesting in waterways to create price competition for the large rail companies.36 In 1869 waterways carried 2.5 million tons of cargo, railroads 3.5 million.37 Later, under the Third Republic, investment in canals and rivers increased by some 23.6 percent following JeanBaptiste Krantz’s report of 1874 to the Assemblée Nationale on navigable waterways. Krantz was an engineer who believed that railroads had reached their capacity.38 As late as 1878 the minister of public works, Charles de Freycinet, launched a new effort to widen and standardize canals as well as construct new ones, but it benefited primarily industrial regions in the provinces. These projects show that despite the advent of railroads, which had spectacularly increased their share of commercial transport, waterways were still considered viable, even indispensable. They continued to benefit from regular investment and improvement. Indeed, the engineer Paul Poiré’s idea for a movable dam encouraged one of the ambitious plans for improving waterways, the concept of a Paris seaport (Paris port de mer). According to Louis Simonin, the Bassin de la Villette was “a veritable interior port,” whose 2.5 million tons of cargo in 1876 made it third after Marseille and Le Havre. Following the Franco-Prussian War, Paris was resupplied primarily via the Seine and its network, since many railway tracks and bridges had been destroyed. Simonin, a supporter of waterway competition with railways, reported that in a single day forty thousand tons of cargo passed through the Bougival lock. “What railroad depot could have accomplished that phenomenon?” he asked.39 In today’s world, images of French canals call forth memories of the past, revisited on holidays on lazy tourist barges and bicycles

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following now mostly defunct pathways. But though Sisley’s images may appear merely nostalgic to us today, they document an aspect of economic life that was highly visible and vital in his own time. The Seine as an industrial waterway within the city limits of Paris is recorded in a significant number of Impressionist paintings of the early 1870s.40 Armand Guillaumin was instrumental in introducing the theme to Impressionist painting. The cast-iron Gare d’Orléans (now the Gare d’Austerlitz), which handled the passenger traffic of the Compagnie d’Orléans, was opened in 1869 near the Quai d’Austerlitz on the Left Bank of the Seine in the southeastern part of the city. According to the guidebook of the recently built tourist destination the Grand Hôtel, “This neighborhood of Paris [between Orléans Station and the Gare de Lyon on the other side of the river] is none other than a vast warehousing district for wines, spirits, oils, and vinegars that arrive by the Seine and by train from Burgundy, Beaujolais, 70

Provence, Languedoc, etc. Nowhere can one see so many barrels, so many full cellars, so many boats loaded down with containers. Entire streets are lined with warehouses and liquid storage depots.”41 Vast quantities of wood were discharged farther up river on the Left Bank; next to that area were the cargo and merchandise sidings of the Orléans railroad. Until 1868, Guillaumin worked as a ticket clerk for the Orléans railroad company (Compagnie des Chemins de Fer d’Orléans), so he knew this area by heart. He also attended drawing classes at the Académie Suisse, where he met other future Impressionists in 1863, befriending Cézanne and Pissarro in particular. He subsequently took a job working three nights per week, for higher pay, with the Paris Department of Bridges and Roads, based at City Hall. This new position allowed him to paint during the daytime.42 From the mid- to late 1860s Guillaumin was painting barges on the Seine, as in Barges on the Seine (1865, G 2, Musée d’Orsay, Paris) and Barges (1868, pastel, G 8, private collection, Paris). He continued with numerous industrial views along the river in southeastern Paris (see Chapter 5) until going to Pontoise and Auvers in 1872 to work with Cézanne and Pissarro. In about 1871 Guillaumin painted the Place Valhubert, on the Seine, near the offices of the Orléans railway adjacent to the Jardin des Plantes (1871, SF 43, Musée d’Orsay, Paris). Guillaumin’s early masterpiece The Seine in Paris, Rainy Weather (1871, Plate 9) was done from the Right Bank of the Seine, across from Place Valhubert. Exhibited at the first Impressionist exhibition, this large painting would certainly have confirmed a visitor’s notion that Impressionism was committed to a modernity that included scenes of industry and labor. Traditionally thought to represent the view from the Quai de la Rapée on the Right Bank looking across to the Quai d’Austerlitz, The

Seine in Paris was actually painted closer to the center of Paris, slightly farther downriver, on the Quai Henri IV, near the Ile Saint-Louis, which is clearly visible in the middle distance to the right. The apse of Notre-Dame Cathedral, on the Ile de la Cité, is at the center of the background. Linking the Left Bank of the Seine to the Ile Saint-Louis is the pedestrian Passerelle de Constantine, which was replaced after its collapse by the vehicular Pont de Sully (1876).43 The pedestrian bridge, one of several in Paris at one time, was a relatively recent construction (1836–38), its walkway suspended from supports by iron cable. Its center span was 102 meters long. It was worthy of illustration in Adolphe Joanne’s widely circulated guide Paris illustré (1867).44 To its right in Guillaumin’s painting can be seen another walkway, the wooden Passerelle de Damiette, which linked the Ile Saint-Louis to the Right Bank and was replaced by the second span of the Pont de Sully in 1878, thus allowing river traffic to pass on the northern side of the Ile Saint-Louis. The Port de l’Arsenal would have been behind the painter, along with the first basin of the Canal Saint-Martin and, farther down to the left and out of sight, the Quai

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de la Rapée. At their moorings across the river are barges delivering wine, since the central wine market (Halle aux Vins) was nearby at Jussieu, where an important campus of the Paris University is now situated. Barrels lie in rows on the riverbank behind them. Two horse-drawn carts used for hauling barrels are visible on the opposite bank as well. An illustration from Guy Le Bris’s Constructions mé-

talliques, published several years later (and showing the brand-new Pont de Sully) clearly indicates the site and the system for moving barrels by carts (Figure 43). At the very center of Guillaumin’s composition are a steamboat and tug. In both this painting and Place Valhubert, figures along the riverbank enjoy the green space and watch the commercial activity. Unlike the diffident Sisley, who places a relative distance between himself and his figures, Guillaumin seems to share his figures’ immediate space. Those on the viewer’s side of the river, in contrast with those in Place Valhubert, are dressed exclusively in working-class attire. Four men, in groups of two, wear mariner’s garb and hats. A woman holding a child looks over the railing, perhaps awaiting her husband. Two men eye a second woman near them. This is not a place where crowds congregate or numerous bourgeois promenade. Although many boats are tied up near the railing, there is no indication that they are pleasure craft. The overcast sky and the title Rainy Weather suggest that Guillaumin was more interested in an ordinary, workaday reality than in the carefree pleasures of sunny times. During the 1870s Guillaumin made many other views of the busy riverbanks in this part of Paris. As we saw in Chapter 1, several show construction of embankments or the dredging necessary to make the river more navigable for heavier vessels. The Seine at Bercy (ca. 1874, Figure 44) depicts a steam dredge performing this activity, anchored just offshore. Workers in the foreground transfer the sand to carts for use as construction material or landfill. In another version of this scene, Travaux au

Pont National (ca. 1874, Figure 45), a woman fishes in the foreground (unless she is looking for scrap metal—see below); behind her is a horse-drawn cart into which sand is being loaded. A workman stands above an elevated bin behind the cart with a coarse screen used for sifting the sand. In the distance of both compositions is the Pont National. The view is from the Quai de Bercy on the other side of the Pont de Bercy, whose double-deck design at the time (the upper deck for trains) would be unmistakable if it had appeared in this picture.45 This industrial area was expanding rapidly, hence the efforts

FIGURE 43. Illustration from Guy Le Bris, Constructions métalliques (Paris, 1894), p. 50, fig. 3

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to improve the navigable shoreline. Areas of barren shore and open space in the paintings imply its potential. They also show Guillaumin’s use of bright, raw colors and choppy brushwork to suggest the powerful and unresolved forces shaping the landscape. Other than his views of the Canal Saint-Martin, Alfred Sisley rarely represented industrial activity on the Seine as close up or as exclusively as Guillaumin. In addition to his views of the Canal SaintMartin, however, he worked from sites along the other end of the Parisian Seine, where it exits the city and begins to wind through the western suburbs toward Normandy. Numerous views at Grenelle or at Billancourt, the latter just at the city limits, are in the same spirit as Guillaumin’s but focus less on construction of new embankments. The southwestern banks of the Seine were not as heavily industrialized as the eastern part, probably because the western side of Paris was historically less a working-class area and fewer 72

railroads were present. On the Left Bank, however, were a number of chemical plants and a branch of Cail and Co., which manufactured steam engines, among other machinery.46 An early painting by Sisley, The

Seine in Paris and the Pont de Grenelle (1870; D 15, private collection), and Sisley’s The Seine at Grenelle (ca. 1872, Plate 10) are located in this general area but farther upriver. The buildings in the distance to the right (but on the Left Bank in Parisian terms) in the latter painting are those erected in the Parc d’Exposition at the Champ de Mars, south of the Cail factories. Sisley was thus on the Right Bank looking northeast toward the Pont d’Iena. Cail and Co. is too far upriver on the Left Bank to be recognizable, but its smoke is probably part of the scene’s atmospheric elements. Only one tall chimney emerges slightly from the vapors right near the center of the composition. A small port, called the Port de Grenelle or the Port de Javel, and a bridge were built at Grenelle in 1825. Sisley’s painting predates the 1874–75 bridge reconstruction that confirmed the growth of this section of the city.47 According to Adolphe Joanne’s Paris guide, the Left Bank was more developed at this location, with a port for unloading stones, wood, coal, and all sorts of merchandise.48 On Sisley’s side the loading area is rudimentary, with a single steam-powered crane. Considerable river traffic moves in both directions, leaving white puffs of vapor behind. Although Sisley has framed the scene with the railing of the promontory in the foreground, its geometry is not enough to make the composition cohere. A general sense of emptiness and randomness prevails. Yet that very plainness, without an overriding or too willfully selected structural principle, endows the scene with naturalistic credibility and exemplifies what led critics to compare Impressionism to photography. It may be that to stay faithful to a setting requires a certain distance. Focusing close up on details removes them from explanatory contexts and transforms them into aesthetic objects, as in the extreme example of Caillebotte’s plunging views from above. The distance that so often deprives Sisley’s views of strong aesthetic focus and emotional interest reflects his commitment to a self-evident realism—if ultimately a less engaging one than Monet’s, for example. Indeed, if the eye is not immediately seized by bravado brushwork or bold structural elements, it can linger over gentler effects of subtle lighting from a gray sky reflected on rippled waters. The time it takes to discover and appreciate such elements serves realism too, for it more closely approximates the artist’s own real-time experience of the site. In 1877 Sisley returned to work slightly farther down the Seine, just beyond the city limits of Le Point du Jour, at Billancourt, near Boulogne (see Figure 46). The two communes had joined together as Boulogne-Billancourt in 1859. A number of scenes of barges moored or unloading signal the industrial future of this area, which is now known for the huge automobile factories recently abandoned by Renault and is destined to be converted to an arts space or college campus. An etching by

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FIGURE 44. Armand Guillaumin, The Seine at Bercy, ca. 1874. Kunsthalle, Hamburg. FIGURE 45. Armand Guillaumin, Travaux au Pont National, ca. 1874. Musée du Petit-Palais, Geneva.

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Guillaumin done at Le Point du Jour, Quai de Billancourt, looking up toward Grenelle (Le Point du Jour,

Quai de Billancourt, etching, ca. 1870, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris), shows many factories on the opposite bank. The name Point du Jour means, loosely, sunrise, and stems from the location’s reputation as a dueling ground at dawn. Here was where the two-story Viaduc d’Auteuil (see Figure 27), constructed for the Petite Ceinture circular beltway rail line over the Seine, had opened in 1867. Although the moorings at Billancourt were a continuation of the strip of development along the riverbank opposite Grenelle, Billancourt itself, as a port, supplied Boulogne’s large laundering industry, which served neighboring Paris. A painting at the Hermitage Museum, Barges at Billancourt (1877, Plate 11), has factories in its background. Its muted colors and grayish skies, into which the factories emit their black smoke, create a somber industrial environment, which at the time was dominated by chemical facto74

ries producing detergents, perfumes, pharmaceuticals, candles, siccatives, tar, and gas. In 1874 one Charles Fiori established a factory there to produce washing machines.49 A painting by Sisley known as Unloading Barges (ca. 1877, D 273, Courtauld Institute, London) was probably done in the same area, as were several others.50 Another view of about the same time that bears the same title (D 276, National Museum, Belgrade) perpetuates the dour atmosphere while bringing the barges much closer.51 By contrast, a third painting, Unloading Barges at Billancourt (1877, Figure

FIGURE 46. Alexandre Vuillemin, pictorial map of environs of Paris, 1874,

engraved by Bénard. New York Public Library, Map Division.

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47), is more brightly colored, with puffy clouds in a rich blue sky; the green vegetation punctuated by redtiled roofs creates an almost bucolic feeling. The atmospheric and outdoor effects in this last painting counterbalance the presence of a half-dozen or so workers, who quietly unload sand from their sail barge. Two years earlier, in Sand Piles along the Seine at Marly (1875, Figure 48), which bears a closer resemblance to Guillaumin’s work than Sisley’s other paintings, the painter observed the dredging of the Seine at the suburban port of Marly.52 In that painting Sisley, in a compositional strategy like that of Monet, used piles of sand in the foreground to create a bold compositional structure that holds the viewer’s interest and elides the specific laboring activities of the figures. For all we know, they could be fishing for their dinner.53 Guillaumin’s focus on industrial scenes found sympathy with his closest friends, Cézanne and Pissarro.54 From 1871 to 1872, Cézanne lived at 45 rue Jussieu, opposite the Halle aux Vins.55 His painting La Halle aux Vins (1871–72, Figure 49) probably shows the view from the window of his flat. (The painting was long thought to have been done from the Quai de Bercy, which is actually quite far upriver and on the opposite side from Jussieu.) In early 1872 and at times thereafter, Cézanne seems to have painted in Guillaumin’s studio, nearby on the Quai d’Anjou of the Ile Saint-Louis, a neighborhood closer to the haunts of the older Realist generation (the caricaturist Honoré Daumier once had a studio there) than to those of the younger Impressionists, but very convenient to Guillaumin’s nighttime job. There Cézanne painted the powerful Self-Portrait, probably in the same year (1872, Musée d’Orsay, Paris); it shows Guillaumin’s The Seine in Paris (see Plate 9) in its background. (The Guillaumin is reversed, as Cézanne would have seen it in the mirror he used for his self-portrait.) The picture is an important statement by Cézanne of both friendship and solidarity with his working-class colleague.56 Indeed, though Cézanne did not paint his own views of the working river, he made a copy (copy after Guillaumin, The Seine at Bercy, ca. 1876–78, Figure 50) of Guillaumin’s The Seine at Bercy (see Figure 44). It is of great interest because in it Cézanne was developing his methodical brushstroke based on patches of parallel, hatchmark-like strokes of identical or closely related colors. His touch appears heavier and more labored than Guillaumin’s. As he worked with Pissarro and Guillaumin beginning in the early 1870s, Cézanne seemed to be searching for a way of expressing his sense that his personal vision was related to the handwork of a productive process—that his imagery was “produced” rather than “copied” and that representation was an active and not mechanical process. Whereas both Guillaumin and Pissarro often chose scenes that included labor and productivity, Cézanne externalized the values associated with such activities by using this novel technique, rather than by frequently representing the activities themselves. Technical explorations had in fact been a central part of the collaboration between Cézanne, Guillaumin, and Pissarro.57 For example, they used the etching press at the home in Auvers-sur-Oise of the homeopathic physician Dr. Paul Gachet, who later helped Vincent Van Gogh. Cézanne’s rare etching Barges at Bercy (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris) is a copy, though incomplete (and reversed, as etchings are), after Guillaumin’s painting of 1871 (SF 11, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), which Gachet owned.58 Gachet seems to have encouraged modern subjects in art, for he did not hesitate to purchase works on industrial themes from his friends. Guillaumin’s several etchings of river life at places such as Charenton, Ivry, and Boulogne-Billancourt date from this period as well. Some early paintings by Paul Gauguin confirm the role of the group around Dr. Gachet—Pissarro, Cézanne, and Guillaumin—with whom Gauguin worked in the years before he left his banking job and decided to devote himself entirely to art. Gauguin did a group of pictures while living on the Rue de Chaillot

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FIGURE 47. Alfred Sisley, Unloading Barges at Billancourt, 1877. Ordrupgaard Collection, Copenhagen. FIGURE 48. Alfred Sisley, Sand Piles along the Seine at Marly, 1875. Art Institute of Chicago.

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in the prosperous neighborhood between the Place d’Iéna and the Avenue Marceau.59 For his riverscapes, however, he looked elsewhere. In The Seine, Pont d’Iéna (1875, DW 12, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), Gauguin gazed, not upriver toward the Pont de l’Alma and the fashionable sites beyond it, but down the right embankment toward coal and wood barges unloading, with the Pont d’Iéna and the still relatively open hillside of Passy in the background. Some studies and a signed picture of the Port de Grenelle show that he took this subject matter seriously (The Port de Grenelle with Cail and Co. Factories, 1875, Figure 51). The factories are those of Cail and Co., one of France’s leaders in steam-powered machines and locomotives, which we saw in the distance in the painting of The Seine at Grenelle by Sisley. Gauguin had crossed the river to the Left Bank, from which he had a direct view of the ensemble. The Pont de Grenelle is in the distance. The Seine, Pont d’Iéna’s cloudy sky and range of color, characterized by Richard Brettell as “resolutely antipicturesque,” suggest that Gauguin had seen Seine, Rainy Weather by Guillaumin at the first Impressionist exhibition.60 Other pictures look more like Sisley’s work, as does one of Gauguin’s largest pictures of this early group, Crane on the Banks of the Seine (1875, DW 14, private collection, United States), despite its Guillauminesque motif of the crane. One wonders if the same crane is shown in Port de Grenelle,

FIGURE 49. Paul Cézanne, La Halle aux Vins, 1871–72. Portland Art Museum, Oregon.

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FIGURE 50. Paul Cézanne, copy after Guillaumin, The Seine at Bercy, ca. 1876–78. Kunsthalle, Hamburg. FIGURE 51. Paul Gauguin, The Port de Grenelle with Cail and Co. Factories, 1875. Private collection.

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with the differences between them explained by the likelihood that Port de Grenelle was worked up in the studio.61 One more painting even farther downstream represents the Port de Javel, again on the Left Bank (The Port de Javel, 1876, Plate 12). Its palette seems closer to that of Pissarro, who, like Gauguin, looked to Corot’s work for guidance at the outset of his experiments as a landscape painter. But its chimneycrowded, smoky sky certainly echoes Guillaumin’s pictures of Ivry (see Chapter 5). In any case, and whatever their sources, these pictures by Gauguin at the very beginning of his career tell us that the industrial riverscape was important enough to attract such a talented newcomer. To Gauguin, searching for original and significant artistic expression, as to Van Gogh nearly ten years later (see Chapter 6), the workaday and productive side of modern landscape seemed compelling.

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THE SEINE AS WORKPLACE Charles-François Daubigny was a pioneer in the exploration of boating on the suburban Seine. Although he is most often associated with the Barbizon School painters, Daubigny belonged to the generation between Barbizon artists such as Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot and Jean-François Millet and Impressionists such as Pissarro, Monet, and their friends. Moreover, he settled in Pontoise (which means “bridge on the Oise River”), north of Paris, rather than near Fontainebleau. In paintings of the Oise, a major tributary of the Seine, Daubigny was among the first to include barges and to hint at the commercial uses of the river. His fourteen etchings of the album Voyage en bateau (1861) illustrate his adventures on the Seine and the Oise with his family in his boat studio. In these works, various vessels ply the river, including a steam packetboat, whose wake the pleasure boaters must take seriously, as in an illustration called Gare aux vapeurs! 62 The oldest of the Impressionists, and certainly the Impressionist closest to Daubigny, was Camille Pissarro. He resided mainly in Pontoise from the mid-1860s until the early 1880s (except from 1869 to 1872, when he lived in Louveciennes or fled to London during the Franco-Prussian War). He was probably attracted there by Daubigny. An early painting by Pissarro, Barge at La Roche-Guyon (ca. 1865, Figure 52), may be compared to Daubigny’s Boats on the Oise (1865, Figure 53) of approximately the same year to confirm this relationship but establish important differences. The paintings share a similar palette, which conveys the drabness and simplicity of this ordinary, unpicturesque, working countryside. Daubigny’s barges are moored in the middle distance rather than in the foreground; they blend in tonally with their surroundings, in which there is little sign of human activity. In the Pissarro, by contrast, workers actively load the vessel situated prominently in the foreground, while in the background a small packet-boat steams by and fishermen work their lines from a third boat at the composition’s right. Whereas Daubigny’s picture encourages tranquil contemplation and may suggest enjoyment of pleasant atmospheric conditions and reflections off smooth water, Pissarro’s image catalogs river productivity and human labor within a similar setting. It is well known, of course, that Pissarro’s leftist political views would have placed him in sympathy with workers. But if he became vocal about such matters in letters beginning in the 1880s, in earlier years he articulated such attitudes only implicitly through his art. Conscious politics cannot explain the difference between his and Daubigny’s river scenes. They must be attributed instead to an inclusive vision that not only encompassed signs of labor and industry but was willing even to make them its focus. Naturally, such a way of seeing had political implications, but they would become evident only later.63

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That is certainly true of several Pissarro paintings of activity on the river from the early 1870s, when he and Alfred Sisley were producing works documenting barge traffic and other forms of commercial activity along the Seine between Bougival and Port-Marly. Both towns, on the Left Bank of the river south of Saint-Germain-en-Laye and slightly north and east of Louveciennes, a village where both Pissarro and Sisley resided at various times, had been havens for landscape artists for at least a generation (see Figure 46). Bougival is perhaps best known in Impressionist lore as the location of La Grenouillère, where Monet and Renoir, painting together in 1869, first developed the quintessential style of broad, fragmented brushstrokes that characterized much Impressionism for the next decade. The fame and beauty of those bold and colorful compositions have perhaps given Bougival an unwarranted reputation for exclusively recreational pleasures, even though it was also the location of an 80

important and heavily used lock on the river Seine. Pissarro’s La Grenouillère at Bougival (ca. 1869, Figure 54), moreover, clearly shows how close the restaurant and swimming spot were to a factory across the river. Indeed, in this picture there is no sign of recreational activity at all, since it was out of season. Another painting done from a related location but closer to factories and now looking downriver is Pissarro’s The Wash House at Port-Marly (1872, Figure 55). This picture focuses on another, far less pleasure-oriented river establishment not far from the restaurant on the other side of the river. Both pictures are startling reminders of how easily and in what close proximity work and leisure could coexist, as well as of how much our vision of the nineteenth-century Paris suburbs has been determined by the paintings that art historians and collectors have chosen to emphasize. The reality is that all the buildings featured in these two pictures embody elements of economic activity along the river, including the restaurant. The Wash House at Port-Marly is also an antidote to the picturesque and often erotic representations of laundresses that were famous from the eighteenth-century works of Rococo artists such as François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard. In those paintings, washerwomen were the objects of male fantasy and subjects for pictorial delight. Pissarro’s composition conveys a less cloying, more neutral, if tranquil and harmonious, workaday aesthetic. Pissarro’s view, looking northwest and downriver toward Port-Marly, encompasses several barges in addition to the factory with its smoking chimney stack. At least a half-dozen washerwomen are busy at the floating washhouse, while in the left foreground one woman stands alone holding some linens. One suspects the painting was done early in the year 1872, when it was signed, because the leaves are not full on the trees. Pissarro had returned to nearby Louveciennes following the Franco-Prussian War to find that his house had been ransacked by billeted soldiers and almost all his early works destroyed. What might they have told us about his interests during these years? Soon thereafter, he moved back to Pontoise. During his brief return to Louveciennes in 1871–72, Pissarro also produced two remarkable pictures of commercial river life around Marly and Bougival. They are painted in a style deriving closely from Monet, with whom Pissarro had spent time in London and earlier. The modest piers at Port-Marly were shipping points for its plaster mines and its production of lime (“blanc de Marly”), as well as for lumber cut in nearby forests.64 The first painting of this pair is The Seine at Marly (1871, Plate 13), which was done in autumn, judging by the foliage. It shows a tug bringing a barge eastward toward the village of Bougival at a bend in the river. The restaurant La Grenouillère may be visible on the opposite bank in the picture’s background to the left.65 A bourgeois couple stroll along the towpath; ahead of them is a tow horse, near two boats moored together. In the foreground, a man sits on the grassy

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FIGURE 52. Camille Pissarro, Barge at La Roche-Guyon, ca. 1865. Musée Pissarro, Pontoise. FIGURE 53. Charles-François Daubigny, Boats on the Oise, 1865. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

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FIGURE 54. Camille Pissarro, La Grenouillère at Bougival, ca. 1869. Private collection. FIGURE 55. Camille Pissarro, The Wash House at Port-Marly, 1872. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

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bank fishing. Both the horse and the fisherman (the latter out to catch a meal) refer to activities of the local economy and inhabitants, yet the bourgeois couple remind the viewer that the towns along the river were also places for weekenders and country houses. In the second painting, The Seine at Port-

Marly (1872, Figure 56), once owned by Dr. Gachet, the varied activities are more closely juxtaposed. The viewer looks downriver, in the opposite direction from the painting of 1871. Two steam barges approach the shore; in the background is the low, white building of the Machine de Marly—the fabulous pump that lifted water uphill to the seventeenth-century aqueduct, visible from Louveciennes, to supply Louis XIV’s château at Marly-le-Roi. This mechanism, renewed and replaced in 1859, was revered as a wonder of engineering and is mentioned in every guidebook.66 A pipe-smoking worker trudges along the riverbank toward the viewer. He could be a member of one of the boat crews. Behind him is a crowd of bourgeois, probably tourists headed for a visit to the celebrated machine. It may seem that Pissarro’s combination of old and new, and of weekending bourgeois and local working folk, reflects ambivalence toward modernity, an inability to accept it frankly by discarding the past. That would be a simplistic view, however, because for Pissarro, as for Monet, at least until the later 1870s, and other Impressionists modernity was progressive rather than intrusive. Its presence, moreover, could not obliterate the past and certainly did not erase interest in it. The ultimate combination of past and present was tourism—a modern pastime derived from the new economy that made curiosity about the past a motivation both for education and for affirming identity. In the wake of the French defeat by the Prussians, good citizens would have understandably looked to their native soil and its monuments as sources of strength and reassurance. At the same time, many placed their hope in a resurgence fueled by modernization. The group of tourists in The Seine at Port-Marly would probably have traveled to this spot by riverboat. Modern transportation methods—the railroad even more than the steamboat—made the nostalgic enjoyment of rural and suburban places accessible to increasing numbers of visitors. It is worth noting, finally, that Pissarro rarely depicted crowds of people. He usually put figures into small groups or kept them either relatively isolated from one another or relatively distant from the viewer, as in The Wash House. That is, both the bourgeois viewer and the outsider like Pissarro— a Sephardic Jew, born in the Caribbean, who married his mother’s Catholic former cook—could surely feel less social discomfort in these mixed environments. Pissarro’s paintings record the diverse reality that is modernity; thanks to its complexity and rapid transformation, he could hope for accommodation in it. One can make a similar point regarding Pissarro’s take on Impressionism in general. Its commitment to documenting contemporary society freed him to paint without reference to religious or ancient national traditions. Landscape seemed a sufficiently neutral subject, open to any artist of talent. Modernity and its evidence of physical and social change invited outsiders to participate in the ideology of progress and renewal. In these paintings, Pissarro seems to have taken pains to harmonize the diverse elements he brought together. The play of autumn colors in The Seine at Marly, with the red jacket of the female figure to the right and the red stripes on the boats in the river, provides an excellent example of a thoughtful, unifying aesthetic process. The transition from foreground to background, from the brighter colors of the barges and the figures’ clothing to the subtle yellows of the Croissy island of the other riverbank, suggests the persistence of an earlier unifying sensibility that Pissarro had learned from Daubigny and the latter’s mentor, the celebrated landscapist Corot. Despite all his inter-

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est in the Monet-based Impressionist style of the moment, Pissarro strove to integrate past and future to produce an inclusive present. He found that niche in Pontoise, where he produced an occasional image of river traffic too, such as The Lock at Pontoise (1872, PV 156, Cleveland Museum of Art) or Barges

at Pontoise (1876, Figure 57), the latter with its boldly colored geometric boat forms in the immediate foreground. Pissarro’s picture bears comparison to Sisley’s Barges on the Canal Saint-Martin (see Figure 42), even though Pissarro painted his four years later, in 1876. The barges in Pissarro’s painting, like those in Sisley, are close to the viewer, but Pissarro has in addition made the barges themselves an aesthetic focus and has used their geometry, emphasized by color, to create a Monet-like compositional structure that eschews the ostensible randomness and reserved neutrality of Sisley. A significant footnote to Pissarro’s and Sisley’s activities along the Seine near Port-Marly can 84

be found in two exceptional paintings by Renoir. Among those Impressionists painting suburban landscapes in the 1870s, Renoir was certainly the least sympathetic to records of industrial and productive activity. They are rare in his oeuvre overall. To begin with, his primary concentration was on portraiture, and his landscape output was thus far smaller than that of his landscapist peers.67 In addition, his political conservatism may have given him pause in choosing subjects that may have been discouraged by government arts policy in the mid-1870s (see Chapter 7). So when one discovers, among the small number of landscapes Renoir did produce during the 1870s, two directly related to industrial themes, they reinforce a sense of the group’s commitment to modernity at a precise moment, the early 1870s. The first painting is Renoir’s Chalands along the Seine (ca. 1872, Figure 58), a view from the heights above Port-Marly. A convoy of ten barges snakes upriver toward Paris, giving this otherwise placid and panoramic scene a distinctly modern character. Two tugs accompany the barges, which vary in size and configuration. But unlike Pissarro, who featured the steam-powered vessels close up, Renoir makes only perfunctory distinctions and seems more concerned with the overall landscape as a place of pleasure, marked by a woman seated to the lower right. Renoir’s Wash House on the Seine (ca. 1872, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts) affords a closer view of another activity. Renoir stayed frequently with his parents at the hamlet of Voisins near Louveciennes, where Pissarro lived in the early 1870s. Both these pictures are surely related to the artists’ friendship at the time and therefore can be dated to these years. Compared to the washhouse in Pissarro’s Wash

House at Port-Marly, Renoir’s rickety structure has a certain folkloric charm, and his laundresses are sketched in quite gracefully. Even though Renoir paid only slight attention to the productive implications of his scene, the presence of the barges and washhouse on the river defines the place as one of labor. Renoir, then, conceded briefly to the trend among his cohorts to understand modern landscape as a place of productivity as well as leisure, even when that productivity might not exemplify especially up-to-date technology. The suburb of Asnières was one stop before Argenteuil on the train line from Saint-Lazare Station, five kilometers from Paris, on the first loop of the Seine after it flows out of Paris. (Argenteuil is four kilometers further and is on the second loop of the Seine—see Figure 46.) Monet, who was living in Argenteuil and rode the train frequently, stopped at Clichy, across from Asnières, at some point between 1873 and 1875 to make a few paintings along the river. He used Clichy as a place from which to contemplate river industry, rather than the pleasure boating that he portrayed in Argenteuil. In this attitude Monet was unusual, for Asnières was at least as widely known as Argenteuil for being a bathing

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FIGURE 56. Camille Pissarro, The Seine at Port-Marly, 1872. Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart. FIGURE 57. Camille Pissarro, Barges at Pontoise, 1876. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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and boating spot. According to Henry-Alexis de Conty, “Asnières, whose settled population is today composed of persons of private means, small jobholders and especially retired women of the world, owes its fashion, its success, even, I would add, its fortune to its basically floating population of Parisians, of boaters and especially its daughters of Eve, whose peignoir is their most beautiful ornament. Let us add that it is one of the most important points in nautical sport for rowing races.”68 Robert Herbert notes that both artists and stars from the world of entertainment set up residence in the village.69 In his important Histoire des environs du nouveau Paris, Emile de La Bédollière devoted most of a long chapter to Asnières, again focusing on bathing and boating as its primary attractions. He gave a history of the regattas and their rowing heroes, and he included the words from popular boating songs. Unwilling to recognize any flaws in its reputation, La Bédollière denied the novelist Eugène Sue’s claim 86

(in Les Mystères de Paris, 1842–43) that Asnières was frequented by salvage men collecting metal debris from the river bottom and along the shore.70 But Sue’s claim has merit, for such treasure would have come from industrial Clichy, on the other side of the river, and the barges that serviced it. Monet’s interest in Asnières thus suggests an unconventional emphasis on the industry across the river, on the bank nearer to Paris. When La Bédollière briefly noted that Asnières faced the industrial suburb of Clichy, he described Clichy quite positively:

FIGURE 58. Auguste Renoir, Chalands along the Seine, ca. 1872. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

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87

FIGURE 59. Candle Factory at Clichy (exterior view from Asnières), engraving, in Julien Turgan’s

Les Grandes Usines, vol. 1 (Paris, 1860), p. 132.

It is a city of business rather than pleasure. . . . In Clichy there are factories that produce starch, zinc white [and other pigments], gut strings, chemicals, soap, ammonia, tulle [etc.]. . . . Clichy has France’s largest factory for the manufacture of stearic candles [i.e., made from animal fat]. . . . The buildings of the manufacturing plant spread majestically along the banks of the Seine. They cover a surface of two hectares [about five acres], on which function three steam engines with 130 horsepower. They drive powerful hydraulic presses and distribute with remarkable harmony, in every part of the factory, a perfectly regulated energy, which is the first element of good fabrication.71 In the very first tome of Les Grandes Usines, which eventually became a set of eighteen volumes, Julien Turgan published illustrations of this complex from both inside and outside. The exterior view also shows coal barges that provided fuel for the factory’s huge energy consumption (Candle Factory at

Clichy [exterior view from Asnières], Figure 59).72 Such proud representations of Clichy contrast vividly with the picture conveyed by Louis Barron in 1886: Asnières, national pleasure port, holy city of boating, spreads its seductions, its brightly painted café-restaurants, its casino, its castle and its piers along the Seine facing Levallois and Clichyla-Garenne, with which it forms a violent contrast. One must see it on a sunny morning, from the dusty riverbank of Clichy, and, for example . . . from the vault itself of the collector sewer [which came from Paris]. Have no fear of the odors. . . .

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From this dried-up riverbank, full of the coal dust spread by the workers unloading the barges, bordered by factories covered by soot, by cafés where they drink beef’s blood [coarse red wine], and hovels where the derelicts hang out, Asnières produces a charming impression; it seems as gay, carefree, lazy, and green as its facing neighbors are arid, dull, somber, and laborious.73 Monet recorded his response to this spectacle in a small group of paintings he made during his presumably brief visits. Three closely related pictures show barges on the Seine with Asnières in the background.74 The villas along the river in the background surely housed residents like those to whom Conty alluded. Only the least formally painted of the three (Barges at Asnières, ca. 1873–75, W 270, private collection) gives overt evidence of pleasure boating, with a sailboat and some skiffs in the 88

background.75 In the other two, nearly identical views (Barges at Asnières, ca. 1873–75, W 269, Figure 60) such activity is far less evident, noted only by tiny dark brushstrokes indicating figures and a few small boats at the shore. In all three, Monet has concentrated, in his foreground and middle ground, on barges or chalands, similar to those in Sisley’s image of the Canal Saint-Martin. A fourth painting,

Men Unloading Coal (1873–75, Plate 14)—the masterpiece of the group—reveals the contents and purpose of the barges. Although this work is usually attributed to 1875, and the others to 1873, it seems

FIGURE 60. Claude Monet, Barges at Asnières, ca. 1873–75. Private collection.

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more likely that all four were done at approximately the same time rather than two years apart.76 The vantage point of Men Unloading Coal is the foot of the highway bridge connecting Clichy and Asnières, looking downriver toward another bridge of more recent construction that linked the same towns across two small islets, the Ile Vaillant and the Ile de Clichy. (The single span of the bridge in the distance does not cross the entire river. Most bridges required several sections to do so.) In the background, under the highway bridge, are factories corresponding to La Bédollière’s description of Clichy. Monet’s two views—across the river and downriver—are linked by the presence of the coal barges. His vantage point is similar to that of Louis Barron, who looked across the river to Asnières from a location that made him highly conscious of Clichy’s industrial character. The generally contrasting tonalities of Monet’s two views, sunlit versus dark and gloomy, correspond to Barron’s rather schematic descriptions too. The approximately twenty-five-year interval that separated La Bédollière and Barron perhaps explains their differing attitudes. By 1886 ever-increasing congestion and pollution may have undercut the original enthusiasm for industrial progress. Paul Tucker has convincingly suggested that Monet himself gradually soured on the industrial presence in his home suburb of Argenteuil, eventually choosing to move elsewhere. He is certainly correct that when Monet wished to focus on industrial modernity he left Argenteuil for places like Paris (e.g., the Saint-Lazare Station), Clichy, and Le Havre.77 Perhaps its coexistence with the world of leisure, as in the paired opposites of Clichy and Asnières, was tolerable only in places one visited as an outsider. Yet in making that coexistence his theme, Monet revealed his tacit ideological commitment to a modernity that, in spite of his ambivalence, he associated with progress. Indeed, in Monet’s paintings of Asnières individually, his attitude seems relatively unconflicted. In the brighter view shown especially by the Hermitage painting and its near-identical twin, the bold forms of the barges dominate the foreground, while the houses behind them provide a sustained counterpoint that is both iconographic and aesthetic. Framed on the left by the mast of the farthest barge, which thrusts upward and cuts across the background, and on the right by the barge’s dark rudder and its reflection, which comes forward almost to the bottom edge, the composition proposes a rigorous harmony between the two contrasting elements of residence and industry without requiring symmetry. In Men Unloading

Coal, Monet’s aestheticizing overlay is far more evident. Perhaps that is no surprise in an image that puts workers in the foreground in greater numbers than in any other Monet painting. Faceless men, framed by the arch of the highway bridge and silhouetted against the dull reflecting water—as well as covered in grime and Zola-esque coal dust (though the writer’s mining novel, Germinal, was not published until 1885)— march in rhythmic syncopation back and forth from barges to shore along narrow wooden planks. Here one has the feeling of labor as effort performed over time, although the performance itself seems more like a ritualistic procession than a backbreaking slog. The planks are spaced, and Monet has staggered the figures so they look almost like dancers in a ballet or dehumanized robots—pawns lacking agency in any case—against a backdrop of smoking chimneys. The juxtaposition between the factories that burn the fuel and the coal carriers who provide it gives a progressive purpose to their labor. Their participation in France’s commercial expansion, supported like the bundles of coal on their hefty shoulders, can be construed as noble and heroic. Monet’s composition thus echoes La Bédollière’s awe and pride at the well-regulated mechanisms of Clichy’s progressive industrial harmony. It was an attitude that would culminate in Monet’s series of paintings of the Gare Saint-Lazare just two years later.

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4 RAILWAYS AND STATIONS TRAINS AND TRACKS

Much as the Internet has changed communication habits and infrastructure in today’s world, railways were a transformative technological innovation for the nineteenth century, with profound social and economic ramifications. By midcentury the railroad, and in particular the locomotive, was an icon of the new industrial world. On a deeper level, traveling at three times or more the speed possible by stagecoach led to new perceptions of time and space. The world seemed to shrink while concomitantly the space immediately available to individual access expanded enormously.1 Railways contributed to the creation of national markets, centered on Paris in the case of France, and provided the essential condition for the nation’s unprecedented industrial expansion at midcentury. They also facilitated personal mobility and tourism, permitting an artist like Monet to travel easily between his native Normandy coast and Paris, as well as hordes of weekend pleasure seekers to reach the suburban riverbanks at Argenteuil, Asnières, and Chatou, each of which had a railroad bridge over the Seine and a station. Artists who painted in such spots could easily live nearby, with rapid access to Paris, like the thousands of commuters who were moving to the suburbs and traveling to the city almost every day. The most important railroad lines in this development were those that fed into the Gare Saint-Lazare, the famous station designed in the modern cast-iron mode by the engineer Etienne Flachat, who was the leading expert on the technique (see Chapter 5). His complete reconstruction of the original station of 1837 opened in 1853, then underwent expansions until 1886.2 In 1868 the rail yards were spanned by the Pont de l’Europe (see Chapter 1), an engineering wonder featured in a beautiful illustration of the same year (Auguste Lamy, Paris, Bridge at the Place de l’Europe, 1868, Figure 61), which thus preceded any of the paintings we know. Between the bridge, the station (which the illustration shows from the rear), and the new apartment buildings nearby, this neighborhood more than any other embodied Parisian modernity. Saint-Lazare Station handled approximately 40 percent of Parisian passenger traffic.3 Destinations accessible from it were Auteuil, just southwest of Paris; the Petite Ceinture (Small Beltway) line, which encircled the city near its outer limits; Versailles; Saint-Germain-en-Laye; and most of Normandy. The Argenteuil line, which split off the Normandy route before Asnières, was extended in the 1860s to join the northern line at Ermont, where it could reach Pontoise and points farther north, such as Lille. The main branch more or less followed the Seine from Mantes through Rouen to Le Havre and later to Dieppe. Following the British, the first railroads in France were for industrial transport, using Britishmade equipment to cart coal between Saint-Etienne and Andrézieux on the upper Loire River in 1827, and expanding to Roanne and Lyon by 1832.4 They fed and supplemented navigable waterways before

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92 FIGURE 61. Auguste Lamy, Paris, Bridge at the Place de l’Europe, wood engraving, L’Illustration, April 11, 1868, Musée Carnavalet, Paris.

they competed with, then ultimately overwhelmed them. From 400 kilometers in 1840, French rail track grew to 23,600 kilometers by 1880; sums invested increased one hundred-fold from 1825 to 1884, encouraged as they were by state guarantees.5 The first passenger line was to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, begun in 1835 and opened in 1837. It was financed by the banking empires of James de Rothschild and Emile Péreire, the latter a follower of the engineer-philosopher Henri de Saint-Simon, who believed in human progress through industry, science, and art. Leaders of each of these three fields, according to Saint-Simon, would constitute an “avant-garde” triumvirate. The Saint-Simonians joined with the leftist political parties opposed to bourgeois capitalism to advocate directed government investment in order to promote nationalization.6 In 1842 their effort resulted in a compromise that established a unified route plan and a public-private partnership: the state would acquire rights-of-way and construct roadbeds and viaducts, rigorously supervised by the Ministry of Public Works (Conseil Général des Ponts et Chaussées). Private companies with state concessions would lay rail, run their own equipment over it, and handle ticket sales and other business relations with the public. By 1843 the ParisOrléans and Paris-Rouen lines were running. By 1857 the Paris-Lyon and Marseille lines had merged into the famous P.L.M. company, with the blessing of the administration of Napoleon III, who generally tolerated the monopolistic practices of his powerful backers. The economic importance of the railroads made them both a potent political force and the target of strong political opposition, always in the news and under public scrutiny. Napoleon III’s decision to relaunch the financing of navigable waterways in the 1860s was a response to public complaints challenging the railroad barons’ emerging hegemony over all transportation.7 In the 1860s there was a move to decentralize their power by authorizing small, local companies, sometimes on narrower-gauge lines.8 In 1863, encouraging that move, Etienne Flachat published a report commissioned by the government to compare the French and the British railways.9 In the mid-1870s, under the Third Republic, the Compagnie des Charentes, which had a system in western France, was being choked off by the Compagnie d’Orléans, which controlled entry to the area. This was a typical example of how the big six rail companies

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crushed their competition. When Charentes tried to sell out to the Orléans line, the French parliament intervened and purchased the smaller company for the state. It became the first element in today’s staterun French railways (the Société Nationale des Chemins-de-Fer Français [SCNF]). The Franco-Prussian War brought out glaring weaknesses of the railway system as devised by private capital. Its capacity, with its many single track lines, had never been considered for moving huge numbers of military personnel and equipment. Its centralization in Paris, with a lack of transverse lines to provide bypass, made it extremely vulnerable. Destruction of track and bridges, either by the advancing Prussian soldiers or by French sabotage intended to slow the Prussians, created formidable bottlenecks. Demolitions of the Argenteuil, Asnières, and Chatou bridges were among the worst such cases, choking off access from the important northern and western sectors and the uncaptured port of Le Havre to Paris. 93

TRAINS AND TOPOGRAPHY It has been noted that as official photographer for the Ponts et Chaussées ministry, under government commission, Hippolyte Collard produced albums documenting Parisian bridge construction (see Chapter 1). Railroad expansion was also recorded in a number of photographic albums beginning in the 1850s. In 1855 Edouard Baldus, financed by the railroads, published his album Le Chemin de Fer du Nord (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris), followed in 1869 by his Réseau sud de la Compagnie P.L.M., which contained sixty-nine plates. Although public works and railroad photographs were not necessarily popular collectors’ items, they were featured at the Universal Expositions of 1855 and 1867, where France showed off its industrial progress to the rest of the world. They were also shown at the photographic Salon and were thus part of a widespread visual culture representing railroads. As mentioned earlier, in 1883 the Ministère des Travaux Publics, under the direction of the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, published a five-volume compendium of public works imagery; its entire second volume was devoted to railroads.10 I suggested in Chapter 2 that an alliance existed between engineering and photography. I now propose that in a sense railroads and photography together made the old concept of landscape painting impossible. Trains now carried people through the countryside as never before, and through the window frames of their compartments they could see the landscape as it really was, if only for fleeting moments.11 Paul Nadar, the son of the famous portrait photographer Félix Nadar, is known to have made photographs from moving trains in the 1880s.12 Photography had the power to freeze specific images, and, as Shelley Rice has shown, even though travel photographers focused primarily on monuments, such as one might visit while hopping by train from city to city, they recorded some plainer landscapes too. Out of thirty-six photographs appended to a map of the Chemin de Fer du Nord (Figure 62), five correspond to what would traditionally be called landscape, showing views of villages seen across fields.13 Compared to the paintings by Théodore Rousseau and Corot being made in the Fontainebleau Forest (and photographs by Charles Marville and Eugène Cuvelier emulating them), these are banal, ordinary scenes. Baldus’s albums mixed sites and monuments with pictures of railway track and stations. The implication was that all were of the same order of interest, the latter simply being equivalent achievements in modern time to the more ancient structures. Certainly, to the bourgeois traveler, railroad rights-of-way and station platforms were familiar. And they could be associated with leisure and pleasure, connoting modernity without overtly making the connection to the labor and in-

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dustry that were the conditions of their existence. Railroad travel thus certainly contributed to the sense that landscape scenery was becoming a salable commodity in the form of trips to specific places. Paintings of such places provided a longer-lasting, if vicarious, commodification of the same experience. Yet the thirty-year lag before railroads themselves appeared in French painting attests to the resistance of landscape painters to elements that would break the spell of nostalgia and escapism cultivated by tourism as well as by the work of the greatest contemporary landscapists, such as Corot and Rousseau.14 Even the more progressive Daubigny never included them in his painting, though he represented trains and steamboats in prints, such as Voyage en bateau: Le Depart, which shows the train as a means to reach a less urban part of the river.15 Similarly, at least one of the illustrations that he contributed to Jules Janin’s guide to travel from Paris to Normandy shows a train prominently wait94

ing at the Saint-Lazare Station.16 Landscape painting, however, had rarely had the goal of recording what was present (except in sketches and studies); rather, it aimed to represent the landscape as an ideal of nature. Only the champion of Naturalism, Jules-Antoine Castagnary, called for modern landscape based not on idealization but on social reality, to conform to what he believed was the modern spirit of scientific rationalism.17 Now that escape to the countryside was offered through train travel rather than vicariously through art, its destinations became specific in both place and time. This element of specificity was crucial in differentiating Impressionist paintings from previous traditions. If the

FIGURE 62. Edouard Baldus,

photographs of the Chemin de Fer du Nord, 1860. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

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Impressionist conception of landscape was to record responses at particular moments of observation, then recognizable topographical motifs would act as markers of that approach. Unlike trees or geological formations, manmade elements contributed an enhanced temporal specificity. Few motifs could locate a landscape more clearly on a map or identify a landscape in contemporary time more effectively than a train or a factory. Not that Impressionist painters necessarily sought such elements systematically; but there was no longer a reason to avoid them, since they could reinforce claims to modernity. As a factor essential to the development of the suburbs, and as the means of access to leisure activities often associated with them, the train was virtually ubiquitous. The proliferation of illustrated guidebooks was directly related to trains. Many itineraries followed train lines and were part of publishers’ series, such as the Librairie Hachette’s “Bibliothèque des chemins de fer.” Hachette employed the romantic novelist Jules Janin and then the famous guide writer Adolphe Joanne. The latter’s pocket-sized Environs de Paris went through edition after edition. Others guides were published by hotels, which were filled with visitors arriving by train. The railroad was an essential factor in the “new Paris” described by Emile de La Bédollière in his Histoire des en-

virons du nouveau Paris. By “new Paris,” La Bédollière meant not only the renovated “Haussmannized” city itself but its outskirts rendered accessible by railroad. By way of introduction, he wrote: In the past, two hours were necessary to travel to Versailles, in a coach whose straining horses could accomplish their task only by wearing themselves out. Excursions to Montmorency, Sceaux, Saint-Denis, Saint-Germain, or Choisy-le-Roi were hard to finish in a single day. . . . Are not these conditions now changed? Is it not correct to say that the circle of Paris’s environs has considerably expanded? The trains to Versailles, Saint-Germain, Boulogne, Argenteuil, Sceaux, Orsay; the lines that lead to the ancient provinces of Brittany and Normandy; the lines to the east, the south, and the north each day carry thousands of passengers. The employee, the proprietor, the Parisian pensioner can in summer settle in previously distant and abandoned localities. . . . Today, with the facilities offered by railways, we can expand the outskirts of Paris to approximately 100 or 120 kilometers.18 Gustave Doré’s title-page illustration to La Bédollière’s quarto-sized guide (Figure 63) takes this essential role of railways into account. Framing picnickers, fishermen, and boaters with its rigorously horizontal horizon line, the Saint-Germain train steams away over its Seine river crossing in the weekend landscape’s background. Its engine fills the sky with smoke, while country folk, their lives disrupted by these new arrivals, look haplessly on. Railroad advocates seemed conscious of a certain skepticism concerning the railroad’s effects on the landscape. As early as 1862, the popular science writer Amédée Guillemin argued that railroads were “not the enemies of art or of the picturesque in landscape.” For him, industry had created “beautiful viaducts, whose long rows of white arcades . . . form a decorative effect that is both simple and pleasing.”19 Already in 1859 the Realist writer Champfleury, the staunch supporter of Courbet, wrote: “Leaning on a bridge, I contemplate with pleasure those grand iron tracks, which can be charming in the absence of steam engines. Beveled slopes cut through green fields showing great

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FIGURE 63. Gustave Doré, title-page illustration for Emile de La Bédollière’s Histoire des environs du nouveau Paris (Paris, 1861). New York Public Library.

sandy yellow trenches, a blue sky, rail crossings amid gentle curves, are these not pictures just waiting for a new landscape painter? Industry mixed with nature has its poetic side: the point is to see it and be inspired.”20 Léonce Reynaud, in the preface to his compendium of photographs of public works, proclaimed the equivalence of such modern monuments to those of the ancients and hailed them as agents of prosperity: All manifestations of human genius are worthy of respect. But one cannot deny that the works of today triumph over those of the Ancients. Our railroads alone have caused the construction in Europe, over barely the past half-century, of more works similar to the celebrated aqueducts of the Romans than in thousands of years before; in recent years, we have opened more tunnels through hard rocks than since the beginning of civilization. Our seaports are more numerous and more vast. . . . It should be noted that our grand public works enterprises, thanks to powerful machines of modern invention . . . have become agents of prosperity both during and after their execution.21

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Moreover, as Jane E. Boyd has pointed out, certain popular images of railroad infrastructure actually improved the landscape setting by eliminating construction debris or by adding vegetation to create a more harmonious, integrated whole than what was shown in contemporary photographs.22 One of Paul Cézanne’s better-known early landscapes (1869–70) is The Railroad Cut (Figure 64), an important painting for which Cézanne made drawings, as well as a preparatory sketch (R89, Barnes Collection, Merion, Pennsylvania). It shows a dramatic gash through a Provençal foothill, with Mont Sainte-Victoire in the background. The site is on the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence, at the southern limit of Cézanne’s family estate at the Jas de Bouffan.23 The same westbound line cuts across the foreground of two of Cézanne’s most famous views of Mont Sainte-Victoire (see Introduction).24 The abruptness and sharpness with which the railroad bed implacably slices through its mound suggests the relentlessness of modernization and its effect on the landscape. It calls forth perceptions of the modern traveler as one indifferent to and isolated from the geography through which he hurtles at unprecedented speeds.25 At the same time, the violence to and alienation from nature that this image implies may also be related to other early paintings of Cézanne in which such feelings are frequently thematized through violent and/or erotic content. After all, such domination and penetration of the landscape have sexual overtones. One might therefore see this painting as an early step in Cézanne’s effort to reorient such impulses, previously expressed in his work through literary subjects, toward their expression in landscape.26 But the painting also expresses the interest in industrial images and modernity that he shared, if briefly, with Pissarro and Guillaumin, with whom he often worked during the late 1860s and early 1870s.27 Indeed, Cézanne made a drawing that either freely copied

FIGURE 64. Paul Cézanne, The Railroad Cut, ca. 1869–70. Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich.

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one of Guillaumin’s railroad pictures showing the Sceaux line at Arcueil (see below) or was done at the same time as Guillaumin was painting.28

The Railroad Cut contrasts sharply with Claude Monet’s Train in the Countryside (1870, Figure 65), with which it shares honors as one of the two earliest Impressionist railroad scenes. The latter shows the small double-decker carriages of the Saint-Germain line trundling toylike across the bridge over the Seine at Chatou, viewed in the afternoon from the south near Croissy, just across the river from Bougival.29 In Monet’s foreground, ladies with parasols promenade across a perfectly bucolic bright green meadow. As in Doré’s illustration, these promenaders in the fields, rather than the train itself, seem to be the picture’s main subject, in spite of its title. Partly hidden among the trees and confounded with the tree line, the railroad and its structure seem a benign and almost incidental pres98

ence in this lush and sun-drenched scene, except that, of course, the train provided access to this countryside for people like those in the foreground. It was the condition for their being there and a marker of modernity. Indeed, Monet implied a link between them and the train by rendering passengers visible on the open third-class deck, above the enclosed compartments for second-class passengers. Neither Monet nor other painters took the trouble to do so in other paintings.30 In recording this interdependence of sorts, then, Monet’s picture conveys a satisfying harmony that Cézanne’s hard geometric focus denied. In addition to their different attitudes toward the train’s presence in nature, then, these two paintings suggest different approaches to the question of railroad imagery. In the Cézanne, the focus is on the train’s presence in nature through topographical features such as the right-of-way, the track, fences to keep out stray animals, and attendant buildings like the small utility shack in the center of the composition, highlighted against the shadow of the cutting. His painting focuses on the human intervention in the landscape. The other approach, as in the Monet, is to show the trains themselves: that is, to represent railroads as transportation, with all their implications of movement, mobility, speed, and change. These approaches are not mutually exclusive, but such a consideration can help one gauge not only the different effects of the railroad revolution on people’s lives and environment but also the range of attitudes toward those effects in art. Commonplace as trains were in the landscape and in public consciousness, their presence was never a matter of indifference. Camille Pissarro painted his first trains in England while he waited out the Franco-Prussian War. He was living in the South London suburb of Upper Norwood, near members of the London branch of his family. Like Paris’s outskirts, these were country villages being transformed by the railroad. Pissarro’s dozen or so representations of the area, however, show a relatively bland and peaceful middleclass community, unlike Paris’s western suburbs, which had a more exciting reputation for bucolic and leisure possibilities. One picture, Environs of Sydenham, Lower Norwood in the Distance (1871, Plate 15), shows the straight cut of the railway track through the open fields. The train itself, with its trail of vapor, seems too small for the distance at which it is shown because of its sunken roadbed. Providing scale, a figure left of center watches as the modern wonder rumbles by. A second picture, Lordship

Lane Station, East Dulwich (1871, Figure 66), shows a line that branched off from London’s commuter network to take passengers a few miles more directly to the glass and cast-iron Crystal Palace (see Chapter 5). After the Great Exhibition of 1851, the structure had been dismantled and removed from Hyde Park to the Norwood-Sydenham area, near Dulwich. This was a popular train run in its day, close by and very much a part of daily existence in Upper Norwood, whose development as a relatively

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FIGURE 65. Claude Monet, Train in the Countryside, 1870. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. FIGURE 66. Camille Pissarro, Lordship Lane Station, East Dulwich, 1871. Courtauld Institute, London.

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fashionable area was encouraged by the strikingly modern building’s presence. The Crystal Palace was destroyed by fire in 1936, and the line was later abandoned; the tracks were removed in 1954.31 More clearly than in the previous picture, Pissarro’s composition emphasizes the cut into the earth that contains the sunken right-of-way. Not only do such alterations to the landscape allow the train to make a relatively level, hence more efficient run, but they set off the right-of-way from its surroundings, reducing the likelihood of unpleasant encounters between machines and farm animals or even humans. Yet a strange uneasiness attends the quiet chugging of what, from the painter’s distance, seems a diminutive locomotive. The viewer’s position directly above the tracks, on Cox’s Walk footbridge, produces a disconcerting psychological standoff between curious human observer and compact industrial beast. Compare it to a rarely seen early painting from about the same time by Gustave 100

Caillebotte (Railroad Right-of-Way, ca. 1872, Figure 67), in which the right-of-way, without a train and viewed from a footbridge, is the only subject of the picture. In the latter, the spectator concentrates exclusively on the clean tracery of the railway line’s powerful and elegant geometry on the landscape. Caillebotte juxtaposes the forward-thrusting track with the rigid rectangles of the footbridge railing, rigorously imposing a modern compositional structure that suggests a theme of human dominance over nature and combines his well-known interest in engineering with his artistic vision.32 On the other hand, Pissarro’s locomotive, with its two front wheels, lights, and single stack, has a quaint anthropomorphic quality. Yet like the geometry of railroad beds or bridge construction, the stalwart little engine suggests a relentlessness that could even be dangerous. One questions whether Pissarro seeks to resolve some underlying tension between his normally rural orientation and the train’s modernizing intrusion or whether his geometrically articulated composition is a means to reconciling the two. On his return from England, Pissarro, like Monet, undertook a number of overtly modern, industrial subjects. That period included a few railroad themes in Pissarro’s work. The railroad line had been extended to near the center of Pontoise in 1862, thanks to the construction of a railroad bridge over the Oise. In at least one painting, Pissarro focused his attention on the bridge itself (The Railroad

Bridge, Pontoise, ca. 1873, PV 234, private collection), although, as Richard Brettell has pointed out,

FIGURE 67. Gustave Caillebotte, Railroad Right-of-Way, ca. 1872. Private collection.

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its effect is attenuated, confounded as it is with the older, traditional stonework road bridge behind it.33 Two other paintings, by contrast, are much more forceful. The first, Road along the Train Tracks,

Snow Effect (1873, Figure 68), shows a sweeping and massive earthen embankment, like that of Cézanne’s Railroad Cut, bordered by telegraph poles. This alteration of the landscape, atop which lie the tracks, frames and dominates a set of curves within which a peasant couple in the middle distance are contained. The second, Railroad Crossing at Pâtis, near Pontoise (1873–74, Figure 69), again reveals the physical impact of the railroad on the rural scene. In this case, the geometric forms of the wooden traffic barrier are the painting’s focal point, partially closing off access to the panoramic view of the hills and river bend beyond. At this rural crossing, the traffic of several trains per day in each direction may have exceeded vehicular road traffic. The dangers of road crossings were already apparent in the early years of railways, encouraging construction of bridges and tunnels.34 At crossings such as this, it is likely that the gates were kept closed until a carriage or cart driver signaled the guard, who resided in the adjacent house built by the railroad company. Pissarro’s figures, a woman in peasant dress and a man in a worker’s smock, seem to be in conversation. The man is certainly the guard himself, and the woman may be his wife, since the railroads generally hired couples and gave them uniforms that included the smock and a hat such as the one worn by the man.35 The house and crossing gates correspond very closely to the standard constructions built by the companies, as illustrated in Louis-Guillaume Figuier’s Les Merveilles de la science (1867).36 Contained within the geometry of the barrier gate and the property wall, reinforced by the distant trees and certain lines of the house, and framed at the left by the vertical of the telegraph pole, everything in Pissarro’s painting seems immobilized. Surely Pissarro understood that by using his forms as compositional devices drawn from the landscapes of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, he was imparting a classical tranquillity and timelessness to this otherwise overtly contemporary scene. Unlike so much railroad imagery in Monet and in literature, which features speed and movement, this painting seems to be about stasis. One can only guess whether to interpret the railway as a blockage and intrusion or whether to see it as matter-of-factly integrated into the dusty, sun-drenched, enduring countryside. Pissarro may have held conflicting attitudes of which he was barely aware. Thanks to hindsight and to Baudelaire, one can place such ambivalence about change at the heart of the modern experience. Despite his commitment to representations of industry and his connection to the Compagnie des Chemins de Fer d’Orléans, Armand Guillaumin’s railway pictures are relatively rare, represented in only two paintings, although they are major ones. In both, moreover, the publicly financed works of infrastructure—ouvrages d’art, as they were called in the profession—seem to be featured at least as much as the trains themselves. In Bridge over the Marne at Nogent (formerly thought to be at Joinville) (1871, Plate 16), a red brick–faced railroad bridge over the Marne River dominates the composition. The structure was well known, for including its viaduct approaches it was nearly a kilometer long, and it was notable for its Roman-style brickwork. Amédée Guillemin recommended it “to Parisians who love pretty sites and admire great works of human industry,” adding that “one does not exclude the other.”37 According to historian Marcel Prade, at the time of its construction (1855– 56) this edifice was the most important railway project in the Paris region.38 The overland viaduct still stands, but the bridge over the Marne had to be replaced by a more modern structure when during World War II the retreating Nazi army destroyed it.39 The red color so prominent in Guillaumin’s

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FIGURE 68. Camille Pissarro, Road along the Train Tracks, Snow Effect, 1873.

National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo. FIGURE 69. Camille Pissarro, Railroad Crossing at Pâtis, near Pontoise, 1873–74. Private collection.

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painting was intended to evoke monuments from Roman times. (It has largely faded now, remaining barely visible in some spots with recent erosion.) Guillaumin views it from the west looking east, with the northern approach to the left. To the right is the Ile des Loups in the middle of the Marne, which the bridge used for part of its footing. Designed by the engineers Collet-Meygret and Pluyette of Ponts et Chaussées for the Compagnie de l’Est (Paris-Strasbourg, Mulhouse, and Basel), the overall structure is pictured twice in Auguste Perdonnet’s Traité élémentaire des chemins de fer (Figure 70). It was opened in 1856. According to measurements—each of the four principal arches of the bridge had a diameter of fifty meters and therefore a height of approximately twenty-five meters—Guillaumin’s rendering gives a more accurate sense of its proportions than does the illustration in Perdonnet. 40 In the Guillaumin painting, a locomotive with eight carriages and a coal tender steams across the bridge, leaving a trail of black smoke at the center of a bright blue sky with fluffy white clouds. As the smoke blends into the wind, it darkens the sky to the left. This painting, which once belonged to Guillaumin’s friend Dr. Gachet (see Chapter 3), is located in an area just east of Paris beyond the Bois de Vincennes and north of Joinville-le-Pont, in the municipality of Nogent-sur-Marne. The Marne, a major tributary of the Seine, joins the Seine in the southeastern outskirts of Paris, at Charenton and Ivry, which Guillaumin also frequented. The viaduct’s intersection with the Seine is upriver from the industrial area of Paris, between the Gare d’Orléans and the Gare de Lyon, where Guillaumin painted many river scenes (see Chapter 3). At both Nogent and Joinville, the Marne was popular for sailing and fishing, as it is even today, since it has never been subjected to the same level of industrialization as today’s Argenteuil. In Emile Zola’s novel Au bonheur des dames (1881), the heroine, Denise, spends a day at Nogent with her friends. Guillaumin also painted factories along the Seine at Ivry, which is between that area and the countryside of this painting (see Chapter 5). This southeastern part of Paris and its environs in general were at the heart of Guillaumin’s work, just as the northwestern suburbs from Argenteuil and Clichy to Paris were for Monet. Indeed, in this picture Guillaumin seems to share the optimism of Monet’s Argenteuil paintings. Harmony reigns between the fisherman and boaters on the shore and their surroundings. The bridge’s brick facing and forms echo age-old building traditions, and its color complements and enhances the various greens of its environment. This is

FIGURE 70. The Nogent Viaduct, in Auguste Perdonnet’s Traité élémentaire des chemins de fer, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1865), vol. 1, between pp. 484 and 485.

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FIGURE 71. Edouard Baldus, Landscape near the Chantilly Viaduct, photograph from the Chemins de Fer du Nord Album, 1855, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

an image not of dislocation but of access and interdependence. The whole is structurally bold, technically sure, and fresh in color, resulting in one of Guillaumin’s most overtly pleasing works. Guillaumin’s image of the train crossing the river, like Monet’s Train in the Countryside, corresponds to a familiar motif found in guidebooks and repeated in many paintings. For example, Joanne’s

Guide de Paris à Saint-Germain features an illustration of the most spectacular viaduct and bridge over the Seine near Saint-Germain. As if one could distinguish between a railroad bridge and a regular road bridge only by the presence of a train, there is a train moving across it.41 Yet according to mid-nineteenthcentury schedules, there was one train per hour in each direction.42 An observer might be forced to wait a considerable time before experiencing such views as were represented. Therefore, other, parallel and complementary explanations for the near-ubiquity of trains on images of such bridges and viaducts might focus on the development of the railroad as the impetus for such structures. They were a novelty, required by the train’s speed and lack of maneuverability compared to vehicular traffic. Still, more fundamentally, the innovative movement and energy of contemporary progress are surely better embodied by the movement of the train itself than by its stationary support, however spectacular that might be. Obviously, such public works were themselves objects of admiration. Baldus’s photograph Land-

scape near the Chantilly Viaduct, from the Chemin de Fer du Nord album (Figure 71), shows a locomotive and tender with their crew atop the structure. Because Baldus’s exposure time was in seconds (rather than a fraction of a second), one knows the train was stopped there, for the purpose of being photographed. As was often the case in public works photographs, engineers, supervisors, and/or workers posed for the camera. Here, even more clearly than in Guillaumin’s case, and certainly more than in Monet’s, the composition focuses attention on the viaduct—the manmade contribution to the land-

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scape. The pride the architect and builders took in such work is reflected in Perdonnet’s comment that, in disregard of economic factors, “they attained an excessively expensive level of artistic perfection.” 43 The relationship between such structures and the machinery they carried is suggested in the title-page illustration for Louis Figuier’s Les Merveilles de la science (Figure 72). The image is dominated by a double viaduct. There were several of these, such as one built in Brittany at Morlaix, another closer by at Val de Fleury, near Meudon, on the Left Bank Paris-Versailles line, and the Viaduc d’Auteuil of the Petite Ceinture line, which was frequently depicted (see Chapter 2).44 In Figuier’s illustration, trains are running in both directions. In his foreground is a steam-driven threshing machine; in the middle ground is a paddle-wheel steamboat on the river and a factory on the land. By featuring a dizzying array of machines in motion, Figuier accepts and even celebrates the alteration of the countryside by the machinery of human progress.

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This association between different new elements in the landscape may illuminate a second painting by Guillaumin in which a railroad motif is again dominated by the stone arches of a manmade span. In Aqueduct at Arcueil, Sceaux Railroad Line (1874, Figure 73), the Aqueduc de la Vanne is as much a principal motif as the train tracks, which went due south from Paris to the comfortable suburb of Sceaux. The Sceaux line, which left its station at the Rue d’Enfer (now Denfer-Rochereau), was owned by Guillaumin’s former employer, the Compagnie d’Orléans. It has been part of the Paris FIGURE 72. Title-page illustration for Louis

Figuier’s Les Merveilles de la science, vol. 1 (Paris: Furne, Jouvet, 1867).

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FIGURE 73. Armand Guillaumin, Aqueduct at Arcueil, Sceaux Railroad Line, 1874. Art Institute of Chicago. FIGURE 74. Hippolyte Collard, Deviation of the Vanne Waters, photograph, ca. 1867.

Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris.

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Regional Express Network (RER) system since 1969. The 11.5-kilometer line was inaugurated in June 1846 and was known for its curvy route, which required special carriage-wheel technology.45 Arcueil lies between Gentilly, which borders on Paris, and Sceaux. Guillaumin’s view looks south along the tracks, away from Paris, toward where the 157-kilometer-long aqueduct turns north from a brief eastwest run across the valley on its way toward Paris. Originally built in the seventeenth century to bring water from Rungis (near Orly), its extension was part of the system of recent improvements to the Paris water supply.46 It was completed in 1874, bringing water harvested from the Vanne River near the city of Sens in Burgundy to the Montsouris Reservoir, which still supplies half of Paris’s needs.47 It was photographed by Hippolyte Collard around 1867 (Figure 74). In a landscape with bourgeois travelers—possibly visitors to the park at Arcueil or the nearby castle—who are casually awaiting the arrival of their train, one thus discovers the intersection of two important facets of modern infrastructure. With dappled sunlight from a blue sky falling on the partly grassy roadbed, Guillaumin’s world, with its industrial emphasis, is optimistic and harmonious.

SPEED AND THE INDUSTRIAL SUBLIME The experience of railway travel changed people’s lives, but it cannot be said to have been a novelty by the 1870s, when it first entered the realm of French painting through Impressionism. In 1869, 111 million travelers took the train. People were so used to train travel that, far from considering it an adventure, they became impatient for arrival, much as today people are impatient with the speed of computers because of their raised expectations. The historian François Caron cites Maxime Du Camp’s comparison between the wonder of his first train trip and the banality that train travel became.48 Speeds on express trains ranged from sixty to eighty kilometers (thirty-seven to fifty miles) per hour, with some capable of even more.49 As passenger traffic seemed to level off in the late 1860s, companies began to offer special promotions and tourist tickets, sleepers, dining cars, coastal ferry liaisons, and other services. They invested in resorts as well.50 Through such efforts to encourage travel, nature became a packageable commodity. In La Vie en chemin de fer (1861), the popular writer Benjamin Gastineau could exclaim: “With the speed of the train, everything is transformed and poeticized. . . . All of nature becomes a fabulous theater.”51 Yet despite proposals by several artists and writers that railroad imagery be used in public buildings—as in Manet’s unanswered suggestion of 1879 to the Paris Municipal Council for the decoration of the rebuilt Paris city hall—it entered the realm of painting only via the smaller formats of Impressionism.52 The art of Joseph Mallord William Turner is often cited as an antecedent for and influence on Impressionism. It is true that when Monet and Pissarro were in London they discovered Turner’s works. Among the most famous of Turner’s paintings is still his Rain, Steam and Speed: The Great Western

Railway (1842, National Gallery, London). Widely recognized for its atmospheric effects produced by open, gestural brushstrokes and palette-knife work, Turner’s painting may have confirmed the Impressionists’ already formed aesthetic interests and technical experimentation. In addition, this particular picture by Turner may have contributed to the Impressionist commitment to modernity by legitimating the representation of train travel, connecting it to interests and techniques the Impressionists already considered modern. The painting did, in fact, acquire a special status within Impressionism in that it

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was the only Turner reproduced in an etching by a printmaker and member of the Impressionist group, Félix Bracquemond. His rendering of Rain, Steam and Speed was executed in 1873 and exhibited at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. Several writers have observed a compositional similarity between Pissarro’s Lordship Lane Station, East Dulwich and the Turner, with both locomotives moving toward the viewer, who is positioned near the track. Trapped on Turner’s viaduct and scurrying for its life is a hare. Its fright and other effects contribute to a sense of movement down the track, with the viewer safely to the side. In the Pissarro, the sense of motion one might normally associate with the engine is replaced by the tension, noted earlier, that is produced by the viewer’s position just above the tracks. The aspects of the railroad emphasized by the Turner, perhaps the poetic and theatrical aspects mentioned by Gastineau, are most apparent in the work of Claude Monet. Even if we exclude his 10 8

series of paintings in and around the Gare Saint-Lazare and its railway yards, no major nineteenthcentury painter before or after Monet ever made so many paintings of trains. Like Sisley’s river barges and Guillaumin’s representations of public works, they are a characteristic and concentrated theme in his oeuvre of the 1870s. Other than the Gare Saint-Lazare series, Monet’s trains are with few exceptions seen at Argenteuil, Monet’s commuter stop.53 But one of those exceptions is singularly important, for The Cargo Convoy (1872, Plate 17) is one of Impressionism’s most dramatic industrial landscapes. The painting was part of the group of pictures that Monet made on his trip to Rouen in 1872. It shows one of those places not in Argenteuil—such as Le Havre and Clichy—to which Monet traveled seemingly for the purpose of representing modern, sometimes overtly industrial imagery. In the foreground, three figures, a man and two women, watch a passing freight train with long, flatbed hauling cars. The convoy stretches across almost the entire composition, leaving a billowing stream of white vapor reaching back in a powerful diagonal. One could not ask for a sharper contrast with Monet’s earlier Train in the Countryside, a contrast enhanced by the different role of the figures. In both paintings, the people are identifiably bourgeois—well-dressed men and ladies with their parasols. In Train

in the Countryside, they enjoy their surroundings, making little note of the train, which they take for granted. In The Cargo Convoy, they gape at the industrial spectacle before them, much like the tourists Monet later painted in views of the Normandy coast such as The Manneporte, Etretat (1883, W 832, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), where the figures are dwarfed by the huge cliff formation.54 The implication is that this industrial scene is an extraordinary sight worth experiencing, an example of what might be called the “industrial sublime.” The cargo train travels against a hillside with a thicket of factory chimneys. The location is Déville, in the valley of the Cailly River, outside Rouen. Textile manufacturing and dyeing works, paper mills, naval construction, and metallurgy, among many other industries, were concentrated here. The figures are looking approximately west southwest. On the upper reaches of the hillside is the Roumare Forest, which Monet only summarily indicated. He was not interested in the possible irony of a natural forest superseded by an industrial one; indeed, the band of green field in his immediate foreground seems relatively pleasant and unthreatened. The bold cloud of vapor unifies the central band of the composition, wedged in between grass and sky. It sweeps across and spreads through the industrial city, mixing with the less luminous, ostensibly heavier, and presumably more acrid and toxic emissions of the factories. The summarily treated foreground and relatively generalized forms of the train may simulate the blur of the train’s speed, though freight trains were probably slower than passenger trains. In its special place—

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FIGURE 75. Claude Monet, Argenteuil Station, 1872. Conseil Générale du Val d’Oise, Château de la Motte, Luzarches.

the industrial suburb—and viewed from a distance, as across a field, such a spectacle might well be cause for national pride and celebration (see Chapter 5), especially in the immediate wake of France’s recent defeat at the hands of the Prussians and then its subsequent escape from a destructive civil war. Of Monet’s six pictures of trains at Argenteuil, two were painted at the station, three show trains crossing the Seine on the railroad bridge, and one shows a train crossing the fields outside town. Rather than the results of a concentrated campaign, they were done sporadically at different times and seasons. The earliest, Argenteuil Station (1872, Figure 75), was painted in the same year as The Cargo Con-

voy and is the closest to it in spirit, as it is also the closest in spirit to the paintings of the 1877 Gare Saint-Lazare series. It shows the rail yards at Argenteuil station and is a true industrial scene. Until the line was extended in the direction of Pontoise, Argenteuil was at the end of a suburban spur off the main line heading toward Rouen and Le Havre. Rolling stock and engines were stored there or maneuvered to reverse direction. Until the construction of a bridge over the Seine, which opened in 1863, passengers had disembarked across the river at Gennevilliers. Thanks to Argenteuil’s popularity for weekend rowers and sailors, it became a destination in its own right.55 Monet shows several parallel tracks, with a shunt between them, and at least three active locomotives oriented in different directions. Telegraph poles, signal wires, a crane, and various outbuildings and sheds are also part of the landscape, which is framed by a couple of distant hills. In its broad execution and limited tonal range, punctuated by a few small red lights, this painting is the railway equivalent of Monet’s Impression: Sunrise—painted in

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the same year—the latter celebrated for its sketchlike representation of Le Havre’s industrial port. In both, moreover, an open foreground is framed by utilitarian vessels, their manmade vapors merging with the sky. Together, they may be taken as a pair of industrial “impressions.” Monet’s other painting of a train at Argenteuil station is the far better-known Train in the Snow

at Argenteuil Station (1875, Figure 76), in which even the bulk of the locomotive, seen relatively close up, is suffused and dematerialized in the snow-filled air. A signal man stands by the front of the train near the stopping sign above the fence, readying for departure. The neatly planted row of trees bears witness to the station’s recent landscaping. Those trees, the irregular, rustic lines of the fence, and the softening effects of snow serve to contain the engine within the tranquil ambiance of a residential refuge. Similarly, Train in the Snow at Argenteuil (1875, Figure 77) dampens the train’s effect with snow and 11 0

earthen winter tonalities, enhanced by the beige underpainting that shows through prominently, suggesting raw soil and thus a work—both the painting and the landscape—in process. The train is shown moving away from the viewer in the middle distance; its curved tracks contrast with the hard, straight, industrial quality of the trajectory of The Cargo Convoy. Even so, the entire lower half to two-thirds of the composition has forms strewn about haphazardly, except for the tracks themselves. The fencing and telegraph poles are spaced widely enough so they appear to follow somewhat randomly, and the scrub and grasses that poke up from under the snow seem no better than weeds, perhaps suggesting nature randomly covering its wounds. This relatively empty, semicoherent, antipicturesque landscape, like Sisley’s The Seine at Grenelle (Plate 10, discussed in Chapter 3), seems all the more authentic for these qualities, yet there is also a sense of its barrenness in a wasteland created by the uncaring penetration of the industrial right-of-way. There is none of the clean structural coherence or pride associated with improving nature that was found in the topography of Pissarro’s Road along the Train Tracks, Effect of

Snow, Caillebotte’s Railroad Right-of-Way, or Guillaumin’s Bridge over the Marne at Nogent. Monet’s views of trains at Argenteuil were more than simply by-products of his sittings along the river watching pleasure boaters. The wooden arches of the highway bridge appear far more frequently in his work, but north of the highway bridge was the railroad trestle, opened in 1863 and rebuilt, like the highway bridge, after having been destroyed during the Franco-Prussian War. Its sleek, simple structure of large cast-iron beams laid across pairs of cylindrical piers was a most efficient and economical design compared to the far heavier and more labor-intensive stone viaducts and bridges of previous decades. It simplified the design of the similar bridge on the same line that crossed the Seine at Asnières.56 In a painting generally dated to 1873, Railroad Bridge at Argenteuil (Figure 78), the bridge forcefully traverses the composition as its principal motif. A train with three passenger carriages and some cargo heads across it toward Paris; a couple of sailboats float by under it. The bridge had been celebrated by an article in Le

Monde illustré shortly after its opening, which claimed that it “did honor to the ingenious engineers who were in charge of the work.”57 It might well have been an object of local pride, since it was constructed by the Joly ironworks, one of the largest in France, with which it shared the Argenteuil riverbank. One might easily assume that Monet was in agreement with that opinion, since his painting is considerably bolder than the illustration that accompanied the article.58 There was, however, a contrary point of view as well. Paul Tucker has discovered that several commentators blamed the ironworks engineers for a bare, undecorated structure with little artistic value. They considered it an intrusion on the environment, blocking previously open views. One of them expressed the hope that the

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FIGURE 76. Claude Monet, Train in the Snow at Argenteuil Station, 1875. Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris. FIGURE 77. Claude Monet, Train in the Snow at Argenteuil, 1875. Private collection.

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FIGURE 78. Claude Monet, Railroad Bridge at Argenteuil, 1873. Private collection, formerly Niarchos Collection, London.

Gennevilliers side of the supporting earthen mound would be planted with trees to blend in better with the landscape.59 In two later paintings of the bridge, Monet seems almost to respond to such advice, for he mitigated the bridge’s impact on the land by viewing it from a sharper angle than in his earlier painting.60 As a result, he was able to leave his foreground and the left-hand side of the composition open. Moreover, the bridge makes a softer transition to land when seen through the trees that frame both pictures at the right.61 The result is a more complete integration of the bridge with its surroundings that does not at all diminish the overall effect of its powerful thrust across the composition. In the sunny Philadelphia Museum version of the composition (Railroad Bridge at Argenteuil, 1874, Figure 79), the bridge’s white piers shimmer with blue reflections off the water, and a sailboat drifts lazily toward it. The vapors from the Paris-bound train seem to create the pleasantly cottony clouds in an otherwise clear blue sky. The starkness of Monet’s earlier composition has been converted to celebrate the harmony between idyllic sailing on pleasant waters and the rumbling overhead of industrial innovation in full-steam action. How different it is in that juxtaposition from a composition by the creator of idylls Auguste Renoir, whose later Railroad Bridge at Chatou (1881, Musée d’Orsay, Paris) has the bridge itself now almost completely hidden by chestnut trees in a scene that implies rustic leisure more than industry. Along the same lines, Renoir’s The Skiff (ca. 1875, National Gallery, London) focuses primarily on a pair of female boaters on the Seine, most likely near Chatou. The painting bespeaks modernity in every way, from the ladies’ fashionable clothing and the modern house behind them to the railroad bridge and the mostly hidden train in the background. Yet given the blurring of the bridge’s metallic framework and the unobtrusiveness of the train, these elements are merely a con-

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text for leisure rather than the primary interest of Renoir’s picture; in contrast, Monet’s Train in the

Countryside far more clearly implies the connection between rail transport and modern forms of recreation. Somewhere in between Renoir’s The Skiff and his early painting lies Monet’s more recent Near

the Railroad Bridge at Argenteuil (1874, W 321, Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri). The trestle in the latter is more distant than in Monet’s other paintings of the railroad bridge at Argenteuil, and it is combined with the strip of riverbank behind it to integrate with its surroundings, in an effect reminiscent of that in Pissarro’s 1873 painting of the Pontoise railway bridge. On the grassy bank in Monet’s foreground, the artist’s wife and son look toward the viewer. In such a scene, domestic bliss and enjoyment of natural surroundings appear fully congruent with modernization. Indeed, though less visible than in most other compositions, a train is chugging over the bridge in the distance. The painting represents not only the structure itself but the activity that gives it purpose. Only when one learns how Monet suppressed the evidence of less pleasure-oriented aspects of industrial modernity in Argenteuil (see Chapter 5) does one realize how selective and constructed this vision was. His insistence on preserving Argenteuil as a residential retreat allowed him to incorporate aspects of modern industrial technology that enhanced bourgeois comfort and convenience. Otherwise, as we know, he celebrated the industrial presence elsewhere. Much has been written in recent years about representations of the Gare Saint-Lazare, which was Paris’s busiest station and was located in its most modern neighborhood (see Chapter 1). A 1998 exhibition organized by Juliet Wilson-Bareau brought together the eleven paintings from Monet’s group of views of the arrival hall, the passenger platforms, the yards, and the tracks that extended to the Place de l’Europe and beyond. Even before any of the Impressionists had taken up the theme of the

FIGURE 79. Claude Monet, Railroad Bridge at Argenteuil, 1874. Philadelphia Museum of Art.

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railroad, the writer Champfleury exclaimed in an essay of 1868: “One freezing winter evening I was crossing the Pont de l’Europe. I leaned through one of the large cast-iron openings that offer a view of the Gare Saint-Lazare. No spectacle since Rembrandt’s famous Nightwatch ever appeared so fantastic. Immense perspectives lead towards the luminous eyes of machines that slide slowly in the distance along the rails. [There is] a flash, a burst of smoke, and mists pierced by a thousand lamplights, and as a frame for this industrial landscape [are] enormous lozenges of simple and massive cast iron.”62 Although Monet’s paintings are justly celebrated, he was not the first Impressionist to paint in the immediate vicinity of the Gare Saint-Lazare. Two painters preceded him with large and noteworthy pictures: Edouard Manet in 1872–73 with The Railroad (Figure 80) and Gustave Caillebotte in 1876 with Pont de l’Europe (see Plate 5). Indeed, Caillebotte helped Monet with the rent for the apart11 4

ment he used across the street from the station. Neither Manet nor Caillebotte, however, focused as centrally as Monet on the station and its activities. To both, the railroad theme appears at first glance almost incidental. In Manet’s painting, a little girl, said to be the daughter of the painter’s friend Alphonse

FIGURE 80. Edouard Manet, The Railroad, 1872–73. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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Hirsch, gazes through an iron fence across the railroad yards that pass under the Place de l’Europe. This was the location of Hirsch’s studio. The girl’s nanny, posed by Manet’s professional model, Victorine Meurent, holding a little puppy, looks up from her reading, as if just noticing a passerby. She seems oblivious to the vapors and presumed activity behind her, which enthrall the child. In Caillebotte’s picture too, an observer, the worker in the foreground, gazes out from the trestle. Anyone even slightly familiar with the Pont de l’Europe’s spectacularly engineered crossing of iron girder bridges over the railroad yards would realize that the tracks lie below and that the cloud of steam issuing from behind the hefty beams in the background must come from a passing train. Viewers barely notice a tiny locomotive approximately halfway up at the painting’s right-hand edge; they tend to be far more preoccupied with the passing encounter of a man and woman in the street. A smaller painting by Caillebotte (On the Pont de l’Europe, ca. 1876, B 51, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth) changes the point of view so that, along with urban figures, one gazes directly through the ironwork toward the Saint-Lazare yards and the massive station in the background. Although these representations of the area near Saint-Lazare Station are certainly marked by railway presences, those presences seem to be merely a setting for something else. Even if one takes seriously the title Manet gave his painting—The Railroad—as an indication of his principal interest, one must conclude that such interest seems primarily aesthetic—an aspect of the spectacle of modernity, with which only the child would be bothered. Of course, children were sometimes used by artists to call attention to ways of seeing that adult conventions overlooked. In Romanticism and in certain works by the Realist painter Gustave Courbet, children suggested naiveté—a vision capable of finding wonder in mere reality.63 Critics of Impressionism attacked such lowly realism and compared it to photography. Yet Baudelaire, a friend of Manet, had called artistic genius precisely this kind of “childhood recovered at will.”64 So it is possible that Manet, however obliquely and self-consciously, was exploring the possibilities of industrial subject matter, which his younger Impressionist colleagues were embracing contemporaneously, though with their attitudes more centered on physical and economic change. Indeed, by virtue of the iron grille that separates the girl from her view, Manet recorded the physical effect of tracks cutting through the city, as the parallelism of metal work echoes their form.65 Such effects are not merely ambiguous but often productive. On the one hand, the fence is a barrier, preventing access and fragmenting the neighborhood psychologically—even though its new streets were designed from the outset to be on either side of the rail yards and were connected by the Pont de l’Europe. On the other hand, the iron bars provide a safe vantage point, framing and, almost like an up-ended musical staff, offering a grid against which the notes of modern urban life can be aesthetically plotted. Such bittersweet contradictions were at the heart of modern existence and could lead to novel forms of art. Appearing at the Salon of 1874, just after the opening of the first Impressionist exhibition, Manet’s picture, with its industrial allusions, may offer a meditation on Impressionism’s relation to modernity. As such, this painting would have strengthened his reputation as one of the leaders of the new group, even though he abstained from their exhibitions. By comparison to Manet’s and Caillebotte’s work, Monet’s eleven paintings of the Gare SaintLazare railway station and environment are relatively straightforward in their dramatic celebration of functional architecture, industrial machines, and modern mobility.66 Monet knew the place well. On returning from England, and before settling at Argenteuil, he lived in an apartment across the street.

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Once in Argenteuil, he became a commuter through the station every time he came to Paris to see friends or manage his affairs. Monet’s four best-known paintings of the group of eleven take their views under the station’s cast-iron and glass arrival hall, through which all passengers must pass.67 Designed, as noted earlier, by Etienne Flachat, its floor plan grouped the lines according to destination.68 To the left were the Versailles and Auteuil trains, in the center the trains to Argenteuil, and to the right the trains to Saint-Germain and the long-distance trains to Rouen, Le Havre, and Dieppe. Images of the station from the inside were rare, with the exception of the one used for years in the Librairie Hachette’s guidebooks from the Bibliothèque des chemins de fer, authored first by Jules Janin and then by Adolphe Joanne.69 The largest span covered the left-hand side (shown on the right in Figure 61 because the view of the station is from the rear). Under this span, to the left near the Auteuil platform, 116

Monet painted his most finished and largest views (Interior of the Gare Saint-Lazare, 1877, Plate 18). The other two interiors, including Arrival of the Normandy Train (1877, W 440, Art Institute of Chicago), show the side bordering on the Rue d’Amsterdam, to the right. Stationed farther down the platforms, beyond the glass and iron roof, Monet painted seven other views that included the storage sheds along the Rue d’Amsterdam side, which are also visible in the Arrival of the Normandy Train. For example, two very freely painted images that mix tracks, smoke, and signals in near-abstract patterns are Pont

de l’Europe (1877, Figure 81) and Train Signals and Tracks at Gare Saint-Lazare (1877, W 448, Niedersächisiches Landesmuseum, Hanover). For his eleven paintings, Monet set about a campaign far more systematic than he had for his group of the harbor at Le Havre, to which he had returned repeatedly over two or three years. His desire to concentrate on a series was strong enough for him to rent the apartment across the way, as mentioned earlier. Yet he followed the same pattern of accumulating scenes viewed from diverse locations in and around his principal motif. At Saint-Lazare, he worked intensely from January 1877 until the opening of the third Impressionist exhibition in April, at which he showed at least seven views, possibly more.70 Although Monet always encouraged the idea that he worked spontaneously and exclusively in plein air—that is, on the spot, directly from observation, rather than in the studio—an album full of pencil drawings reveals that his choices of angle and composition were carefully made from among many possibilities.71 Although in January he had immediately sought permission to set up his easel in the station, there was some delay before he received his authorization. It seems possible that until a positive response came he made sketches in his album and went to paint in his apartment. By March he had already sold a few of the paintings to collectors.72 If there is one pervasive element in the group as a whole, present in every image, it is the smoke and mist that signify the presence of steam power, harnessed by human ingenuity. The pictures also record the presence of massive manmade structures, marvels of engineering, often dematerialized and obscured by the floating, drifting, sometimes billowing, sometimes dissipating clouds of vapor. In the paintings of the interior of the station and of the Pont de l’Europe, the architecture serves as an elegant framework—related to the function of but more open than Manet’s iron fence. Resembling a stage set or related enclosure, it theatricalizes both the depicted presences and the pictorial means that produce them. With their patterns of crossing beams and cables, signal stanchions, pillar posts, suspended lamps, and tracks, overlaid by a latticework of light and shadow, Monet’s views dramatize visual spectacle as the result of uniting modern industrial forces with modern artistic tech-

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niques. Monet’s achievement may be contrasted to photographs of tracks and stations published by Edouard Baldus (Figure 82). Whereas a number of Impressionist paintings of public works seem to parallel documentation of similar monuments, Monet’s interpretation goes far beyond both the aims and means of the photographers. With the technical limitations of their medium, due to its still relatively long exposures, to say nothing of its lack of color, photographers would have found it impossible to capture the ineffable, mobile elements dramatized by Monet even if they had wanted to. Along with the steam, of course, are the engines that produce it—the “monsters” or “beasts,” as they were rhetorically called in the celebratory prose of some of the favorable reviews of the time. Indeed, Monet’s paintings offer close-up views of locomotives that are rare in the railroad imagery of the other artists this study has considered. Illustrations of the engines produced by Cail and Co., such as one in Turgan’s Les Grandes Usines, supply the details that Monet has glossed over to achieve his overall effect.73 Georges Rivière, a friend of Renoir and publisher of the short-lived journal

L’Impressionniste—a sort of in-house publicity organ—wrote what is still today one of the freshest and most authentic accounts of these pictures:

FIGURE 81. Claude Monet, Pont de l’Europe, 1877. Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris.

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FIGURE 82. Edouard Baldus, Amiens Station, photograph from Chemin

de Fer du Nord Album, vol. 1 (1855), Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

In one of the biggest pictures [the Fogg Museum version], the train has just arrived, the locomotive is about to depart. Like a furious and impatient beast, energized rather than fatigued by the long haul it has just provided, it shakes its mane of smoke, which presses up to the glass roof of the great hall. All around the monster, men scurry along the track like pygmies at the foot of a giant. On the other side, resting locomotives sleepily wait. One hears the shouts of the workers, the sharp whistles of the machines sounding their warnings from a distance, the constant sound of iron on iron, and the formidable and breathless respiration of the steam. One sees the grandiose and crazed movements of a station in which the ground trembles at each turn of wheels. The walkways are damp with soot, and the atmosphere is laden with the acrid odor of burning coal. . . . Near this picture, another of the same size [the Musée d’Orsay version] shows the arrival of a train in full sunlight. It is a joyous and lively canvas: people rush to step down from the wagons, the smoke drifts rearward in order to rise up higher, and through the skylight the sun casts its gilding on the sandy track bed and machines. In some paintings, the fast, irresistible trains, wrapped in airy rings of smoke, are engulfed in the embarkation hall. In others, great locomo-

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tives stand immobile in their various waiting places. In all of them, the same power energizes these objects, which only Monsieur Monet has known how to represent.74 Despite what Rivière calls the “monotony and aridity of the subject matter,”75 he seems to have recovered— thanks to Monet’s extraordinary talents and knowledge of “composition and arrangement—the excitement once associated with trains that Maxime Du Camp now dismissed as a banality. Implicit in Rivière’s conclusion is a comparison between the forces propelling the locomotion and those that impelled the artist—the concept of nature’s forces pressed into service both for progress and for art. Emile Zola, too, hailed Monet for having captured “the poetry of train stations,” and Monet’s oeuvre for exemplifying “painting in its grandest modern setting.”76 There is drama both in Monet’s portrayal and in that which he portrays. This is the essence of the performative effect of Impressionism—that an artwork simultaneously enacts and describes that to which it refers through a unity of subject matter and created form. In the image of steam as virtual abstraction indexed by the artist’s proactive brush, the viewer finds Monet’s evanescent merger of industrial and aesthetic productivity to be a convincing and perfectly complete performance of the spirit of his times.

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5 FACTORIES AND WORK SITES CITY AND COUNTRY

Although the development of landscape painting in the nineteenth century prior to Impressionism shows a clearly marked trend toward naturalism, landscape was still portrayed as a refuge, a nostalgic escape from the encroachments of daily life. Impressionist landscape functions in this way for many viewers today, although it was differently regarded in its own time. Even painters noted for outdoor study and close observations of place and environmental conditions—men such as Camille Corot and Théodore Rousseau—produced landscapes whose soothing or melancholic images were conducive to introspection and repose. Factory chimneys poking up over the horizon would have been unwelcome reminders of workaday life, intrusions upon the meditations and withdrawal from care facilitated by the vicarious retreats to the countryside proposed by landscape painting.1 Perhaps the different ethos underlying Impressionist landscapes is therefore no better exemplified than by the presence within them of factories. The architecture writer Gillian Darley writes that the image of the factory was “an apt metaphor for progress and change.” From the eighteenth century onward, factories were “markers: of revolution, technical and social, of innovation, in design and in process, politically and economically . . . reflecting the exact circumstances of time and place with some precision.”2 That is not to say that Impressionists entirely abandoned the notion of landscape as refuge; and certainly in the majority of examples—especially after 1880 and in the art of Monet and Renoir—they perpetuated its association with leisure. But there is no better demonstration of Impressionism’s construction of landscape as a real rather than an imaginary space than those scenes in which contemporary modernity in the form of industrial economic activities is present. Foreshadowing and anticipating Paul Alexis’s call for the artist “to plant his feet in modern life,” Jules-Antoine Castagnary advocated the naturalist portrayal of landscape. Although he did not specifically recommend industrial landscapes as we understand them, he repudiated false idealizations of nature, proposing representations of modern France as it was actually experienced. His 1863 statement, briefly quoted earlier in this book, is worth quoting at length here for its groundbreaking inclusion of urban and industrial themes and its allusion to scientific techniques of observation: The goal of painting is to express the society that has produced it. . . . Every epoch is known solely by the events that occur in it: political events, literary events, scientific events, industrial events, artistic events, each of which is marked by its particular character distinguishing it from the previous epoch and the one that will follow. . . . Consequently, painting . . . is a part of the social conscience, a fragment of the mirror in which generations view themselves, each in turn,

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and as such it must follow society step by step, recording its incessant transformations. [One might dare say that] each epoch deposits its image on the canvas in this way and reveals in passing the secret of its genius. . . . [The school of naturalism embodies these goals, for it] affirms that art is the expression of life in all its modes and degrees, and that its only aim is to reproduce nature. . . . It is truth allied with science. Naturalism thus reestablishes the broken bonds between man and nature. Through its dual effort to represent rural life, which it already interprets with such power, and the life of cities, which promises some of its most beautiful triumphs, painting renders all the forms of the visible world. Already, it restores to their true role line and color, which are no longer separate from one another.3

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In 1868 Castagnary refined this definition of naturalism in painting as “the visual reproduction of society in its natural setting.”4 It was a profound revolution, he argued, that would finally “give to France that which she is still seeking . . . an art that reflects her and is her faithful image.”5 Beginning in the 1860s, and throughout the 1870s, Castagnary attacked the Salon juries and the art administrations for their outdated support of academic painting and their refusal to encourage and include the work of younger artists. Only landscape artists had succeeded in rendering a true image of France. In 1876 he credited the Impressionists with an important contribution to that development.6 Well in advance of the first Impressionist exhibition but immediately concurrent with the formative years of the Impressionist painters, Castagnary’s language thus encompassed urban and industrial life and implied a process of representation based on art as a mirroring or recording enterprise. If he had not been so specifically considering painters, he could easily have been evoking photography, which in any case provided the model for his concept of modern representation: the notions of inclusive rendering, of an art in which the epoch “deposits its image on the canvas” (as nature might be said to do on the photosensitive plate), and of the fusion of line and color in nature, as opposed to their academic separation as techniques of figuration. These imply a scientific viewpoint grounded in the reality of the external world rather than subject to rote technical recipes or artistic manipulation. His insistence on achieving unity through the alliance of science and aesthetics echoes the integrative progressivist theories of the Positivist philosopher Auguste Comte. When Castagnary began to see his ideals realized in the work of landscape painters, including the Impressionists, he insisted—mostly in vain—that they receive public recognition and inclusion at the official Salons. The appeals of Alexis and Castagnary have two important contexts. The first is Positivism, the other nationalism. Hippolyte Taine, though not a disciple of Comte, took from the latter the idea of historical evolution in phases toward a harmonious end and the general Hegelian principle linking history to material circumstances. Taine was professing at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in the 1860s that art is grounded in the chronological, geographical, social, racial, and biological reality of the individual. Emile Zola, who was Edouard Manet’s most vocal supporter, met Taine while working for the publisher Hachette and reviewed several of Taine’s works, including Philosophie de l’art, in which Taine’s lectures were published.7 He once declared himself Taine’s “humble disciple.”8 Zola’s famous statement that art is nothing other than “a corner of nature seen through a temperament” was both a version of Courbet’s individualist Realist Manifesto (“to translate the customs of my epoch according to my own estimation”)9 and Taine’s notion that reality is viewed through the “screen” of individual consciousness, a con-

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sciousness affected by the factors mentioned above.10 This scientific grounding of human consciousness in reality meant that any attempt to represent the world other than through honest perception was false. Comte had argued similarly, so it might be said that such ideas were little more than old wine in new bottles. Even so, their consequences were beginning to be felt. Moreover, Positivism had a faith in progress underlying its emphasis on empirical knowledge and expression. But unlike Zola, whose concentration on art as an individual’s visual “analysis” of the world was ostensibly politically neutral (despite his writing for liberal newspapers), Castagnary retained some of the social purpose he had acquired through his associations with liberal politics, Positivism, and Courbet.11 Nationalism was an important factor too. In 1851 the British held their famous Great Exhibition of Works of Industry of All Nations at the Crystal Palace, a vast building designed by Joseph Paxton especially for the occasion. It was erected out of glass and masonry on a skeleton of cast iron—a technology that permitted the creation of huge open spaces. The building’s symbolic value is confirmed by the fact that when Pissarro was in England some twenty years later, he made a “portrait” of the building (The Crystal Palace, 1871, Figure 83), one of the very few he ever made.12 Although the exhibition was inspired by earlier French models, the British had the idea to make their display international, thus implicitly claiming to be the leaders of world exchange.13 The French felt humiliated, and rivalry with British industry marked French attitudes toward the future, much as rivalry with U.S. culture marks French attitudes today. If Napoleon III was to bring stability to French politics, as those who valued order over democracy asserted, he would need to foster by any and all means an economic ex-

FIGURE 83. Camille Pissarro, The Crystal Palace, 1871. Art Institute of Chicago.

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pansion that would maintain France’s dominant position in continental Europe. But the French had a lot of catching up to do; the nation’s industrial revolution lagged behind England’s by about fifty years. In response to the Crystal Palace, then, the French organized a Universal Exposition for 1855. In it, the status of art would equal that of industry, enabling the French not only to display their industrial achievements but to flaunt their superiority in “culture.” The Universal Exposition was also the occasion for a small polemic on the relationship of industry and the arts. Maxime Du Camp published a book of poems called Les Chants modernes, the lengthy preface to which not only reiterated that art should be of its times but claimed that industry should be a theme in modern poetry. Among the verses Du Camp composed were titles such as “La Vapeur,” “La Bobine,” and “La Locomotive.” Although other poets had already expressed admiration 124

for certain scenes of industry, Du Camp was really the first to make them systematically central to a major literary effort. That effort failed mainly because his poetic forms were still conventional.14 More than his poems themselves, however, Du Camp’s attack on art for art’s sake and on “pure form” led to an animated discussion that revealed important political dimensions to the issues he was raising. As we shall see in Chapter 8, similar political implications affected the reception of Impressionism. The official art culture of the 1855 Exposition was still primarily academic, and it provided the context for Taine’s, Castagnary’s, and Zola’s often oppositional aesthetics of the 1860s.15 Taine’s praise for Dutch art, which he claimed was characterized by its direct use of color outside of academic formulas, was linked to the superior, democratic forms of the Dutch Republic. For the Republican Castagnary, especially during the Second Empire of Napoleon III, forms descended from the tradition- and hierarchy-challenging Realism of Courbet embodied the freedom and national democratic aspirations present in French art and society since the Revolution of 1789. For Zola, who couched his arguments less politically, the empirical basis of Manet and his followers’ use of color and their recording of contemporary surroundings were emblems of an irresistible progressive impulse. Even so, from the 1850s forward, France’s superiority in the arts would not entirely compensate, in terms of national morale, for its second rank in industry. Moreover, French overconfidence in their military prowess proved disastrous, as their diplomatic provocations helped ignite the FrancoPrussian War. Both elements became important features in the rhetoric of national pride, with consequences for art during the 1870s. In Les Merveilles de l’industrie (1873–77), Louis-Guillaume Figuier predicted that in spite of being defeated by the Prussians, “a people [i.e., the French] whose industry is flourishing can serenely anticipate that the future will bring about their moral vindication.”16 The engineer Paul Poiré wrote in La France industrielle: “If France today, still under the shock of the terrible blows it received [from the Prussians], can look to its future without too much worry, . . . it is because her people, of exquisite taste, free and inventive spirit, truly possess the industrial genius.”17 His implication was that French talent in artistic taste and creativity would carry over into industry.

SYMBOLISM AND SMOKE More than any other motif, including even the railroad, the factory symbolized brute productivity and national progress. Julien Turgan’s encyclopedic Grandes Usines de France suggests the factory’s ideological significance. His short preface is a strange mixture of evolutionary theory and pride. He held that

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since humanity was the last species to develop on earth, it seemed as if the other animals had already perfected all the strategies of survival. Man was thus forced to adapt through intelligence. Industry was the result of the battle between man and nature: “Led by study and inclination to the spectacle of the human battle [for survival], [the author] curiously examines those fortresses that man has erected against his original misery, those vast factories where the skillful direction of the chief, the activity of the foreman, and the courageous toil of the worker combine to produce the marvels of our civilization.”18 The factory was a relatively new building form that permitted under one roof the centralization of manufacturing activities that either were new or had previously been practiced on a smaller scale in individual cottages or workshops. In modern factories, machines performed tasks once done by hand, and they were often powered by steam engines that had begun to replace hydraulic power. The volume of their output responded and contributed to the development of markets beyond the local and regional level, facilitated by the expansion of and improvements in a truly national transportation infrastructure. The factory also represented large investments of capital to finance the harnessing of energy, purchase of machinery, and administration of shipping. Hence the factory structure itself, in addition to its practical function, stood for ownership and control over a wide-ranging enterprise. Although most factories were primarily utilitarian and architecturally undistinguished, they sometimes exemplified important structural advances responding to the need for large open workspaces with high ceilings. Etienne Flachat, who designed the Saint-Lazare train station, had earned his reputation constructing the great iron forges at Vierzon (1841).19 He also coauthored an authoritative treatise on cast-iron building techniques.20 Engineers took on the role of leadership in architectural design in addition to that of building bridges and railroads and renewing other elements of infrastructure, such as roads and navigable waterways. During the second half of the century, their accomplishments were more and more frequently documented by photography and other illustration, as we have seen.21 In 1874 the civil engineer Jules Garnier published his popular book for the lay reader on iron and its uses.22 In his book on railroads, Amédée Guillemin celebrated the engineer’s “magnificent role, which from the point of view of social influence and responsibility has no superior except that of the legislator and politician!”23 Such ideas were often aligned with those of the utopian philosopher Saint-Simon and his follower Prosper Enfantin.24 Saint-Simon’s training at the Ecole Polytechnique, France’s elite engineering school, determined his belief in the progress that industrial and technological innovation could bestow. Cast-iron structures therefore carried ideological as well as physical weight in their invocation of a glorious future. Certainly, industry and technology, fostered by the Second Empire’s Saint-Simon-inspired public-private partnership, drove France’s economic expansion into the early years of the Third Republic. The factory embodied the convergence of these forces.25 Occasional early-nineteenth-century representations of small work sites, such as Théodore Géricault’s The Lime Kiln (ca. 1822–23, Musée du Louvre, Paris), are related more to the picturesque of rural labor than to the spirit of national economy or industrial development. There are a few exceptional instances of paintings commissioned by business owners, such as the famous British example of the representations by Joseph Wright of Derby of Sir Richard Arkwright’s cotton mills at Cromford ( Ark-

wright’s Mill in Moonlight, 1783, private collection).26 In England to some degree and in Germany in particular, a small number of specialized artists were attracted to industrial scenes and machine works as a form of spectacle.27 In 1833 Corot painted the House and Factory of Monsieur Henry at Soissons (1833,

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FIGURE 84. Ignace Bonhommé, Le Creusot, 1855. Lithograph. Bibliothèque Nationale, Cabinet des Estampes et des Photographies, Bonhommé, AA6.

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Philadelphia Museum of Art). In such works, the patron’s pride of possession and prosperity draw on the tradition of landed gentry who commissioned portraits of their great houses and parks. Such private commissions supported the career of the one French painter who was the sole major exception to the paucity of factory painters—Ignace-François Bonhommé, known as “le Forgeron” (the Blacksmith). For more than twenty years beginning in the 1840s, he specialized in portraying the great metallurgical industries sited in the Nièvre region and around Le Creusot.28 Bonhommé’s View

of the Great Forge at Fourchambault (1840, Eglise Saint-Louis, Fourchambault) is typical of his concentration on the motif rather than on the landscape. In that emphasis, his compositions are similar to those of graphic artists working for the popular illustrated press, where most visual images of industry appeared. However, some of his views do have the sweep of landscape (Le Creusot, 1855, Figure 84), including those of Le Creusot that he showed at the Salon of 1867. The latter were commissioned by the Schneider family, founders of the French metallurgical industry.29 Such paintings’ structures and their precise rendering of various industrial elements, though picturesque, clearly align them with the genre of topographical panoramic views rather than with the more intimate, solitary, and nostalgic scenes preferred by the leading landscapists of the time. Journals such as L’Illustration and Le Monde illustré regularly featured picture essays on factories and work sites, at times employing engravings done after Bonhommé’s work, as in L’Illustration’s account of the Creusot furnaces in 1845. Technical books such as Flachat’s on cast iron and Louis-Laurent Simonin’s La Vie souterraine,

ou Les Mines et les mineurs (Paris, 1867) also used Bonhommé’s work as an accurate record of the processes or facilities it represented. The documentary and topographical character of industrial landscape imagery thus further distanced it from the ideals of landscape painting. The same can be said of the many photographs of public works and railroad structures commissioned by the government in the middle of the nineteenth century. But unlike photographs of railways, photographs of factories were rare until the 1880s, for they would have been privately commissioned, like many of Bonhommé’s paintings. And whereas urban public works modified a cityscape that Haussmann’s engineers believed they were improving, factories, to the degree that they were considered from an aesthetic viewpoint at all, were more likely to be called a blight than an improvement. Even so, several important illustrated publications proudly

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documented French industry and its factories. Paul Poiré’s La France industrielle (2nd ed., 1875) was intended to raise the level of public awareness of the importance of industry—an element too neglected in French education, Poiré believed, thinking no doubt of France’s lag behind Britain.30 Louis Figuier’s illustrated compendiums Les Merveilles de la science (1867–70) and its successor Les Mer-

veilles de l’industrie (1873–77) constituted an eight-volume encyclopedic array of explanations and detailed images of every imaginable industrial process and apparatus of the time.31 The latter’s frontispiece engraving (Figure 85) shows Industry as a classical figure wearing a crown with a shining star, like a guiding light, and surrounded by factory smokestacks of all types. Included as well are various pieces of modern equipment, such as batteries, chemistry flasks, and condensers, while the lower register offers interior views of a glassworks and a pottery manufacturer. Like Bonhommé’s illustrations, most of those in Poiré’s and Figuier’s books show specific tasks being carried out in interiors.32 But on occasion, as in a panorama of the Springer grain distillery and yeast factory in the Paris suburb of Maisons-Alfort, there is a building exterior (Figure 86). This particular factory had exemplary planted grounds, which it occupied almost like a seventeenthcentury château. Priority in illustration of factory exteriors must go to the serial publication of Julien Turgan’s Les Grandes Usines.33 Whereas Poiré and Figuier were interested primarily in the scientific and industrial processes housed by the structures, Turgan presented factories from the broader perspective of national pride in industrial progress. While he explained manufacturing in detail, he also gave particulars of ownership, investment, and site. His volumes contain many exterior views of factories,

FIGURE 85. P. Ferat, Industry.

Frontispiece engraving for Louis Figuier’s Les Merveilles de l’industrie (Paris, 1873), vol. 1, p. i.

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some of which, such as a view of the mines at Vielle-Montagne (Moresnet) (Figure 87) or the Schneider metallurgy complex at Le Creusot, must qualify as true industrial landscapes.34 They are worth comparing to Monet’s painting of the industrial hillside at Déville, near Rouen, in The Cargo Convoy as instances of the “industrial sublime.” In an early volume, Turgan’s description of the Derosne and Cail foundry works in the Parisian sections of Grenelle (see the discussion of Gauguin’s Port de Grenelle in Chapter 3) and across the Seine at Chaillot suggests his attitude. The enterprise “is neither foundry, nor hardware manufacture, nor boiler works, nor construction site,” yet it produces machines without which “today’s industry could not survive.”35 There was therefore a substantial visual culture of factory images. Yet despite their modernity and significance, factories barely entered the repertory of painting until Impressionism. And when 128

they did, they exemplified the association between Impressionism and supposedly uncreative, documentary forms such as photography or topographical views. Unlike railroads, which the bourgeois and art-viewing public directly experienced, factories were a part of the environment rarely connected openly to pleasure or to leisure. Even when an artist who later became sympathetic to the Impressionists, Charles-François Daubigny, produced ostensibly accurate renderings of identifiable places, he did so using a loose technique that tended to generalize and aestheticize the reality on which they were based. He rarely chose his sites for their particular details. To the contrary, the more ordinary the place chosen by an artist, the more his rendering could be personal and a source of pleasure derived from artistic properties. Factories would have introduced unwanted points of interest and ideological considerations. By contrast, for Impressionists, who began with a new set of assumptions, industrial scenes were no longer out of bounds. In representing factories as their main objects of interest or at least including them in their landscapes, the new painters accepted a reality already well documented in graphic media. Against the elitist conventions of painting, they heeded the call of Castagnary’s naturalism and honesty. They produced a dynamic balance between subjects that overtly signified modernity and the artist’s equally modern freedom of choice and expression. Three rare examples of factories in the work of Edgar Degas underscore these points and illustrate different kinds of conditions under which factories appear in Impressionist paintings. The earliest is Race-

FIGURE 86. Bird’s-eye view of

Springer Distillery, in Louis Figuier’s Les Merveilles de l’industrie (Paris: Furne, 1873), vol. 4, p. 513, fig. 282.

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129 FIGURE 87. View of Moresnet,

engraving in Julien Turgan’s Les Grandes Usine, vol. 4 (Paris, 1865), p. 216.

horses before the Stands (1866–68, Figure 88), in which factories appear as part of an otherwise generalized landscape in the background against which the main event takes place. The showing of the colors, in which the jockeys parade their steeds before their owners prior to the race, was a tradition of this aristocratic activity imported from England. Degas’s painting thus combines the preoccupations with social class and with aesthetic artifice so characteristic of his work. The smokestacks seem so incidental to such interests that it is remarkable that Degas represented them at all. Surely there would have been no purpose to adding them, nor are they a motif in any other landscapes by Degas of this time (except for other versions of this one), so we cannot say that Degas sought them out deliberately. We can only conclude that he recorded what he saw—that there were factories located near the racetrack. Indeed, both Parisian racetracks were near industrial areas.36 Hence, Degas’s naturalist impulse, which was as strong as his other commitments, was to accept the presence of these smokestacks as markers of place and time—signs of modernity that in fact embody the conditions for the other aspects of his practice. Degas’s Portrait of Henri Rouart (ca. 1875, Figure 89), which was exhibited at the third Impressionist exhibition (1877), surely stems in part from the pride that Degas’s longtime friend Rouart had in his enterprise, a pride that was seconded by his serious interest in modern art. (Rouart exhibited his own landscape paintings with the Impressionists, and he collected their works.) For Degas— more than for Rouart himself—the association between the artist and modernity is evoked by this image of the proprietor standing in front of one of his factories. It is one of Degas’s many portraits of individuals in settings that tell of both the personality and the profession of his subjects. The Portrait

of Henri Rouart followed by two years Degas’s painting of his own two brothers and uncle in the rooms of the New Orleans cotton exchange, Portraits in a Cotton Office (1873, L 320, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Pau).37 Both images evoke the business world—one in which Degas’s family had a considerable stake because of the investments made by his father’s bank. Rouart, who had attended the Lycée Louis-leGrand with the artist, had received his further education as an engineer, and he was a partner in the manufacture of special metal tubing for cooling, electrical, and military applications.38 Degas has framed Rouart’s features within the geometries of railroad sidings leading to a low building with a high smoke-

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FIGURE 88. Edgar Degas, Racehorses before the Stands, 1866–68. Musée d’Orsay, Paris

stack and several smaller chimneys. Degas’s juxtaposition of these elements to the imposing head and serious expression of his friend clearly suggests the power of Rouart’s intellect—that of a self-made man capable of realizing his rational plans. Both evoking and contrasting with traditional portraits of gentry before their country houses, the portrait expresses dominion over nature, but in this case dominion through reason and investment rather than through tradition and heredity. As exemplified by Degas’s attempt (though failed) to sell his Portraits in a Cotton Office to a British textile manufacturer, the artist believed in this new class of patron as the best hope for the future of a modern art.39 Rouart’s support of Impressionist artists certainly confirmed Degas’s confidence.40 Smoke like that emanating from Rouart’s chimneys was a favored Impressionist motif for more than just aesthetic reasons. In this context, as in that of locomotives or other representations of factories, smoke and vapors are the by-product of the productive activities taking place within the machine or edifice from which the chimneys protrude. Although Degas almost never made landscapes except as backgrounds, one rare monotype focuses on factory smoke (Factory Chimneys, ca. 1876–79, Figure 90).41 This image corresponds to entries in one of his notebooks: “On smoke—people’s smoke, from pipes, cigarettes, cigars; smoke of locomotives, tall chimneys, factories, steamboats, etc.; smoke confined in the space under bridges; steam.”42 Inspired perhaps by Manet’s or Monet’s views of Saint-Lazare Sta-

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tion and its rail yards, Degas’s words situate smoke in its modern context. But since only the very tops of two of the four chimneys show in his monotype, one can presume that Degas’s interest was primarily aesthetic. By admitting those tips into the image, he nevertheless endowed his effects with a specifically industrial identity. Otherwise, the smoke might be from trains or steamboats—not that it would have mattered much. The point is that through this private and ephemeral work Degas aligned himself, however briefly, with other artists who celebrated such motifs. With his emphasis so exclusively on sky, there is here a sense of smoke as manmade cloud—as a new, synthetic element of landscape. Of all the Impressionists, none was more capable of appreciating such a concept than Degas, whose fascination with the rituals of the racecourse, the stagecraft of the opera and ballet, and the allure of the brothel was matched only by his self-conscious displays of the seductive artifices of painting. Hence, Degas’s use of the image of the factory, as in the three examples here discussed, establishes a range of possibilities: it may be a sign of modernity, declaring the naturalist vision as anchored in time and place; an attribute for what is primarily a portrait but one that reveals the subject’s ideals and profession; or a naturalistic reference for primarily aesthetic interests. Degas gave little indication of these factories’ significance as places of productivity or of their impact on the environment as an element of change— the essence of modernity, for better or for worse. For those artists who were more interested in land-

FIGURE 89. Edgar Degas, Portrait of Henri Rouart, ca. 1875. Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

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FIGURE 90. Edgar Degas, Factory Chimneys,

ca. 1876–79. Monotype. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

scape, such issues would be paramount. The doubt, alienation, and yearning for escape underlying Romantic landscape had disappeared in favor of a new self-confidence. In this new world, nature was being tamed by technology to serve humanity. The smoke of factory chimneys rivaled the forms of nature, marking the heavens, so to speak, with the power and ingenuity of human productivity.

FACTORIES INTO LANDSCAPE In a number of Impressionist paintings factories are the focal point, while in others they are simply part of, even apparently incidental to, a general view. We have already discussed many of the latter, such as Claude Monet’s Men Unloading Coal (Plate 14) and The Cargo Convoy (Plate 17), because their primary motifs, whether barges or the railway, were more visible than factories, the latter being part of their modern setting. Paul Cézanne, Armand Guillaumin, Camille Pissarro, Gustave Caillebotte, and Alfred Sisley are the only Impressionists who produced works exemplifying the former, whereas Monet included smoking factories in the backgrounds of many of his suburban scenes in addition to his overtly urban and industrial landscapes. If in Degas the presence of factories signified the proximity of the city—and perhaps, for some, its encroachment on country tranquillity—Guillaumin’s factory settings are by contrast always completely urban. Pissarro’s case is more complex, for the location was Pontoise, the small regional capital and market town about an hour and a half from Paris by train, three times as far out as Monet’s suburb of Argenteuil. The kind of manufacturing to which Pissarro’s numerous factories allude, moreover, was altogether more modest than the heavy industries celebrated by Guillaumin and included in Monet’s views of Déville, Clichy, or even Argenteuil. Pissarro was probably the first Impressionist to represent a factory directly, as in his La Pe-

tite Fabrique (1865, Figure 91) and Landscape with Factory (1867, Figure 92). But Armand Guillaumin deserves credit as the first to center attention on them in the context of economic power and development, as in his relatively well-known Setting Sun at Ivry (ca. 1869, Plate 19), which he exhibited at the first Impressionist exhibition as already belonging to Dr. Gachet. Guillaumin also made a number of related drawings, oil sketches, etchings, and paintings of the same and related views between 1865

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FIGURE 91. Camille Pissarro, La Petite Fabrique, 1865. Musée de Strasbourg. FIGURE 92. Camille Pissarro, Landscape with Factory, 1867. Formerly Putnam Collection, Timken Museum of Art, San Diego.

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and 1873.43 As a group, they constitute the first concerted grouping of works by an Impressionist on a clearly industrial motif, preceding Monet’s Le Havre group by a few years. If the origin of the “series” concept in painting can be traced to such early groups of works, then Guillaumin must be included among those who deserve credit for it. Most of Guillaumin’s paintings undoubtedly represent the famous forges that grew up along the riverbank between Charenton and Ivry (Figure 93), as seen from the Quai de Bercy, which was one of Guillaumin’s preferred locations. The distinctions between Pissarro and Guillaumin are significant, deriving first from the different kinds of factory they represented—premodern ateliers versus mechanized giants. The word fabrique can include handwork; compared to usine, it can suggest a smaller scale of production and less advanced processes. The different settings are also significant—Pontoise versus Ivry—as well as the relationship 134

the artists have conjured between the factories and their surroundings. La Petite Fabrique is represented as an isolated building in the middle of a field, clearly in the countryside rather than the urban part of town. With little indication of smoke emanating from its chimney, there is no explicit clue to activity inside. A few figures are present, but they have no clear relationship to the building, unlike the purposeful figures laboring in Pissarro’s more or less contemporaneous Barge at La Roche-Guyon (see Figure 52). As a witness to rural artisanship, La Petite Fabrique is even less specific than Géricault’s Lime Kiln, which offers clearer evidence of productivity. If one surmises, on the basis of many of Pissarro’s other

FIGURE 93. View of the Forges at Ivry, from L’Illustration, June 4, 1881, p. 387. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

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pictures, his sympathies with the rural worker, those sympathies seem little differentiated here from what he will reveal in pictures of peasants binding wheat, tilling soil, or sweeping cottage floors. All are motifs within a harmonious whole, suggesting nature harboring and nurturing the productivity of man.44 By comparison, Pissarro’s Landscape with Factory has a more urban, hence industrial flavor, especially when one realizes that the central building with smokestack was the recently inaugurated local gasworks. There it stands matter-of-factly, partly hidden by trees, unobtrusive and functional, since its production served the local population. In front of it just to the left—and more visible, though less ostentatious because there is no smoke—is the smaller chimney of a local distillery, a more artisanal enterprise. To the right one notices the blue-gray horizontal trestle of the railroad crossing over the river Oise.45 At the time this painting was made, this was the “industrial heart” of Pontoise, located at the southwestern edge of town where the small Viosne tributary flows into the Oise—the opposite side of town from Pissarro’s residence in the hamlet of L’Hermitage. Of course, factories are not a dominant motif among Pissarro’s many representations of Pontoise. But that he included such scenes at all reveals an openness and lack of prejudice characteristic not only of Pissarro’s democratic attitudes but of his personal stake in the inclusiveness of the Impressionist enterprise. While Guillaumin shared Pissarro’s openness, his images of the factories at Ivry had altogether different connotations, keyed to the reputation of that suburb adjoining southeastern Paris along the Seine. Two grand enterprises dominated the town: the Guibal rubber factories and the scrap metal forges founded by the Coutant family. Julien Turgan described the rubber plant, on the banks of the Seine, about two kilometers from the Paris city limits. Docks permitted the direct arrival of both coal and raw materials, and the finished product could be shipped out via the nearby rail station. The plant itself was a monumental, three-story structure within a larger complex that included a gasoline storage building, a distillery apparatus, a lamp shop, a wood shop, and a miscellaneous storage area for crates and flammables. In the midst of all these buildings was always a huge pile of coal, as rapidly replenished as it was consumed by the furnaces necessary to maintain steam in a set of boilers that produced about one hundred horsepower.46 Even more impressive were the thirty-five-thousand-square-meter ateliers of the forges at Ivry, to which Turgan devoted an unprecedented number of pages and illustrations.47 Few guidebooks bothered to describe Ivry at the time, but one exception, published in 1886, covered it extensively as the traveler’s first encounter along the Orléans railway line leaving Paris: Wood construction sites along the [Ivry] station platform obscure the view toward the plains. The Rue Nationale, of recent construction, lies before us, full of workers. The high furnaces and workshops of the Forges of Ivry, organized for melting down and recasting scrap metal, stand at the entrance to the street, a vast area on either side of it. The forge and the neighboring rubber plant employ hundreds of laborers, residing in this Ivry section, which is highly animated. . . . For approximately thirty years, the incessant backwash of Paris has covered Ivry with factories. . . . In all the suburbs, there is no more productive town. It has factories that produce pigments and varnishes, fertilizer, oils, fats, glue, gelatin, albumin, candles, waxed papers, chemicals, hardware; it has a coal depot and a glass factory. Of these industries, some discharge suffocating odors, fortunately carried away and diluted by the lively and salubrious regional air. The population is rapidly increasing; today it is up to eighteen thousand, most of whom are laborers or farmers. The municipality is prosperous.48

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If Guillaumin’s images can be interpreted in the light of such descriptions, one senses their evocation of the dominating power of Ivry’s industry. Guillaumin includes both its darker polluting effects and its heroic scale, signaling its obvious contribution to growth and prosperity. The setting sun dramatizes some views (Snow at Ivry, 1873, SF 25, Musée du Petit-Palais, Geneva), while a snowscape lends another one its sense of quiet, steady, and reliable productivity (Forges at Ivry in Snow, ca. 1869–73, SF 18, private collection). These characteristics carry over into an etching of Ivry, which exists in several states (Les Galéciennes, Ivry, etching, ca. 1870, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris).49 In the mid- to late 1860s Paul Cézanne also made a few images of factories. Although they seem anomalous in a career that eventually would focus only rarely on overtly meaningful social motifs, they do have a context in the time they were produced. View of Bonnières (1866, Figure 94) is as13 6

sociated with Cézanne’s summer stay across the river at Bennecourt in 1866, near Mantes, in the company of childhood friends including Emile Zola. There, according to Lawrence Gowing, the artist perfected his palette-knife style for landscape painting.50 The painting is more or less contemporaneous with Pissarro’s earliest factory images and, like them, located in rural rather than urban territory. It is one of Cézanne’s most carefully organized landscapes among his early works, on a par with The Railroad Cut of about 1870 (see Figure 64).51 Nestled next to the village church of Bonnières is a small factory, identified by its smokestack, which projects almost to the height of the steeple against which it is juxtaposed. It is a gasworks, which thus testifies to the extension of amenities such as urban street lighting to outlying areas like Bonnières. Hidden are the railroad tracks of the Paris-Rouen line that cut across the composition between the riverbank and the town. Bonnières was the stop for visitors to Bennecourt. In 1843, the directors of the Paris-Rouen railroad had chosen it as the location for a station. Thanks to the railroad, Bonnières was being transformed from a declining agricultural village to a small commercial town.52 The whole is framed to the left and at the top of the composition by a tall pole and horizontal wire, from which dangles a rope that served to pull the little ferry. It obviously provided access from Bennecourt to the town and to the railway, and thanks to increasing tourism the primitive ferry continued to thrive. Like the juxtaposition between church tower and factory chimney, that between the tiny bark and the railroad right-of-way embodies the contrast and yet the harmonious coexistence of past and present in the countryside. Even if no particular ideology should necessarily be ascribed to the factory’s presence in this painting, there is a congruency between Cézanne’s seemingly naturalistic representation of the village and his experimentation with the palette-knife technique he had seen practiced in landscapes by the Realist painter Gustave Courbet.53 Offering an abrupt contrast that helps to emphasize the deliberateness of Cézanne’s choices is Monet’s well-known, brightly lit painting of Camille sitting leisurely on the riverbank at Bennecourt two years later (1868, W 110, Art Institute of Chicago). That the motif of the factory may have had some social overtones for Cézanne is suggested by another landscape, this one overtly industrial, that the painter made for his friend Zola. At this time, the critic was advocating the painting of modern subjects and had begun writing his novels about workingclass life. Unlikely as it seems, Cézanne’s large early drawing of Factories at L’Estaque (1869, Plate 20) is said to have graced the cover of Madame Zola’s workbox.54 It is one of Cézanne’s first known pictures of L’Estaque, a seaside village adjacent, along the curved bay, to bustling Marseille. Cézanne returned frequently to L’Estaque, and he often included factory smokestacks in his images of the village, though among his many views, painted in the 1870s and 1880s, this early depiction is the only one that focuses

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so insistently on the industrial element. Several darkly smoking factories dominate the composition, and there is a sunken railroad right-of-way in the foreground, discernible by the stack of a train poking up at the lower left and protected by a fence. It is worth noting how the vapors from the train go in the opposite direction from those of the factories. Other L’Estaque paintings by Cézanne may show smokestacks among the geometric ensemble of houses along its hillside, but it is relatively rare that one of them is actually emitting smoke (Gulf of Marseille, Seen from L’Estaque, ca. 1885, R 626, Art Institute of Chicago). Yet even though the result in these later paintings is a far more classical than industrial quality, their reference to modernity is unmistakable.55 By contrast, Cézanne’s picture Marseille Seen from the Village of

Saint-Henri (ca. 1877–79, R 281, formerly Urban Gallery, Tokyo) places several active chimneys across the bay in Marseille itself. It is as if L’Estaque became Cézanne’s Argenteuil, with industry located on the other side, as in Monet’s views of Clichy. Yet Cézanne never eliminated the smokestacks from his views, using them most often rather as organizing elements of compositions that assimilated both the modern and the classical tradition. Indeed, in The Sea from L’Estaque (ca. 1878–79, Figure 95), trees frame a composition in which a tall factory chimney is a principal and unmistakable compositional feature. It sticks up almost like an obelisk in the kind of classical landscapes produced by the seventeenth-century painter Nicolas Poussin (e.g., Saint John on the Island of Patmos, 1640, Art Institute of Chicago), whose work Cézanne is known to have admired.56 Smokeless or not, such motifs show L’Estaque as a place marked by industrial modernity, for better or for worse, and Cézanne made no effort to disguise it. The drawing for Madame Zola is related stylistically to Cézanne’s oil painting The Railroad

Cut and to Factories near the Mont du Cengle (ca. 1869–70, Figure 96), whose location with Mont Sainte-Victoire in the background seems related to that of The Railroad Cut, although no record of these particular factories has been found.57 Le Cengle is a rocky plateau situated immediately to the south of Mont Sainte-Victoire and east of Aix. The site appears to be the tiny village of Le Canet, where a more modern chimney can be seen today against a similar backdrop from the Route Nationale 7. The mass of Sainte-Victoire has been diminished in this composition, with the result that the factory

FIGURE 94. Paul Cézanne,

View of Bonnières, 1866. Musée Faure, Aix-les-Bains.

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is featured boldly. These were years during which Cézanne was spending time not only with Zola but also with Guillaumin and Pissarro. Indeed, as a pair of works indicating the direction in which Cézanne was developing, View of Bonnières and Factories near the Mont du Cengle parallel both in date and in the increasing interest in industrial subject matter the pair of Pissarros considered earlier, La Pe-

tite Fabrique (1865) and Landscape with Factory (1867). In Mon Salon (1868), Zola had lavished praise on Pissarro for his combination of personal technique and scrupulous realism: “There is no painter more conscientious, more exact.”58 Although the closest Zola came to acknowledging specifically industrial subject matter in a painting was to notice that Claude Monet “had a weak spot for steamboats,” he opened the section of his essay devoted to the group of painters he called “The Actualists” by declaring: “I need not plead the cause of modern subjects here. It has been won for a long time.”59 13 8

No art historian has studied Impressionist industrial landscapes more closely than Richard Brettell, who has paid special attention to the group of paintings and an etching Pissarro made in 1873 of the Arneuil paint factory and the Chalon and Co. starch plant directly across the Oise from Pontoise at Saint-Ouen L’Aumône.60 Recall that prior to returning to Pontoise from Louveciennes in 1872, Pissarro had been working along the Seine at Bougival and Port-Marly, where his riverscapes placed an emphasis on industrial river traffic and the presence of working men and women (see Chapter 3). As also mentioned earlier, Pissarro had spent the better part of the Franco-Prussian War in London, at the same time as Monet. There both artists found themselves increasingly sensitized to urban moder-

FIGURE 95. Paul Cézanne, The Sea from L’Estaque, ca. 1878–79. Musée Picasso, Paris.

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nity and its transformation of the traditional landscape, a phenomenon that was reputedly happening even more in London than in Paris. Monet’s two pictures of London’s industrial harbor were discussed in Chapter 3; it was in the London suburb of Upper Norwood at about the same time that Pissarro made his first painting of a train, possibly inspired by Turner (see Chapter 4), and depicted the famous Crystal Palace. An ink drawing of the same period by Pissarro shows factory chimneys in the village of Anerley, seen from Upper Norwood, with a train cutting across the composition near the center (Anerley, from Upper Norwood, 1871, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).61 Hence, the group of factory paintings Pissarro made on returning to Pontoise in 1872 was conceived in a vein similar to Monet’s group of the industrial harbor at Le Havre, done during the same years. It is impossible to determine which artist deserves credit for concentrating on industrial subjects first. Rather, their parallel explorations should be considered an element of what the Impressionist painters shared in their early years. When Pissarro resettled in Pontoise in 1872, new industrial construction at Saint-Ouen l’Aumône was probably already under way. By 1873 the factory buildings and the tall smokestack of Chalon and Co. had been erected. When Pissarro had lived in Pontoise in the later 1860s, he was certainly not shy about representing factories. But by 1873 Pontoise’s available industrial novelties coincided with Pissarro’s even more focused interest in productive aspects of modernity, as evidenced by his views of the Seine at Marly. As a result, the smokestacks of the Chalon factory became virtually ubiquitous in Pissarro’s landscapes of that year, and the artist concentrated exclusively on those factories for a group of at least four paintings, plus a watercolor and a powerful etching. Instead of choosing the venerable picturesque monuments or rustic habitats found so frequently in Romantic landscape, Pissarro chose these blatantly modern structures. Brettell has pointed out that in one version of the Chalon factories along the Oise (Factories

near Pontoise, 1873, Figure 97) Pissarro added a couple of small vertical houses. They appear in no other versions of Pissarro’s factory group, and Brettell ascertained in local archives that no such res-

FIGURE 96. Paul Cézanne, Factories

near the Mont du Cengle, ca. 1869–70. Private collection.

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idences had ever been recognized legally or appeared on any map. I can only speculate that they may have been temporary buildings associated with the factory construction. Yet other aspects of the factories’ shape, location along the riverbank, and disposition of associated buildings are repeated in other views, such as Factory at Pontoise (1873, PV 217, Israel Museum, Jerusalem) or Pissarro’s darkly dramatic and relatively close-up etching (Factories near Pontoise, 1873, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris). The consistency is such that one is convinced, as in so many other Impressionist paintings, that Pissarro’s images provide a relatively accurate record of what he saw from his vantage point. The added houses change the factories’ scale so that they appear very large. From a painting of a slightly more distant view from farther upriver, The Oise near Pontoise (1873, Plate 21), one discovers that the relatively compact group from the previous compositions is actually part of an even larger complex. In any 140

case, in all examples Pissarro integrated the forms compositionally, pursuing his usual goal of tonal unity as well as creating unifying geometric patterns. In the picture with the small vertical houses from the Museum of Fine Arts in Springfield, Massachusetts (Figure 97), as has often been observed, the gradually descending height of the smokestacks is picked up and echoed by the poplar trees that also parallel their verticality. In this view chimneys penetrate the sky and the smoke merges with cloud in a medley of creativity where nature and human industry seem partners. In the Jerusalem painting, where

FIGURE 97. Camille Pissarro, Factories near Pontoise, 1873. Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, Massachusetts.

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the wind blows from the left rather than the right, the larger stack and its smoke frame the smaller pair, an effect echoed by a larger tree and then a smaller one. This picture’s tonal theme tends more toward greens and grays, in contrast to the Springfield picture’s more brightly celebratory grays and blues. Unlike Monet’s choices of Le Havre or the Gare Saint-Lazare, Pissarro’s factories are indifferent structures from almost any angle, unremarkable, with little particularity. In what might be considered a compensatory strategy, Pissarro shows them in different lights and weathers, interpreting them as compositional forms that generate an overall pictorial structure. They are more comparable to the ordinary objects on which still-life compositions are based than to the activity-filled ports or train stations represented by Monet. They thus express a modern and productive rural harmony. In the Clark Art Institute picture (Plate 21), the factory complex is close enough to present the physical relationship of its specific buildings to each other but far enough away that they appear contained within a natural framework of vegetation that seems both to shelter and to echo them. As “cathedrals of modernity,” a common catchphrase for recent industrial structures, these buildings echo certain views of Salisbury Cathedral by John Constable. Is it likely Pissarro saw Constable’s works along with Turner’s in London? The painting’s fresh greens and general luminosity seem to emphasize a tranquil and unspoiled environment on which the Chalon factories make no particular intrusion. Rural life seems blessed with a continuity capable of absorbing change. Whereas such buildings may have shocked a public used to landscape views of ruins or castles, the passage of time allows one to speculate on whether Pissarro viewed these factories as their modern equivalents, as so often stated by defenders of industry, hence testifying to human productivity through the ages. Indeed, nowhere in his art is the theme of productivity so foregrounded, both through the motif he has chosen and through the structural intelligence of his compositions and the relatively methodical execution that characterizes these and so many of Pissarro’s other works. In other views, Pissarro included the factories in backgrounds where figures going about their business are closer to the viewer. Even in a later picture, La Sente du Chou, Pontoise (1878, PV 452, Musée de la Chartreuse, Douai), a peasant couple with their goat converse in a vast open space that they share, as one discovers on noticing the background, with steaming factories in the distance. There is no sense that industry overwhelms nature; their smoke does not dominate the sky, as in Guillaumin’s views. Indeed, Pontoise’s industrial environment is limited to these few factories, some barges, and the railroad, as opposed to the concentration of transport vessels, multiple manufacturing operations, and urban infrastructure visible in Parisian cityscapes. Thus, while Pissarro’s attitude toward industry seems to be one of acceptance, even approval, its near-ubiquitous presence in his landscape has not spoiled the balance he perceived even in the more densely traveled environment of Marly and Bougival (see Chapter 3). Pissarro’s series of factory paintings of 1873 made the factory’s presence explicit as only Guillaumin had done before. But in his rural setting, and through his progressive will to view them as part of the generally beneficent development of modernity, Pissarro created a new form of landscape that included the factory as a normal and viable element.62 Comparison with the work of Claude Monet reveals that while the latter also often included factories in his suburban landscapes, he rarely made them his central motif, keeping them at a distance from the more immediate environment of his pictures. For Monet, industry had its specific, more urban locations, and he left his home base at Argenteuil for Le Havre, Rouen, Clichy, or Paris when he

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wanted to feature its visual signs. But there was plenty of industrial activity in Argenteuil itself, as evidenced by Gustave Caillebotte’s picture of the local distillery, Factories at Argenteuil (1878, Figure 98), in which residential buildings are literally next door. The Joly ironworks, builders of the railroad bridge, were also prominent, employing as many as 350 workers on eleven-hour-a-day shifts in three factories. Yet as the expert on Argenteuil, Paul Tucker, has pointed out, Monet most frequently worked at Argenteuil with such sights to his back.63 Not once did Monet show as frankly an industrial landscape at Argenteuil as he painted in Déville-lès-Rouen in 1872, or along the small Robec River, which runs through Rouen to the Seine, serving many factories built along its banks (Le Ruisseau de Robec, 1872, W 206, Musée d’Orsay, Paris).64 For example, in that year Monet did a series of views from the outskirts of Argenteuil that do include a smokestack or two of the most recent Joly factory in the far 14 2

background.65 Yet in each case the empty foreground and radical foreshortening of the road toward the village imply that the viewer and the town are miles apart. The sense of industry’s integration into the landscape that one finds in Pissarro is replaced by distance and, perhaps, ambivalence. Indeed, as Monet approached the neo-Gothic villa and the two smokestacks more closely—as in The Prome-

nade at Argenteuil (ca. 1872, Figure 99), there is one on either side of the villa, one of them much closer to it—he either hid one or both in trees or suppressed their smoky emanations. To play devil’s advocate for a moment, one might argue that Monet was striving to integrate such motifs into his landscape harmoniously, as in Pissarro’s example. However, Monet’s frank acceptance of industrial landscapes in his portrayals of other locations supports the theme of ambivalence. Tucker has compared these earlier pictures by Monet just mentioned to a composition from a similar, though closer vantage point of 1877—the same year of Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare series.66 In Argenteuil,

the Riverbank in Flower (Figure 100), the artist used a bed of dahlias as a barrier between the viewer and the forms in the background, including a steam barge, the villa, and the smoking factories, all of which are suffused in haze. In an earlier and simpler picture, The Seine at Argenteuil (1874, Kunstmuseum, Bern), he used a similar device—a stand of reeds. In the latter, however, the two factories’ diminutive size makes them seem less threatening, even though the sky is filled with cloudlike smudges the same color as their smoke. In Argenteuil, the Riverbank in Flower, the figures to the right or in the small boat visible just above the flowers seem caught between the two different worlds that were kept separate in the earlier work. Their presence complicates our reading of the generalized background, which is distant but intrusive through its effect on the environment. Monet would leave Argenteuil the following year, moving to more rural Vétheuil, farther down the Seine away from Paris. Although the majority of Monet’s Argenteuil pictures featured flowery fields and gardens or pleasure boating on the river, it seems that the selectivity required to sustain that vision was increasingly difficult to maintain in the face of the painter’s commitment to working from direct observation and his celebrations of industry elsewhere. Among the last paintings Monet made while living in Argenteuil are three rarely discussed views from the island of La Grande Jatte, which is one of the more substantial of the long, narrow, sandy formations in the middle of the Seine in Paris’s western suburbs.67 Lying across from and just upriver from Asnières, La Grande Jatte was an integral part of the culture of pleasure boating and bathing for which Asnières was known (see Chapter 3). At the same time, it afforded general if not close-up views of the industrial complexes at Clichy. Of the three paintings Monet made, Springtime

on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1878, Plate 22) proffers the most clear-cut juxtaposition between outdoor pleasure and industrial productivity. There are numerous figures along the riverbank promenade.

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FIGURE 98. Gustave Caillebotte, Factories at Argenteuil, 1878. Private collection. FIGURE 99. Claude Monet, The Promenade at Argenteuil, ca. 1872. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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To the left is a rental station with one available boat; empty moorings are nearby in the foreground. Surprisingly distinct in the background, though distant enough to be quite small, is clearly represented the rail trestle that crosses from Clichy to Asnières, with its vertical piers and flat beams. Equally visible are the smoking factories on the Clichy side, which have a configuration resembling that of the stearic candle works illustrated in Turgan’s Les Grandes Usines. Monet must have stood near the area he now represents in the distance when he painted his views of Asnières and his Men Unloading Coal a few years earlier (Plate 14). In another version of the La Grande Jatte composition (La Grande Jatte, 1878, Figure 101), a couple standing in the foreground seem to be looking across the river toward the same view. The industrial background appears even more prominent than in the first painting. The linkage they provide between foreground and distance signifies that the painting’s industrial backdrop 14 4

was as important to Monet’s conception as the immediate setting of La Grande Jatte. There seems to be little irony in the juxtaposition of the Paris region’s ubiquitous poplar trees, which frame the factories to the right, with the smokestacks that fill the sky with manmade cloud. Yet these were among the last factories Monet would ever paint. Attempts to discover ideological attitudes from visual representations are fraught with risk. Certain patterns do emerge, however, when one compares one painter to another. In Monet’s choices of sites as well as within individual compositions, there is a dichotomy between city and country, between industry and leisure. In Pissarro’s view, leisure barely has a place, and productivity, his main concern, is treated matter-of-factly, as an ordinary phenomenon, even in the form of factories. Guillaumin, by contrast, dramatizes industry and modernization; his experience of the countryside was occasional and never dominated his imagery until the 1880s and later. Alfred Sisley can provide a conclusion to this chapter, for though he often represented productive activities, especially in the river scenes that dominate his oeuvre, his images of factories are rare. One is a view of the porcelain manufacturer at Sèvres (1879, D 307, private collection); another is The Machine of Marly (1873, Figure 102); and a third is Factory in the Flood, Bougival (1873, Figure 103). In none of Sisley’s paintings does the factory’s industrial application appear especially significant. The porcelain factory is just a building, perhaps something of a landmark and a foundation of the economy in the Sèvres suburb across the Seine from Boulogne-Billancourt, where Sisley had made numerous river views. Even though it was greatly expanded under the Second Empire, as Julien Turgan illustrates and explains in Les Grandes Usines, as far as one can tell from Sisley’s view, it is still an old and traditional company furnishing luxury rather than industrial goods.68 It hardly implies the kind of development suggested by Monet’s images of Clichy, Guillaumin’s of Ivry, or even Pissarro’s of Saint-Ouen L’Aumône. Similarly, Sisley’s Machine of Marly gives little hint of the gigantic pump works inside, although they were considered a marvel of engineering and a tourist destination. Despite the dam in the foreground and the large intakes over which the clean and regular geometry of the new pump building has been erected, all is peacefully bathed in beneficent light. For all anyone knew, the active mechanics housed inside could still be the premodern apparatus of earlier centuries. Perhaps Sisley was merely taking for granted the associations such buildings would have had for his contemporary viewers. If so, then his attitude would be neither celebratory nor ambivalent; rather, it would be as matter-of-fact as his views of the industrial Seine in the southwest of Paris, not far from the Sèvres factory. Sisley’s Factory in Flood is noteworthy more for what it shows about the state of the river

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FIGURE 100. Claude Monet, Argenteuil, the Riverbank in Flower, 1877. Private collection. FIGURE 101. Claude Monet, La Grande Jatte, 1878. Nichido Gallery, Tokyo.

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FIGURE 102. Alfred Sisley, The Machine of Marly, 1873. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen. FIGURE 103. Alfred Sisley, Factory in the Flood, Bougival, 1873. Ordrupgard Collection, Copenhagen.

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than for its industrial motif. For one thing, the main building appears residential; it has recently been identified with the lockkeeper’s house on the Seine at Bougival.69 Here again is a case where the industrial significance of Bougival was well understood in its time (see Chapter 3) even if it has been lost today. The smokestack behind the house has to do with powering the lock, which was of immense importance both for the local economy and for river access to Paris. Yet the painting also seems to bear witness to the power of nature to disrupt the works of man—that is, if one can surmise that the figures in the painting are somehow having to cope with the water’s cresting. By contrast, Pissarro’s view of the Chalon factory as the Oise rose in the same year (Factory in Flood, 1873, Figure 104) implies little effect on its productivity. As the river attains half the height of the solitary tree in the foreground, the starch plant continues to puff on. Sisley’s paintings, then, with their attitude of calm indifference toward the factories that they portray, can perhaps serve as a standard of neutrality against which to measure the works of his Impressionist colleagues, whose factories seem instead to be associated with values that elicit celebration, ambivalence, or quiet confidence. Yet on some level Sisley must have accepted his colleagues’ point of view, for why otherwise would he have chosen to represent such structures at all? More broadly speaking, when Sisley’s and Pissarro’s paintings from the 1870s focused primarily on individual buildings, the majority of those buildings were both modern and utilitarian. They were important elements for landscapes that aspired to modernity; there was no other reason to represent them.

FIGURE 104. Camille Pissarro, Factory in Flood, 1873. Watercolor. Private collection.

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6 REVIVAL AND RENEWAL IN THE NEXT GENERATION

The Impressionist exhibition of 1886 was the eighth and last. Its final room was devoted to a group of works painted in a novel proto-pointillist style by some artists new to the group, Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. They were joined by Camille Pissarro and his son Lucien. Seurat’s large Sunday After-

noon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1886, Figure 105) was the room’s centerpiece and attracted the most attention at the exhibition as a whole (much as it has in later studies of Neo-Impressionism). This and other works from the 1880s, made for the most part by a new generation of artists, shed light on the original aims of the Impressionists, especially in relation to the importance of modern landscape themes. To the degree that the Neo-Impressionists, looking at their immediate predecessors,

FIGURE 105. Georges Seurat, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1886. Art Institute of Chicago.

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saw their task as at once reaffirming and critiquing Impressionism’s early aims, their artworks provide evidence not only of how Impressionism was perceived at the time but also of the central place of modern motifs and attitudes in the Impressionists’ vision. By the early 1880s an avant-garde reaction to Impressionism had already begun. In 1884 Seurat exhibited his Bathers at Asnières (Figure 106), a scene of workers relaxing on the riverbank with the Clichy factories in the background, a place from which Monet had painted in 1878 (see Chapter 5). Seurat was part of a group calling themselves the Independent Artists (Groupe des Artistes Indépendants). Not only did these artists declare independence from the official Salon, to which they had been refused entry, but they avoided the connections with commercial art dealers that the Impressionists, some of whom were directly supported by Paul Durand-Ruel’s gallery, appeared to cul150

tivate. The Impressionists had not organized an exhibition since 1882, preferring to let Durand-Ruel show their work in various places. The Indépendants showed, not in a private space, but in a public building, a post and telegraph office near the Tuileries that the Paris municipal government had made available.1 They thus represented a new generation pursuing a route to recognition that resembled the strategy of collective self-organization on which the Impressionists had embarked a decade before but now seemed to have abandoned. When Seurat and Signac joined with the Impressionists in 1886, their alliance was therefore double-edged. It implied a certain degree of recognition and acceptance by the older generation, which Pissarro had fought hard to obtain for them. On the other hand, their segregation in a separate room displayed their difference and acknowledged their independence. Both

FIGURE 106. Georges Seurat, Bathers at Asnières, 1884. National Gallery, London.

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achievements were significant, for many critics believed that the younger artists had seized Impressionism’s leadership and were now at the heart of the group. Such attitudes confirmed Impressionism’s ongoing association with artistic militancy. Reviewing a second show of the Independent Artists in fall 1886, months after the Impressionist exhibit had closed, Félix Fénéon coined the term Neo-Impressionist. His reference to a “NeoImpressionist method” was meant to highlight differences from earlier Impressionism.2 While the new term acknowledged that the novel style was an outgrowth of and response to Impressionism’s original innovations and principles, its neo- prefix additionally implied a revival of energy and renewed purpose. Among the key points Fénéon stressed were several that asserted the Neo-Impressionists’ supposedly more valid attainment of goals first articulated by their predecessors. The truth aims of the first Impressionist painters had led them to restrict their work primarily to on-the-spot representations of modern life. That was a given. These same ends, however, were now said to be more fully realized through the objective and scientific approaches to color and the methodical application of paint in regularized brushstrokes to be found in Neo-Impressionism. Fénéon dismissed Impressionist technique as full of tricks and bravura, contrasting with the “patient tapestry” of Seurat’s La Grande Jatte, which was regarded as the new group’s manifesto painting. According to Fénéon, the essence of the Neo-Impressionists’ “revolution” thus lay in its challenge to Impressionism’s means of expression.3 He never questioned their choice of themes or doubted their commitment to modern life. Indeed, both Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières and Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte were located in territory already identified with both contemporary industry and leisure and already explored in a number of paintings by Monet. Although the latter did not show with the Impressionists in 1886, these elements of continuity were presupposed. Impressionism had at least achieved that much.

REFORM AND CONTINUITY In his essay “L’Art moderne” (1883), Joris-Karl Huysmans wrote: “For a new era, new techniques. It’s simply a matter of common sense.”4 In that year he was of course referring to the Impressionists, but his claim could have motivated their successors. Modernity had become an all-important value in its own right for the Impressionists and succeeding generations, so much so that by the mid-1880s few reviewers overtly located modernity in subject matter, since most now took it for granted. That was true even when modern subjects were as programmatically displayed as in the views of Clichy and Asnières exhibited by Paul Signac in 1886 or in the modern harbor landscapes Seurat executed following La Grande

Jatte. Fénéon had acknowledged Signac’s propensity for suburban, working-class scenes, noticing workmen’s trousers hanging out to dry and the desolation of neighborhoods that art viewers other than painters themselves were unlikely to have known well. But these signs of modernity were already an aspect of Impressionist painting, which began passing into history as a new generation took over. Still, no Impressionist exhibition before 1886 had seen such a concentration of works devoted to themes of modernization and economic activity as the majority of those hanging in the special room. Seurat’s large painting La Grande Jatte, with its focus on leisure, was, however modern its incarnation, actually the exception to this trend among his progressive contemporaries. Even La Grande Jatte’s size, making obvious its execution in the studio, distinguished it from the easel paintings surrounding it, which still

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evoked Impressionist plein air observation, even if their technique contrasted with ostensible Impressionist spontaneity. The subsequent focus of criticism and study on La Grande Jatte and its proclaimed technical novelty may thus have overshadowed important elements of continuity and revival in other Neo-Impressionist paintings. Those elements, related primarily to subject matter, confirm the central role of productivity, technology, and urbanization in defining Impressionist modernity. Among the 1886 exhibitors, Paul Signac had the most systematically chosen themes relating to these concerns. The early 1880s had been a time of reassessment and renewal for most of the Impressionist painters.5 Geometric rigor and more regular brushstrokes were among the strategies employed by Monet, Pissarro, Cézanne, and even Renoir to produce, as the case may be, forms with a better sense of mass and volume or compositions planned with more formalized structures than in the 152

1870s. Having discovered the Impressionists and having begun to emulate their work during precisely this time of their own increasing self-consciousness, the receptive young Signac is an excellent barometer of the situation as a whole. Of his fifteen paintings listed in the 1886 catalog, seven featured sites in the industrial suburbs of Clichy and Asnières, where he resided. An eighth, and one of the earliest,

The Crane “L’Union” at the Ile Saint-Louis (1884, C 82, private collection, Paris) displayed a motif and was located in territory made familiar by Guillaumin, whom Signac had met while painting on the Ile Saint-Louis in 1884.6 Given Signac’s subsequent association with the group of artists around Pissarro, his predilections are not especially surprising. The friendship with Guillaumin was especially important. That the two artists produced closely related (though not identical) views of the Quai d’Austerlitz seen from the Quai de Bercy (Signac owned the painting by Guillaumin) suggests that they probably painted side by side, as Guillaumin and Cézanne had. In any case, Signac’s version is executed in the style of his friend (1884, Figure 107).7 In fact, even before his documented meeting with Guillaumin or his adoption of the Neo-Impressionist technique, Signac made several paintings of the Paris faubourgs. For example, his Route de Gennevilliers: Faubourg de Paris (1883, Plate 23), looking east from Asnières toward the smoking factories of Clichy, is Pissarro-like in its plain topography, though with more vivid colors that would have struck a chord with Guillaumin’s work. The crisp curbside corner of the newly built intersection of the main Gennevilliers road and what is now the Rue Louis-Melotte dominates the foreground.8 Punctuated by newly planted saplings and their shadows, as well as by industrial buildings and factory chimneys in the background, the painting displays the clean geometry of modernization. At the 1886 exhibition Signac’s seven views located on either side of the Seine at Asnières and Clichy seemed to catalog the various aspects of modernity that characterized this area. While they obviously reprise themes as well as the notion of grouping represented earlier in the work of Monet, they also chronicle over approximately a year’s time Signac’s gradual adoption of the Neo-Impressionist technique. Banks of the Seine at Asnières (1885, C 109, private collection, Paris), again with the Clichy factories in the background, is the closest to the waterway images of Monet and Sisley and more or less partakes of their traditional Impressionist brushwork. Two paintings entitled The Bois-

Colombes Railway Junction (1886, Leeds City Art Gallery, Figure 108, and 1886, C 113, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam) reveal Signac’s transition toward the technical regularity and geometry of Snow:

Boulevard de Clichy (1886, C 115, Minneapolis Museum of Arts). In 1886 Signac made at least three oil paintings with the railroad as subject, possibly inspired by Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare series, though very different.9 His developing rigor culminated in Gas Tanks at Clichy (1886, Figure 109) and The

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FIGURE 107. Paul Signac, copy after Guillaumin, Quai d’Austerlitz Seen from Quai de Bercy, 1884. Kakinuma Collection, Tokyo.

Puits-Bertin Grade Crossing (1886, C 118, whereabouts unknown).10 It seems likely that the earlier pictures of the 1885–86 group were the ones from the Asnières side of the Seine, which is also where the railroad branches off toward Bois-Colombes. Even more than in the Route de Gennevilliers, the pictures he showed in 1886 use geometry to express the shaping of the landscape brought about by modernization. The smooth curve of the embankment is the primary motif in Banks of the Seine at As-

nières, while the bold line of the fence and repetition of uniformly spaced tree trunks suggests a similar effect in the Leeds Bois-Colombes Railway Junction.

Gas Tanks at Clichy and The Puits-Bertin Grade Crossing show the clear influence of Seurat, whom Signac had met with the Indépendants in 1884. These works’ ostensibly mechanistic application of paint or ink, in the case of a finished drawing of the latter (1886, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), corresponds appropriately to their powerful industrial themes. According to Fénéon, this method revealed its origins in thoughtful labor rather than in spontaneous impulse. One could say it had its source in the same rationalist scientific attitudes that gave rise to the modern energy and transportation industries. The resemblance between pointillism and new techniques of photoreproduction in mass-market magazines was also striking.11 Signac later proposed that chromo-luminarist would have been a more appropriate term than Neo-Impressionist to describe such an approach to painting. Here was a scientific-sounding term that clearly signaled its basis in optics.12 Fénéon claimed that the juxtaposed colors of such paintings, which divided tones into constituent parts, combined within the eye to produce truthful vibrations in the same way that different lights combine to produce

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FIGURE 108. Paul Signac, The Bois-Colombes Railway Junction, 1886. Leeds City Art Gallery. FIGURE 109. Paul Signac, Gas Tanks at Clichy, 1886. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

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heightened luminosity. By contrast, he pointed out, the Impressionists mixed their colors on the canvas— causing, in his opinion, a deadening loss of brilliance. Fénéon’s claims were related to the recent discovery that mixing rays of light of the three primary colors produced white (additive color), while mixing pigments of the same colors resulted in black (subtractive color).13 In the progression of Signac’s paintings from Asnières to Clichy, one discovers a brightening of his palette. Whereas the earlier works follow Pissarro’s more tonally unified and understated means of expressing a workaday environment, the Clichy paintings reflect the clean, clear colors of new brick or tile work, freshly painted façades, posters, and advertising murals. Seurat himself did not exhibit overtly industrial themes in 1886, preferring, its seems, to challenge Impressionism through scenes of leisure or tourist sites such as La Grande Jatte and several views set along the Normandy coast, the latter most explicitly identified as Monet territory. Yet themes of modernization and productivity had been a significant aspect of Seurat’s work in the previous years and again after 1886. He made numerous drawings and oil sketches of railroads, factories, and workers in the early 1880s. One small painting known as Industrial Suburb (ca. 1881–82, H 75, Musée d’Art Moderne de Troyes) already reveals the geometric rigor of his larger works. It features the sharp, functional lines of worker housing newly erected on vacant land at Le Raincy near a smoking factory. Another, The Bridge (1882–83, H 77, Metropolitan Museum of Art), shows two men in a boat near a barge with a bridge of recent construction and a factory chimney in the background. The scene is probably Asnières, where Seurat would set his large painting of 1884. Some other paintings show workers pounding stakes or breaking stones in the suburb of Le Raincy (Stonebreaker and Wheelbarrow, Le Raincy, 1882–83, H 100, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.), harking back to Courbet, the first major artist to represent the menial work of stone breaking. In summer 1886, after the Impressionist exhibition, Seurat painted several scenes of Honfleur. A few of them, especially those that focus on the recently renovated and industrial aspects of the harbor, employ the bold geometries exhibited by Signac, who had taken that aspect of modern representation the farthest. The most striking of the group is The “Maria” at Honfleur (1886, Figure 110), which shows the iron-hulled steam ferry linking Honfleur and Southampton, England.14 Of course, Honfleur, near Le Havre, was again a place frequented by Monet, who painted the Honfleur–Le Havre ferry in a picture of 1866 (see Chapter 3), to say nothing of Monet’s views of the port of Le Havre from the early 1870s. In addition to the hard lines of masts, smokestack, and rigging on the boat itself, Seurat’s empty quay, with its railroad siding, homely commercial buildings, and massive iron bollards, produces a powerful and impersonal setting quite different from Monet’s busy and populated scenes. With this painting and The Bridge at Courbevoie (1886, Figure 111), Seurat clearly affirmed the presence of modern and industrial themes in Neo-Impressionism. Located along the Seine just upstream from Asnières, Courbevoie is viewed from La Grande Jatte, to which it is in fact more directly opposite than Asnières. A smoking factory chimney is prominent at the composition’s center, forming a cross with the cast-iron Courbevoie Bridge off the Boulevard Binau. Not only do these two markers of modernity intersect at the very center of the composition, they parallel and frame the elements of recreation in the foreground, which seem explicitly placed within their ostentatiously industrial setting. The composition forms one of Neo-Impressionism’s most convincing images of the coexistence and interdependence within modernity of commercial and leisure activities. Yet at the very same time that Seurat

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FIGURE 110. Georges Seurat, The “Maria” at Honfleur, 1886. National Gallery, Prague.

so powerfully balanced these aspects, he achieved another sort of balance that gives the painting its idealizing ambiguity. That is, while on the one hand his technique attained a degree of prominence and flattening, displaying its relentless rationalism perhaps even more than in earlier works, its dispersing, atomizing effect achieved a gently suspended, misty, classicizing poeticization of the moment.15 Such combinations and juxtapositions, sometimes disconcerting to us today, were not only normal but progressive in Seurat’s world. They have contributed to the opinion that his political sympathies were utopian. Exhibiting alongside Seurat and Signac in the separate room of the 1886 Impressionist exhibition was Camille Pissarro, the only painter among the original Impressionists to have adopted the new style, even if temporarily. The role of Pissarro in preparing the terrain for Neo-Impressionism is finally beginning to emerge. He had been introduced to Seurat by Guillaumin in 1885 but certainly knew of Seurat already through Signac.16 His use of the new style was not a simple conversion but part of a development to which he is likely to have contributed substantially himself. Although the vast majority of his paintings before the mid-1880s have rural or agricultural settings—the main exceptions being his Seine barge and washhouse scenes and the Pontoise factories group—he returned to in-

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dustrial subject matter when he visited Rouen in 1883, as in L’Ile Lacroix, Port of Rouen (Figure 112).17 At the same time Pissarro did a drawing (charcoal on paper, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford) that became the basis for an aquatint print (1883, New York Public Library) of the same subject. Then, following his conversion to Seurat’s pointillism, he returned to the same drawing for the composition of another, later painting (L’Ile Lacroix Rouen in Mist, 1888, Figure 113). Although these images are more clearly industrial than Seurat’s Bridge at Courbevoie, they have much in common with it, sharing the poetic mistiness. By the time Pissarro signed his canvas, however, he had abandoned Seurat’s contrasting color juxtapositions, preferring a return to more delicate tonal harmonies.18 In the 1870s Monet had produced far more pictures related to industry and modern infrastructure than Pissarro. However, Monet did not participate in the return to such themes in the second quarter of the 1880s. Whether Pissarro was actually a force driving their revival is hard to establish. Guillaumin, who had long been a part of Pissarro’s circle, had not abandoned them, although his views of the village of Damiette shown in 1886 reveal his increasing exploration of the use of color along with his new friend Gauguin, who was by now pursuing a course quite opposed to Impressionism.19 Even the views of Rouen that Pissarro made in 1883 have little of the geometric rigor and novel brightness found in his paintings of 1886. And the paintings Pissarro actually showed in 1886 are rural views. They may nonetheless hold a key to his position, for the two largest and most recent of the works he showed not only were painted in a Seurat-like pointillist style but exhibited a rigorous geometry and a more vivid coloring than his preceding works. In Pissarro’s View from My Window in Cloudy Weather (1888, retouched and signed again in 1888, PV 721, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), the shapes of the outbuildings and the geometric layout of

FIGURE 111. Georges Seurat,

The Bridge at Courbevoie, 1886. Courtauld Institute, London.

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FIGURE 112. Camille Pissarro, L’Ile Lacroix, Port of Rouen, 1883.

Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts. FIGURE 113. Camille Pissarro, L’Ile Lacroix Rouen in Mist, 1888. Philadelphia Museum of Art.

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the vegetable garden clearly record a rational human intervention in nature paralleling that in Signac’s industrial landscapes. Of course, such geometry is characteristic of home-grown gardens, such as those Pissarro had represented in several of his pictures from Pontoise a decade earlier. In this case, however, the geometry of the garden and the way it is set within the composition are emphatic rather than simply matter-of-fact. The large Apple-Picking (1888, PV 726, Ohara Museum of Art, Kurashiki, Japan) is even more grounded in geometric pattern as a composition-organizing strategy, while it also displays the painter’s laborious application of small, even strokes of pigment. Both features render the artist’s productive activity comparable to the routine and communal labor of the women farmworkers. Pointillism can be considered a far more communal style, with less room for individual variation, than Impressionism. L’Ile Lacroix takes up this technique for an industrial subject. Finally, another painting of the same year shows a train coming through the sunlit fields of Eragny on the newly opened line between Rouen and Dieppe (The

Dieppe Railway, Eragny-sur-Epte, 1886, Figure 114). Although this last painting is exceptional in Pissarro’s Neo-Impressionist country scenes, it has a logical position as a remake of his earlier railroad topoi, which, like his river scenes, had been important in his work a decade before. Oddly enough, despite the misting effect of the pointillist technique, the painting’s forms are crisply defined, with a simplicity and brightness evoking the same clean, spare aesthetic of a newly fabricated world as that shown in Signac’s gastank images. Even if the rural silence is broken by a train, the scene conveys the open and placid utopian ideal that could be imagined from the imposition of modern rationalism upon an unspoiled state of nature. Through such characteristics, Pissarro’s works thus paralleled Signac’s Gas Tanks at Clichy, as if they were rural equivalents of Signac’s industrial suburban series. Whereas Seurat’s ostensibly impersonal and mechanistic method seems an appropriate vehicle for the industrial modernity depicted by Signac, its interest for Pissarro is less obvious until one learns of Pissarro’s dissatisfaction with the decorative and pleasure-oriented direction in which he felt Impressionism had been moving. He criticized the latter as “romantic” and found a more rigorous basis for his work in the new “scientific” trend.20 Pissarro had always been attracted to themes of labor and productivity, though in rural settings. His letters abound with references to the seriousness of painting and to its practice as labor and research. His strong commitment to a work ethic was exemplified both by his own methods and by the constant advice he wrote to his son Lucien. That ethos permeates the correspondence surrounding Cézanne and contemporaneous articles by Zola in the second half of the 1860s. As the Aixois poet and essayist Antony Valabrègue, who was Zola and Cézanne’s close friend, asserted in 1866, “All we want is to produce. If we work, our success is certain.”21 In one of his several short articles for the journal L’Evénement of the same year, Zola referred to artists as “workers” no less than three times.22 As mentioned in the Introduction, Zola regarded Pissarro as first and foremost an “honest man” and a “worker.” The art historian Joachim Pissarro, the painter’s greatgreat-grandson, has recently argued in an important essay that a commitment to productive labor had been a value since Pissarro’s early years and was one of the bases for his intimate collaboration with Cézanne in the 1870s.23 In addition, the art historian Paul Smith has recently proposed that Pissarro was at least as responsible as Seurat for introducing the scientific theories of color underlying the Neo-Impressionist division of tones into their constituents.24 Pissarro was indeed highly conscious of his technique in the mid-1880s, which he said aimed at a “primitive” effect and which he once referred to as “barbarian”—surely in contrast to the more seductive handling used by painters like Monet and

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Renoir.25 After meeting Seurat, Pissarro adopted his approach, which could express the value Pissarro placed on labor and productivity. He must have understood Seurat’s effort as an ideal synthesis of the industrial and the personal—the two principal elements in the modern ethos. Similarly, he would have appreciated the use of color theories to ground what was still, in the end, personal perception. Not until the 1890s, after abandoning Neo-Impressionism’s systematic pointillism, did Pissarro again turn to urban and industrial imagery as a major theme. After he did a few pictures in cities in the early 1890s, a posthumous Caillebotte retrospective may have awakened his more sustained interest in such compositions. In addition, trouble with his tear ducts forced Pissarro to paint indoors during all but the best weather. Pissarro’s series of city scenes, such as Place du Théâtre-

Français in Rain (1898, PV 1030, Minneapolis Institute of Art), hark back to Monet’s Boulevard des 160

Capucines (Plate 2), with their carriage traffic and pedestrian movement.26 Lacking Monet’s bourgeois observers from a balcony, however, Pissarro’s views are more impersonal, with figures dispersed atom-

FIGURE 114. Camille Pissarro, The Dieppe Railway, Eragny-sur-Epte, 1886. Private collection.

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FIGURE 115. Camille Pissarro, Rouen, Boieldieu Bridge in Overcast Weather, 1896. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

istically over the picture surface. His approach evokes individual anonymity and autonomy within the city’s throbbing circulation. During the same years, Pissarro made numerous images of the industrial port of Rouen, which he had represented for the first time in 1883, some ten years after Monet. Compositions such as Rouen, Boieldieu Bridge in Overcast Weather (1896, Figure 115) focus on the particular activity of cargo unloading in the foreground, set within the more general industrial landscape. Such works, produced at a time when Monet had withdrawn completely to the quiet country pleasures of Giverny, except for his Rouen Cathedral series and an occasional trip outside France, seem to make an explicit statement of Pissarro’s difference. For Monet, Rouen provided an aesthetic monument—the complex facade of its Gothic cathedral, which had long attracted artists. Indeed, Monet’s views isolate the enormous church from its surroundings in both space and time, dematerializing it to a floating apparition displaying the artist’s poetic sensibility. By contrast, Pissarro’s Rouen pictures report the details of observed reality, asserting Impressionism’s original calling through imagery whose documentary industrial and productive focus declares their modernity. How different from Monet’s Charing Cross

Bridge, Overcast (Figure 116), painted in London in 1900. One almost imagines Monet’s ghostly train floating across the trestle over the Thames as it approaches its terminus at Charing Cross Station. By

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FIGURE 116. Claude Monet, Charing Cross Bridge, Overcast, 1900. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

contrast, it was as if Pissarro needed to exorcise the nostalgia that was always a potential in landscape imagery unless marked by specific signs of the contemporary world.

A DUTCHMAN’S VIEW OF MODERN FRANCE As an outsider abruptly introduced to the Parisian avant-garde in March 1886, the very year of the Neo-Impressionist transformation, Vincent Van Gogh’s reactions to what he saw at the Impressionist exhibition of that year are extremely informative. The urban landscape clearly fascinated him—witness his several panoramic views of Paris and his many Montmartre motifs.27 At first, Van Gogh painted urban scenes in relatively dark tonalities derived from Dutch traditions, as he had done for industrial scenes in the port of Antwerp in late 1885, before leaving for Paris. One of his Parisian panoramic views, Factories Seen from a Hillside in Moonlight (1886, Figure 117), suggests the dramatic lighting of Guillaumin’s Setting Sun at Ivry (Plate 19), toward which the artist from Antwerp would have been sympathetic.28 Moreover, Van Gogh soon lightened his palette and changed his brushstroke in response to Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism. His landscapes during the Paris period actually recapitulate the categories of themes on which this study has focused, from images of industrialized riverbanks to trains, factories, and urban places, primarily in Montmartre, Clichy, and Asnières. Van Gogh had met Signac in early 1887, and they painted together along the Seine that spring. The site of Van Gogh’s Boulevard de Clichy (1887, F 292, Rijksmuseum Van Gogh, Amsterdam) resembles that of Signac’s winter scene, mentioned earlier. One of Van Gogh’s most important pictures from this group was Train Crossing the Seine at Asnières (1887, Figure 118), in which he seems to mediate between

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FIGURE 117. Vincent Van Gogh, Factories Seen from a Hillside in Moonlight, 1886. Rijksmuseum Van Gogh, Amsterdam. FIGURE 118. Vincent Van Gogh, Train Crossing the Seine at Asnières (detail), 1887. Bührle Collection, Zürich.

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Impressionism and the newer generation. There, Van Gogh juxtaposed bourgeois figures on the riverbank and rental rowing boats at the right—sure signs of leisure—to the massive railroad bridge, with a train lumbering over it. Although his brushstrokes are Impressionist rather than pointillist in shape, their regularity and the intensity of the picture’s complementary blues and oranges reveal Van Gogh’s interest in recent pictorial innovations. The same is true of the picture’s powerful geometry, with its clear allusion to Signac’s compositional strategies. Van Gogh also followed Signac and Monet in painting the factories at Clichy facing Asnières.

Factories at Clichy (1887, Figure 119) is the boldest, taken the closest up, whereas earlier views are more distant and inclusive, evoking the spread of industry in the plain of Saint-Denis viewed from the Montmartre hillside along the Rue Caulaincourt (View from Paris, near Montmartre, 1886, pastel, pen164

cil, ink, and gouache, F 1410, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam). One picture, Factories (1887, F 318, Barnes Collection, Merion, Pennsylvania), shows an alley lined by factories or leading into an industrial complex, viewed so close up that one cannot be sure whether it is the same group as in the Saint-Louis picture. Not since the late 1860s and early 1870s, in the works of Cézanne, Guillaumin, and Pissarro, had factory images been so prominent as in the work of Signac and his circle, which included not only Van Gogh but other artists, such as Emile Bernard, Charles Angrand, and, by 1887, Maximilian Luce.29 Although Van Gogh’s works were to a degree derivative at this time, they reveal a powerful

FIGURE 119. Vincent Van Gogh, Factories at Clichy, 1887. Saint Louis Art Museum.

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personality hungry for new ideas that seemed to be coalescing within a group of his contemporaries.30 His affinity for Signac’s industrial imagery reflects not only the revived significance of such themes but their appropriateness for artistic aims in which modern style and modern imagery were inseparable. In Van Gogh’s case, the unique physical imprint of his pictorial handling maintained an insistence on individual artisanal productivity rather than the impersonal or scientific/technological evocations of the pointillist dot. It is easy to understand how Van Gogh’s leftist sympathies for the working man led to his interest in urban and industrial imagery along with the common elements of everyday life.31 At the same time, the admiration for premodern labor that he expressed in many of his letters and early Dutch-period works helps explain his resistance to the depersonalizing anonymity of modernization, which Signac’s pointillist style may well have implied.32 Even in abandoning Paris for the luminous Midi, where he concentrated primarily on agricultural activity in his landscapes, Van Gogh maintained his interest in modernity and industrial labor, especially before his co-habitation with Gauguin in Arles.33 Arles was more than a village at the time: it was the last inland port before the Rhône River Delta, where the great river splits into the Grand Rhône and the Petit Rhône. It was something like a southern Rouen. Rival to Marseille in ancient times, it was the gateway to the Camargue region and was at the center of a rich and fertile agricultural plain. Arles had industry, too; it is rarely noticed that in many of Van Gogh’s views factories can be seen across its fields (Sunset near Arles, 1888, Figure 120).34 It was also an important canal and railway junction, where the Paris-Lyon-Marseille company had some of its maintenance and repair workshops. Van Gogh did not neglect such presences. From the neighboring suburb of Montmajour, he recorded a train from Arles crossing the countryside (Landscape with Train at Montmajour, 1888, F 1424, British Museum). From a dramatic, close-up angle, he painted the railroad bridge that carried the main line and suburban tracks over the main road into town (Railroad Bridge over the Avenue Montmajour, Arles, 1888, Figure 121).35 This bridge was the most massive of its kind at Arles, a sort of provincial Pont de l’Europe (in reverse, since the roadway went under it), carrying both through-tracks and sidings that opened just south of Arles’s main train station. From Van Gogh’s position, the latter would have been just to the right. Looking under the bridge, one sees another in the near distance, which carried a spur off to the west and over the Rhône. And as he had for his Clichy factories, Van Gogh made a close-up view of train carriages as well. One of his most arresting compositions shows from quite close up both passenger cars and coal-carrying freight cars on sidings, near the P.L.M. workshops in the background (Railway Carriages, 1888, F 446, Avignon, Fondation Angladon-Dubrujeand). As with Van Gogh’s predecessors among the Impressionists, river bridges and water activities at Arles attracted the painter’s gaze. It is almost as if Van Gogh were cataloguing Arles’s infrastructure. For example, linking Arles to Trinquetaille, its suburb across the Rhône River, were a road bridge and a railway bridge, both of which Van Gogh painted in October 1888. In The Road Bridge at Trinquetaille (1888, Figure 122), Van Gogh concentrated on the pedestrian access stairway, a massive stone structure that contrasts vividly to the modern lightweight iron span over the river. In The Railroad Bridge

at Trinquetaille (1888, F 426, private collection), Van Gogh clearly showed the bend in the river north of Trinquetaille.36 This was the bridge that carried the spur track mentioned earlier over the Rhône. Although his composition is much like some of Monet’s views of the railroad bridge at Argenteuil (see Chapter 4), its setting is darker, more urban and industrial, with workers lounging or waiting for the

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FIGURE 120. Vincent Van Gogh, Sunset near Arles, 1888. Kunstmuseum, Winterthur. FIGURE 121. Vincent Van Gogh, Railroad Bridge over the Avenue Montmajour, Arles, 1888.

Private collection.

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arrival of a ferry or a barge, as in the middle ground. Van Gogh seems to have been intrigued by such riverbank activities. Another important painting, for which he made at least two elaborate drawings, is

Canal La Roubine du Roi with Washerwomen (1888, Figure 123).37 The canal was part of a large irrigation network (roubine means irrigation canal) that ran through the countryside. It began just south of where the railroad bridge crossed the Rhône, leading through the industrial part of town, past the gasworks and out through the fields to the east.38 The gasworks are clearly visible in Van Gogh’s background. Douglas Druick and Peter Zegers have pointed out that Van Gogh’s ambition for such works was to raise the most ordinary scene to allegorical heights.39 A comparison with a smaller painting Van Gogh did a few months earlier (Washerwomen at the Gleizes Bridge over the Vigueyret Canal, near

Arles, 1888, F 396, Pola Museum of Art, Japan) suggests that in the comparison between countryside and city as the setting for his washerwomen, the city was of greater interest.40 In the background of the earlier painting, one sees the smokestacks of factories from Arles. The Vigueyret Canal crossed the Roubine de Roi just west of the city. It was an area in which Van Gogh worked frequently: the Vigueyret Canal was the waterway spanned by the beloved Langlois drawbridge, as in his well-known painting The

Langlois Bridge with Women Washing (1888, F 397, Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo). Yet the culminating work with themes of washerwomen along a canal is the larger composition on La Roubine du Roi Canal with gasworks. Comparison with Pissarro’s pictures of washhouses on the Seine done fifteen years earlier (see Chapter 3) makes clear how Van Gogh’s dramatic composition and sunrise introduce the possibility of symbolism, given the degree of departure from more conventional compositions he displays. That is, rather than representing a scene that Pissarro appears to have considered utterly natural, requiring no more artistic intervention, relatively speaking, than ostensibly to “record it”—and that in itself would have been the novelty in Pissarro’s time—Van Gogh has produced what seems a far more personal view. For that reason, the composition seems charged with the kind of possibilities to which

FIGURE 122. Vincent Van Gogh,

The Road Bridge at Trinquetaille, 1888. Private collection.

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his allegorical ambitions pointed and thus open to active interpretation. Yet even if we accept Van Gogh’s intentions, they should not be confused with nostalgia. For the countryside Van Gogh portrayed was productive, shaped, like the city of Arles, by human labor and design. Another beautiful and again carefully planned painting made at Arles in August 1888 is Quai

at Arles with Men Unloading Sand Barges (1888, Figure 124).41 Shortly afterward, Van Gogh painted stevedores unloading coal against the city skyline of Arles and a setting sun (Stevedores Unloading

Coal at Arles, 1888, F 237, private collection). The prominence of the French flag in both pictures recalls how Monet’s painting of the Garden of the Infanta adjacent to the Louvre (Plate 4) seemed to be a declaration of national pride for a new style that would reflect the modern world. If Van Gogh’s paintings can, for the sake of argument, be considered an unintended commentary on the Monet, his 16 8

position is far more working class and labor oriented. A smaller, more freely painted oil sketch for the stevedores picture (Stevedores in Arles, 1888, Plate 24) may serve to bring this study full circle, again through its reminder of Monet. In the latter’s Impression: Sunrise (Plate 1), in which figures of workers and boats on water are seen against a brilliant rising sun in an industrial setting, Monet celebrates

FIGURE 123. Vincent Van Gogh, Canal La Roubine du Roi with Washerwomen, 1888. Private collection.

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1 69

FIGURE 124. Vincent Van Gogh, Quai at Arles with Men Unloading Sand Barges, 1888. Museum Folkwang, Essen.

the beauties of nature and industry together. Van Gogh’s intention appears to be related. But also pertinent to Van Gogh’s sketch is its connection, again, to that even earlier masterpiece of the industrial genre in Impressionism, Armand Guillaumin’s Setting Sun at Ivry (Plate 19).42 My point is not so much to claim primacy for Guillaumin or for Monet as to suggest a shared vision that has been underplayed in previous studies of Impressionism. In his voluminous correspondence, Van Gogh speaks often of his paintings of Arles and its environs, but he rarely discusses them in other than aesthetic and technical terms. As with the contemporary Neo-Impressionist works, the themes focused on in this study were taken for granted by his time as part of the range of representation for modern landscape. Certainly in Van Gogh’s paintings of 1886–88 such works are anything but marginal; they participate fully in his panoramic and contemporary vision of his surroundings. For artists of Van Gogh’s generation, then, the impetus for modern landscape was linked to their predecessors’ groundbreaking exploration of its urban and economic aspects, which legitimated industrial and commercial imagery and gave it a status equal to that of the images of leisure with which Impressionism would later become more exclusively associated.

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7 POLITICAL FRAMES AND ASPIRATIONS REALISM TO UTOPIA

Van Gogh’s labor-oriented sympathies lead directly to a discussion of landscape and politics. I propose that Neo-Impressionism brought out an underlying utopian subtext of Impressionism.1 But unlike its successor movement, Impressionism eschewed the characteristically nostalgic vocabularies of rural or classical primitivism usually associated with utopian art, as well as the explicitness of allegory cultivated by Van Gogh. In some ways, and sometimes consciously, Impressionism was more the heir to Courbet. Without Courbet’s overt and self-aggrandizing thematic choices, the Impressionists nevertheless trod along a path first cleared by him.

LANDSCAPE AND POLITICS Even if the Neo-Impressionists and their circle returned to many of the industrial themes and locations that the older Impressionists seemed to have abandoned, it is difficult to prove that their choices were politically motivated. Still, many viewers felt that various aspects of Neo-Impressionism had political connotations. Thus a distinction must be made between the conscious political intentions driving artists and the political reception, not always intended, that artists elicit. Similarly, a distinction must be drawn between ideology, which is a set of underlying assumptions, often unconscious, and the active realm of politics, in which ideology is sometimes put into practice but often compromised. A number of critics in the early 1880s hailed the efforts of the Independent Artists for opposing the bourgeois taste embodied by the official Salon.2 Paul Alexis, the Impressionists’ anarchist ally from their early years, now referred to artists by political position, calling one of the Independent exhibitors a “center-left Impressionist” and thus implying a politics for Impressionism while recognizing its diversity.3 Significant doubt has recently been cast on Seurat’s own reputedly anarchist political views; yet whether he actually created art as a political vehicle or merely allowed his work to be associated with radicalism, even the latter possibility acknowledges that the reception of NeoImpressionism was politicized.4 A writer named Alfred Paulet, in a statement perhaps more hopeful than realistic, held that, “as with the battles of politics, those of art, when they spring from sincerity, attain results in the final analysis.”5 The Symbolist writer Gustave Kahn similarly argued that “in shattering a fragment of the artistic facade, one touches the social facade; it is this that explains why artistic demands, once they are made, encounter such aggressive resistance.”6 Such politicized interpretations of new art were built on a foundation established by the original Impressionists in the early to mid-1870s, when the group’s apparent defiance of aesthetic

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convention and its declaration of independence from the official Salon were received as political. Looking somewhat further back, one finds that the Impressionists themselves drew from and were encouraged by associations between landscape painting and the political avant-garde. In the late eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau laid the groundwork for this connection, thanks to his identification of nature as a realm of purity and truth, in which innocence and freedom found refuge from the artificial conventions and constraints of what he deemed a corrupt society. The centrality of nature and the rural impulse were echoed in the utopian theories of the socialist thinker Charles Fourier, who believed that the freedom of artists would be paradigmatic for other occupations. As Neil McWilliam has shown, these ideas gave landscape a privileged role for left-wing art critics of around 1850.7 Their ideas combined two progressive, if ultimately contradictory, ideals. The first 17 2

was that landscape could portray an earthly paradise, anticipating the future promised in a perfect society. The second was that only the free artist was capable of representing the world in its natural state. In the first case, the forms favored for representing the theme of a worldly utopia had an idealizing quality, reminiscent of Golden Age imagery and quite removed from modernity. We now see this style as more nostalgic than futuristic, harking back to Ovidian mythology or Virgilian eclogues. Dominique Papéty’s Dream of Happiness (1843, Musée Vivenel, Compiègne) typifies this style, which was also emulated by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in his Golden Age (1841–48, unfinished, Chateau de Dampierre). A classicizing and idyllic spirit even pervades many paintings by Camille Corot, especially his early Italianate pictures and finished Salon works. It reemerged in the painting of Seurat— whose time-frozen and simplified forms echoed those of Puvis de Chavannes, an artist whose elegiac landscapes were broadly popular. It is quite absent from Impressionism itself. Writing of Corot in 1862, Champfleury, one of Courbet’s earliest supporters, described the landscape painter in bourgeois society as serving the social function of “a kind of moral consoler who slips into the businessman’s study to refresh his spirit.”8 Champfleury’s explanation still smacks of nostalgia rather than the frank documentary naturalism advocated by Jules Castagnary. His theory rephrases Baudelaire’s utopian argument for art in general from the preface to the latter’s “Salon of 1846,” which was dedicated “To the Bourgeois.” Their difference was that Baudelaire, though recognizing the materialist basis of modern society, did so with an irony meant to maintain his own dignified sense of superiority to such values.9 Champfleury seems to have accepted the conditions Baudelaire considered degrading. Yet both posit escape from day-to-day reality to a utopia—a word that means, literally, “no place” but was always understood to mean an ideal place. Corot’s paintings also embodied the second idea favored by social art criticism at midcentury, namely the appreciation of landscape in its natural state. In this respect, Corot’s later work— which was the most visible to the younger generation—inspired movement in that direction and earned him the admiration of many of the young Impressionists. Among Corot’s generation in the Barbizon School of landscape painters, increased emphasis on the direct study of nature outdoors and on making finished art directly from that experience contributed to the growth of the concept of naturalism. Socialist art critics admired Barbizon landscapes because the artists seemed to place their personal observations above conventional formulas.10 Vision and practice, moreover, were mutually reinforcing:

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173

FIGURE 125. Gustave Courbet, The Studio of the Painter, 1855. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

close observation of nature would free artists from convention, and the freer from convention artists became, the more they would be able to represent nature truthfully. Through this process, naturalist landscape came to be associated with artistic freedom. In addition, many photographers rubbed shoulders with painters in the Fontainebleau Forest. Hence, landscape was a place where technology might negotiate a rapprochement with art. As a site of innovation, then, landscape became a vehicle for challenges to the status quo that could acquire connotations far beyond the artistic realm. As early as 1834, at the same time that he supported the new generation of landscape painters, the left-wing critic Théophile Thoré advocated an art “that [would] penetrate to the heart of the social character of its epoch.”11 In his “Letter to Théodore Rousseau” from Salon of 1844, Thoré argued that “painting is a veritable conversation with the exterior world; it is a positive and material form of communication.” His vocabulary—as in the words positive and material—echoes the ideas of Auguste Comte, for whom human interaction with the material realm was the essence of all positive activity. For Comte, neglect of reality caused by the excesses of imagination in Romantic art was a destabilizing dead end.12 Thoré stated further that since poetry and politics are sisters, “when politics are false, poetry suffers.” He believed, therefore, that art was inevitably grounded in historical reality but that Théodore Rousseau, as an artist removed from the corrupt influence of present politics, was able to produce a truly revolutionary art.13 At least one progressive art critic with related ideas, François Sabatier, was a friend of the militantly political Courbet. Courbet signaled the primacy of landscape by placing a picture of his native countryside on the easel at the center of his Stu-

dio of the Painter (1855, Figure 125), the large painting that he conceived as a manifesto of artistic

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independence.14 For Courbet, Realism—painting one’s own time through one’s own way of seeing— served revolutionary politics by freeing artists from convention and viewers from oppressive ideologies, whether propagated by government, religion, or academies. In his Realist Manifesto, which accompanied the Studio of the Painter at his Realism exhibition, he claimed to be “not only a painter, but a man,” by which he meant a free, unfettered individual. Courbet’s concept of “man” was fraught with political implications regarding the autonomy of the individual as expressed in writings by the anarchist political philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.15 Surely it found echoes in Zola’s statements such as “What I look for in a painting above all is for a man, not a picture.”16 Zola’s term may not have alluded explicitly to anarchist politics, but it had become part of the general vocabulary of protest and dissent. 17 4

What better example of Courbet’s enterprise than a landscape of his own surroundings— representing his specific and personal utopia—rather than escapist views of distant and idealized places?17 As later stated by Edmond About in a Salon review of 1867: “The theory of landscape and that of politics is the same. It can be summed up in one single word, the proudest and sweetest in our language: Freedom.”18 With this word, About combined both the progressive political and the naturalist individualist elements found in modern landscape. Naturalist landscape painters thus constituted a relatively long-standing avant-garde example for the rest of society to follow. As the genre most closely associated with naturalism, progressive yet unidentified with any specific political program, landscape painting embodied “utopian” or at least “liberal” principles in the broadest possible way. For Castagnary, a supporter of Courbet in particular and landscape generally, Naturalism— the word Castagnary preferred to Realism, to evoke a broader agenda than Courbet’s presumed anarchism—was a sign of France’s general evolution in the direction of democracy. 19 The idealistic and integrative cast to his conception can be found in his claim that Naturalism “reestablished the broken bonds between man and nature” and that it would, as I noted earlier, include the life of both the city and the country.20 On this matter, too, Théophile Thoré emerges as a predecessor. In the “Letter to Théodore Rousseau,” he specifically addressed the issue of art and industry, lamenting the division between the two produced by bourgeois society. He argued that “industry is as human as art . . . but until now they have been two nearly separate worlds. For our civilization has fractured man into sections that are foreign to one another.”21 Presumably he meant that industry and art were both products of the interaction between man and nature. For Castagnary, Naturalism healed this rift through its various alliances, such as “truth allied with science,” so that “line and color . . . [would no longer be artificially] separated from one another.”22 In this last statement Castagnary echoed Baudelaire, whose “Salon of 1846” already advocated the reunification of line and color not only as a natural, as opposed to conventional, technique but as the key to an art that would provide the harmony and equilibrium so necessary to what he regarded as an inevitably conflictual bourgeois age.23 Naturalism thus historicized in present or at least foreseeable modernity the aspirations expressed by earlier idealizing utopian theories. The political implications of Impressionist landscape fall within this ideological constellation. Landscape was a genre that allowed painters simply to ignore or bypass traditional religious or historical narratives, rather than having to combat them overtly. The landscapist’s training did not

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require a traditional education in classical literature and history, and landscape imagery was more accessible to a broad public thanks to its basis in observation of everyday things. The narrative plot conventions of history painting had traditionally been a vehicle for political ideologies and propaganda. The non-narrative spaces of landscape, though hardly free from ideology, represented freedom from such government-nurtured norms of communication. The MacMahon regime of the mid1870s implicitly recognized this freedom by attempting to reverse landscape’s trend toward modernity (see below). By definition, then, the Impressionists’ fresh and immediate representations of familiar sites, especially those marked by signs of modernity, asserted a value system quite different from that still promoted at the Academy and by conservative politics. Their paintings spoke of democratic freedoms through the example of nonacademic choices and techniques rather than through defiantly political subjects. Indeed, aside from his figure paintings, Courbet’s landscapes in particular, from which explicitly political subjects are absent, demonstrated a combination of technical and entrepreneurial freedom that was Impressionism’s direct antecedent. This was one of the arguments made in the utopian systems of both Fourier and Saint-Simon, which acclaimed artists as leaders of society. The Saint-Simonians in particular were concerned with the artist’s visionary role in industrial society and saw art partnering with science and industry. Maxime Du Camp’s poetic effort of 1855, Les

Chants modernes (see Chapter 5), was criticized on those very grounds, particularly by the novelist Gustave Flaubert, for whom it was too obvious an attempt to put Saint-Simonian ideas into practice.24 It seems no accident that Saint-Simon’s many and varied works were published as a complete set during the late 1860s, at the time of burgeoning, though short-lived, reform in both art and politics.25 It would be reductive, however, to turn Impressionist paintings themselves into political allegories. Their explicitly contemporary landscapes reside, rather, within a culture of progressive opposition in which political meanings were varied and significant. Nor were the Impressionists monolithic in their party politics: Degas and Renoir tilted strongly toward the right and Pissarro and Guillaumin to the left. One must consider both the artists’ shared subscription to liberal ideals of freedom as practiced through a commitment to naturalist painting and the different ideological investments revealed by an individual’s selective representations of how economic forces transformed contemporary society.26 It was the exhibition strategy of the Impressionists that actually tipped the scales toward a specifically political interpretation in the early reception of their progressive naturalist landscapes. Thanks to it, their economic concerns and sympathies became highly visible not only through diverse choices of subject matter but through the very fact of their independent organization. Here they demonstrated leadership through example rather than through propaganda. For many, the forms of the exhibition itself had leftist implications. Most reviewers of the 1874 Impressionism exhibit considered not only the aesthetic, stylistic, and technical elements of Impressionist originality but also the exhibition’s independent economic and unique structural features. One respected critic for La Presse, Emile Cardon, stated explicitly that the exhibition had to be viewed under these two aspects separately. The one he mentioned first and considered most laudable was that artists had succeeded in opening an exhibition independent from the official, government-run and Academy-dominated Salon.27 The Salon had been under attack for many years and from many quarters. In the 1850s Gustave Courbet was

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perhaps its loudest critic.28 In Le Progrès (1864), Edmond About launched a diatribe against government interference in the arts.29 He defended contemporary art in the “century of steam, electricity, gas, guano, crinoline, rubber, photography, drainage, and universal suffrage.”30 Emile Zola’s scathing attacks on the Salon jury from 1866 are well known for his accusation that no new artists—he had the future Impressionists in mind—would ever be included.31 For Cardon, on the other hand, aesthetic questions were secondary compared to an event that seemed to herald the Salon’s demise. Another critic called the Impressionist show a “Counter-Exhibition,” reacting to it as an alternative to the Salon and as a phenomenon more important than the quality, as he saw it, of the art actually on display.32 Many recognized this significance of the group’s position, even when they disliked the artwork. Several noted the decadence of Salon art, and a few raised the possibility of the government’s own desire to get out 17 6

of the business of managing exhibitions. Independent art shows by artists were not unprecedented and already had avant-garde implications, starting with Gustave Courbet’s celebrated one-man Realism Pavilion of 1855 across from the fairgrounds of France’s first Exposition Universelle. It was at this exhibition of Realism that Courbet displayed his manifesto of artistic independence, The Studio of the Painter, and promulgated his Realist Manifesto.33 In 1867 Edouard Manet, whom the Impressionists considered their leader of sorts in the 1860s, held a one-man show of his own, as did Courbet again in the same year, coinciding with another Paris-based international exposition. But those were the efforts of individuals who had already in one way or another achieved considerable fame. Another sort of precedent can be found in the exhibitions organized by Louis Martinet in rooms on the Boulevard des Italiens, not far from where the Impressionists would eventually exhibit. Martinet’s exhibitions were both historical and contemporary. Artists as diverse as Rembrandt, Chardin, David, and Manet were shown there, along with many others. As the art historian Jérôme Poggi has shown, the significance of Martinet’s activity lay in his utopian socialist inspiration and his practical goals—his attempt to organize artists in a National Society of Fine Arts independent of the Salon and to make his exhibitions financially self-supporting. 34 Although Martinet failed in both his aims, his efforts link Courbet’s ambition for economic independence, which the artist accompanied with much political rhetoric, to the Impressionists, who despite their relatively low-key rhetoric were received as politically challenging. Nonetheless, the Impressionist exhibition still differed in two important ways. First, it was the collective effort of relatively little-known artists (a phenomenon not entirely unprecedented but never before so followed by the press); and, second, it could be located within the new and highly politicized atmosphere following the defeat of the Paris Commune. Whether or not they actually subscribed openly to left-wing politics, the Impressionists had aligned themselves with individuals and practices associated with it.35 Friends of the Impressionists knew that the idea for an independent group exhibition had been on their minds for some time.36 Recall that in May 1873 Paul Cézanne’s journalist friend Paul Alexis had announced its imminence in the pages of the anarchist newspaper L’Avenir national. Alexis described an association of artists that would collect monthly dues of five francs from its members in exchange for exhibiting rights.37 There would be no jury, no exclusions, and no predispositions regarding style or artistic tendency. They hoped for “the solidarity of all workers.”38 The association’s stated purpose was primarily economic—sales

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facilitated by an access to the public free of administrative control. “This powerful idea, the idea of association, is growing, and it is beginning to inject new blood into the anemic old world,” Alexis wrote.39 The notion of an art association or union as an alternative economic solution to the dominance of the official Salon had emerged in the 1860s. It was proffered both by Louis Martinet and by Saint-Simonian friends of his, who saw it as a way artists could adapt to industrial society. It may have originated in England, where art unions had already appeared.40 Referring to artists as “workers” whose power could be enhanced by forming a union, Alexis also declared: “Like any other corporation, the artistic corporation has much to gain by organizing immediately its own syndicate.”41 A week later, Monet replied in a letter to the editor, cited earlier, that a group of painters assembled in his home had “read [the article] with pleasure” and were “happy to see you defend ideas that are ours too.” He called on L’Avenir

national to offer assistance when it came time to execute their plan.42 A London paper, The Academy, correctly described the organization as “a cooperative society of artists.”43 Today, artist cooperatives are well-known alternatives to the commercial gallery system. They are viewed as vehicles for public exposure that the majority of their members would avoid if they could get commercial dealer representation. Joining one is usually more a practical act than a political gesture, but for some it can be political, too—an act of protest against the dominant system, as it was for women’s co-op galleries in the 1970s. The Impressionists’ attitudes were probably no less mixed. For example, Pissarro, though committed pragmatically and politically to the idea of the cooperative, had extensive relations with the art dealer Durand-Ruel as well. The implied or ostensibly political dimension of the Impressionist organization was surely intensified by coming on the heels of the Paris Commune. Paul Alexis’s language echoed the selfgovernment rhetoric of worker associations from recent memory.44 Following the French surrender to Prussia in 1871 and the humiliating treaty resulting from the Franco-Prussian War, a left-wing uprising in Paris established a communist regime there. The standing government of the Third Republic, which followed Napoleon III’s abdication after the Prussian attack, was forced by the Commune into exile at Versailles. Led by conservative Republicans and their allies anxious to reestablish their patriotic credibility after the French defeat, the Third Republic sent in the army, which was led by conservative officers loyal to the official regime. The so-called Versaillais troops routed the Parisian workers in a bloodbath. It was a civil war that took more lives than the Franco-Prussian conflict. In 1873 a monarchist party coalition took power and named as president Maréchal MacMahon, who had led the Versailles army against the Commune. Within a few years, parliamentary struggles broke out between Republicans and Legitimists, the latter hoping to restore the monarchy, the former hoping to preserve the Republic through compromise with the conservatives. The parliamentary elections of 1877 finally gave liberal Republicans a majority, and by 1879 MacMahon was forced to step down. During his four years as leader of the majority (i.e., until 1877), when the Impressionists were coming together as a group and holding their first exhibits, MacMahon had tried to extend his “Moral Order” to the Salon by supporting art of the classicizing and “uplifting” nostalgic bent as opposed to naturalist landscape.45 Whereas in the late 1860s the young Impressionists had on occasion been admitted to the Salon, their efforts at independence in the 1870s undoubtedly reflected the Salon jury’s new stringency.

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The Impressionist cooperative was a representative democracy founded on absolute equality. The author of its bylaws was Pissarro, whose anarchist leanings later disturbed Renoir. Its announced treasurer, Auguste Ottin, had been a member of the Paris Commune’s governing council. The famous photographer and caricaturist Nadar, who rented out his former studio as the place for the first exhibition, was also widely associated with left-wing causes. In his review of the first Impressionist exhibition, Jules Castagnary enumerated the administrative principles underlying the cooperative. The latter, as we know, was a Republican sympathizer who had often defended Courbet, the artist most explicitly associated with anarchist, Communard, and anti-Imperial politics at the time. Courbet had been so militant during the Commune that after its defeat he was imprisoned, fined, and forced into exile to Switzerland by the MacMahon regime. As a larger-than-life personality, Courbet was a convenient tar17 8

get, and the charges against him were certainly overblown. Castagnary defended him against all accusations. The Impressionist organizational principles that Castagnary extolled in 1874 were an equal share in the cooperative allotted to each member; a fifteen-member administrative council, a third of whom would be renewed each year by election; and pictures to be displayed by size and in alphabetical order of artist, beginning with a letter drawn at random.46 Although these were certainly not political aims or gestures, their antihierarchical forms echoed those of leftist politics, and the Impressionists thus seemed ready to contest the reign of oligarchy and centralization embodied not only by the Salon but by the government as well. Assumptions regarding the young artists’ antigovernmental politics were clearly reflected by other labels affixed to them for a time. In addition to Impressionists, the two most common were

Révoltés and Intransigeants.47 Castagnary was acutely aware of the political associations that others were attributing to the new painters. He concurred, but in a positive and generalized way, ascribing the energies abounding in the group’s effort to France’s revolutionary tradition—which he characterized as long-standing and democratic, taking it safely back well before the Commune, so that it would not be linked to communism. That is, he identified the artistic tendencies of the “so-called anarchists” with the naturalist impulse that he believed was the French revolutionary tradition’s artistic manifestation.48 Castagnary had already claimed the previous year that just as a democratic government— the French Republic, declared in 1792 with the abolition of the monarchy—expressed the will of the people, landscape was democracy’s artistic expression.49 But several other writers had linked the Impressionist aesthetic to Realism, whose principal proponent was the infamous Courbet. When Emile Cardon, who used the epithet Révoltés, held that Impressionists should not be confounded with the Realists because the former were contemptuous even of Courbet, he was thus implying that the new generation was willing to go even further—that they were even more extremist and dangerous than their presumptive mentor, the anarchist Realist en chef.50

THE WORKER-PAINTER AESTHETIC The connection between the Impressionist aesthetic and this politics thus clearly existed in the public mind. Before the Impressionists, Courbet’s messages to the press and public protests used language that the Impressionists later echoed, as can be seen in the letters that he and Cézanne, about

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a dozen years apart, addressed to the minister of fine arts, Count Nieuwerkerke, questioning the legitimacy of the Salon jury.51 Emile Zola had done much the same in his virulent attacks on the jury of April 1866.52 Camille Pissarro, who was much praised by Zola, as was Courbet (at least for his work of the 1850s), made what is now the well-known Portrait of Cézanne (1874, PV 293, private collection) during the year of the first Impressionist exhibition. In it, the artist placed a cartoon portrait of Courbet behind the image of Cézanne.53 Moreover, Courbet’s free handling of paint had been perceived as coarse and rustic, like the labor of an artisan or worker rather than the technique of a sophisticated artist.54 Armand Silvestre, a well-known writer on the arts who joined in calling the new painters Révoltés, developed a similar theory for the Impressionists. His judgments on individual works were even-handed, but he was disturbed by what he saw as the artists’ excessive belief in absolute equality: “I find their affectation clumsy. Even if its justification is the philosophical principle that everything in nature is of equal beauty, artistically that principle is false. . . . It makes their worker-like manner stand out, that is, revealing how little skill they have and how much they need a teacher.”55 Associating the principle of equality with the attitudes of workers (whom he may well have associated with the Communards), Silvestre inevitably attributed unmistakable political and social orientations to this aesthetic. His objection to Impressionism on philosophical grounds also paralleled negative comparisons to photography (see Chapter 2). His concept of egalitarianism referred, first, to the lack of selectivity in choices of scenes and objects for representation. Second, it alluded to the unifying effect of Impressionist technique, which to him appeared to render everything in the same way regardless of its significance in a composition. The critic Henri Polday, citing photography as an essentially egalitarian antiart, claimed that such similarities reinforced Impressionism’s intransigent character.56 Hence the perceived connection to communism by Théodore Duret cited earlier.57 By “worker-like manner,” Silvestre, whose older brother Théophile had earlier written about Courbet, can only have meant the ostensibly rough, uneven, fragmented brushstrokes, which to him seemed a crude, unfinished display of manual labor.58 Some Impressionists, especially Pissarro and Cézanne, looked to Courbet in their early years. They wished to ground their vision in a process that imprinted authentic effort—both physical and perceptual—expended over time. Their work became a performance of the values referenced by their themes. That ethos permeated the correspondence surrounding Cézanne and appeared in contemporaneous articles by Zola in the second half of the 1860s. In just one of his several short articles for the journal L’Evénement of 1866, Zola referred to artists as “workers” no less than three times—“unknown workers,” “serious workers,” and “young workers.”59 As mentioned already, Zola regarded Pissarro first and foremost as an “honest man” and a “worker,” seeming to define the latter as “a true painter.”60 Paul Alexis had used workers to refer to the artists he hoped would join the Impressionist group.61 Cézanne’s early style aroused much relevant commentary; his friend Valabrègue described it to Zola as “a mason’s art” in a letter of 1866.62 A local observer, watching Cézanne and Pissarro, is often quoted as saying that Cézanne “plastered” whereas Pissarro “dabbed.”63 During his companionship with Pissarro, Cézanne channeled this powerful handling into the more stable and seemingly regularized “constructive” brushstroke. Theodore Reff described this technique as a way to make paint-

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ing appear as a “constructive professional activity.”64 I noted earlier that Pissarro’s letters abound with allusions to the seriousness of painting and to its practice as labor and research. Martha Ward has noted how Pissarro used his brushstrokes to approximate the weave of peasant garments, thus identifying his own labor with production processes found in everyday life.65 The vocabulary of the worker-painter came directly from the critical discourse surrounding Courbet a decade earlier.66 It is traceable at least to the mid-1850s, for example, in the statement of Courbet’s writer friend Champfleury that “above all, [Courbet] is a born painter, that is, no one can deny his robust and powerful talent as a worker.”67 Although such terminology was meant to emphasize Courbet’s pictorial talents rather than the political ideas with which the artist willingly became associated, Champfleury in the same essay referred the reader more than once to contemporary writ18 0

ings by the anarchist political philosopher and acquaintance of Courbet, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.68 In 1865 Zola reviewed Proudhon’s posthumously published book on Courbet, Du principe de l’art et de

sa destination sociale.69 The review is remembered primarily for Zola’s attack on Proudhon’s theory of the social utility of art and for his formulation of an opposing theory that “art is a corner of nature seen through a temperament.” Yet the second part of Zola’s article is an appreciation of Courbet for “the fullness of his métier,” which made “Courbet . . . the sole painter of our times; he belongs to the family of the flesh-makers, whose brothers, whether he likes it or not, are Veronese, Rembrandt, Titian.”70 For what he regarded as Proudhon’s desire to make Courbet a slave to political ideas and a propagandist, Zola substituted Courbet as an individualist. But to do so was not to reject the politics of anarchist and socialist individualism with which Courbet had been identified, especially through the latter’s association with Proudhon. Zola’s argument with Proudhon was about art’s specific function within politics, not about politics itself. He saw Courbet as the example of freedom advocated in Fourier’s utopian theories rather than as the propagandist advocated by the Saint-Simonians. So for Zola, the precedent of Courbet’s style was crucial: Courbet was “one of those laborers who works according to his physicality and his intelligence.”71 Courbet’s physical translation of the immediate sensation legitimated the work while differentiating it simultaneously from both secondhand academic formulas and nostalgic Romantic fantasies. He exemplified the man of temperament. In the realm of painting, Zola’s word worker was code for the honest manual effort and aspiration to freedom of an oppressed class of sincere but excluded artists. Although it is hard to imagine that the politics of such an agenda were of conscious concern to the artists as they actually painted, its principles lent them strength and its consequences seemed only too evident to many of those who viewed their pictures. It was noted earlier how Pissarro identified his pictorial handling with other productive processes in the everyday world. This became clearer to the next generation, among whom Fénéon could praise Seurat’s “patient tapestry.” Van Gogh’s analogy between painting and weaving is also well known. It is important to observe, however, that following the Commune the term worker had far more inflammatory political connotations than Zola could have imagined when he referred to artists as workers in the late 1860s. Castagnary had been careful to associate the Naturalist trend in landscape with the general trend toward democracy that far predated the Commune, but Silvestre’s comments explicitly evoked the egalitarian philosophy whose ostensible political consequences were no longer the stuff of utopian dreams.

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The name Intransigeants emerged slightly after Révoltés and sometimes accompanied it. It stayed with the Impressionists a bit longer than the former, until about 1877. In 1876 reviewers were about equally divided between the terms Intransigent and Impressionist or used them both. Stephen Eisenman has noted that the former derived from the anarchist wing of the Spanish Federalist Party of 1872, which refused compromises with the central government of Spain and made claims for cantonal independence that escalated into civil war. By 1874 they had been defeated.72 The Spanish situation was troubling from the point of view of the fledgling French Third Republic, fresh from its own costly civil war victory over the Commune. The implication of the harshly political term Intransigent applied to artists, then, was that their position was a threat to the civil order beyond the realm of art. Henri Polday, writing for La Renaissance littéraire et artistique in 1874, took the name seriously enough to define it as the “revolutionary stance of their paintings, which are all outrageously realist.”73 Thus he too felt that the Impressionists’ style and politics were linked, as they had been perceived in Courbet’s Realism. In 1876 one reviewer, noting that the left-wing paper Le Rappel had favorably reviewed the group, observed: “The Intransigents of art join hands with the Intransigents of politics; nothing could be more natural.”74 Stéphane Mallarmé, the poet friend of Manet, made a more subtle and general connection between naturalist landscape and politics in his article written for the English-language publication

The Art Monthly Review: The transition from the old imaginative artist and dreamer to the energetic modern worker is found in Impressionism. The participation of a hitherto ignored people in the political life of France is a social fact that will honor the whole of the close of the nineteenth century. A parallel is found in artistic matters, the way being prepared by an evolution which the public with rare prescience dubbed, from its first appearance, Intransigent, which in political language means radical and democratic. . . . To-day the multitude demands to see with its own eyes.75 Although the multitude to which Mallarmé was idealistically referring may not have been as proletarian as it sounds, he was nonetheless claiming for Impressionism the expression of an honest democratic vision, as opposed to the fantasies of Romanticism. He believed Impressionism’s success was as inevitable as social evolution, and he characterized its protagonists as “energetic,” embodying forces that he linked to the new classes responsible for modern productivity.76 Like Silvestre and others before him, he compared the Impressionist artist to a worker. Intransigent indicated less a specific left-wing political agenda attributable to the artists themselves than a more general individualistic and egalitarian radicalism. These were the social and political consequences of natural seeing—that is, of seeing with eyes freed from elitist convention and government control. Earlier in his essay, Mallarmé had explained that the antidote to traditionalism was for artists to immerse themselves in reality, as in the plein air landscape practices of the Impressionists. Not only would such immersion insulate and protect the artist from the misguiding influences of tradition, much as Thoré had argued for Théodore Rousseau, but it would imprint the experience of nature upon the artist. The Impressionists’ sketch-

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like brushwork and ostensible lack of finish were for him the expression of a world of light and air discovered through such experience and embodied by their laboring processes. In paragraphs following those just quoted, Mallarmé’s assessment of Impressionism’s relationship to modernity became more pointedly political: At that critical hour of the human race where nature desires to work for herself, she requires . . . men placed directly in communion with the sentiment of their time—to loose the restraint of education, to let hand and eye do what they will, and thus through them, reveal herself . . . to express herself . . . to those newcomers of tomorrow, of which each one will consent to be an unknown unit in the mighty numbers of a universal suffrage. . . . 182

Such, to those who can see in this the representative art of a period which cannot isolate itself from the equally characteristic politics and industry, must seem the meaning of the manner of painting we have discussed here.77 In equating this mode of seeing with the political rise of the modern worker and the new industrial age, Mallarmé’s thesis both echoed Courbet’s earlier democratic claims for the Realist vision and appropriated the utopian view of history’s ineluctably progressive direction.78 It thus associated artistic labor with uplifting and positive effects rather than with the stereotypical dirt and sweat of the lower classes. In spite of these assessments, it is difficult to find a specific political program or clear political intentions in Impressionist landscapes. It is also unnecessary. In fact, artistic practices were changing. Only Courbet had couched his rationale for an independent exhibition in explicitly politico-economic terms. With the Impressionists, however, a collective model was established, and actions (i.e., the independent exhibition and its participants’ antitraditional paint handling) seemed to speak for themselves. In the early 1880s, the Indépendants, who gave birth to Neo-Impressionism, renewed their predecessors’ strategy. Before the Impressionists, few artists aspiring to produce ambitious art chose to portray the signs of modern infrastructure and economic transformation. For the Impressionists the inclusion of such imagery in their art not only recognized its presence in the visual field but implied that it was worthy of representation, defining modernity in fact. An artist’s judgment of that worth was usually based on his alliance with the forces of modernization, tacit in some cases, explicit in others. In Neo-Impressionism, the inclusion of images of industry and commerce became a signal element, often coexisting in the same composition with images of leisure and integrated through another novel and ambiguous aestheticizing yet labor-intensive and performative technique. Before Impressionism, landscape painting often reflected resistance to or escape from urban and industrial modernity through representations of a rustic countryside, as in so much Romantic and sometimes overtly utopian landscape painting, and even to a degree in Courbet’s own retreat to his home region of Franche-Comté. Such challenges to the modern economy and demography were nostalgic and reactionary, hence politically unrealistic and ineffectual. On the other hand, history painting was too overtly political, as it had been co-opted either by conservative politics or by the opposite, if Courbet’s figure paintings can be considered academic history painting’s leftist counterpart. Naturalism seemed the only viable form of landscape for the politically progressive artist

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who had a commitment to modernity in art that outweighed any conscious interest in politics and who may indeed have sought a realm of discourse above and beyond politics. Courbet himself staked out such grounds for Realism when he tried to claim as early as 1851 that it was beyond the specifics of politics.79 Monet’s case is telling, for the ostensibly liberal views with which he began his career can be called into question by his discomfort when the workaday sites of industrial modernity encroached on the immediate surroundings in which he lived and primarily painted. By contrast, for the more workingclass Guillaumin and the Jewish Pissarro, each of them outsiders to the bourgeois French high-culture mainstream, the forces of modernization were associated with the social progress that might lead to a more inclusive society. The collaboration between Pissarro and Cézanne, which also included Guillaumin and later Gauguin, was a microcosm of a collective avant-garde movement, growing out of and even perhaps serving as a politically more advanced corrective to Courbet and Manet’s individualist challenges to authority. Those challenges might be regarded as redolent of the heroics of Romanticism. Pissarro, Cézanne, Guillaumin, and Gauguin were the artists allied with Signac in the early 1880s, when the Indépendant movement began. The egalitarianism of their artistic organizations embodied their collectivist hopes for society as a whole.80 Their faith in modern economic forces, which they deemed worthy of representation in art, made those hopes seem reasonable. If one were to isolate groups within the Impressionist constellation, the two that would stand out would be those around Pissarro (the Pontoise School—Guillaumin, the young Cézanne, the early Gauguin, later joined by Signac, and then the group around Signac, briefly including Van Gogh) and those around Degas (the Naturalists, as Degas wished to be called, including Mary Cassatt and for a time Gustave Caillebotte, as well as some artists generally not included in the Impressionist canon). They constitute Impressionism’s two political poles, so to speak. Manet, Monet, Renoir, and Sisley, rather than forming a third coherent group of their own, are individually marked by independence and occasional intersection with the other two groups. The pattern of their participation or not in the exhibitions suggests economic motivation more than other principles. One even finds crossover and collaboration between members of the extremes, such as that between Pissarro and Degas, thanks to their shared love of printmaking. With the exception of the Pontoise School, politics had little to do with their dealings, friendships, and mutual support. But that exception was telling for Renoir, the son of a provincial tailor, who allied himself politically with the conservative Catholic art dealer Paul DurandRuel and the newly wealthy patrons, like the publisher Georges Charpentier, his wife Marguerite, and their friends on whom he depended for portrait commissions. He was suspicious of Impressionism’s apparent political associations, which he ascribed to “that Jew, Pissarro,” whom he accused in 1882 of introducing anarchists into the Impressionist circle.81 Renoir’s attitudes and his abandonment of the Impressionist group exhibitions in order to return to the official Salon as early as 1878 signal the emergence of a division within Impressionism, to which his words gave a political dimension. Although Renoir’s fears were exaggerated, he confirms that some artists within Impressionism had acquired a political reputation. Pissarro had openly become an anarchist sympathizer.82 Since the mid-1870s, when he became an Impressionist and then briefly joined the artists’ union organized by Alfred Meyer, Pissarro had tried to express his political

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ideals through participation in artist cooperatives.83 He was the most loyal of the Impressionists—the only one to exhibit in all eight exhibitions. His efforts were also crucial in getting others to continue their association and in recruiting new members, such as Seurat and Signac. Hence, Pissarro’s links with the Indépendants in the early 1880s had a political context and embodied the continuity between the first and second generations. He and Paul Alexis found their hopes revived when together at the Indépendant meetings they joined Robert Cazes, a militant Republican journalist and former Communard. There, antibourgeois ideas on art abounded in discussions and debates.84 Louis Leroy not only failed to consider the modern theme of Monet’s Impression: Sunrise but also never mentioned that Pissarro’s Hoarfrost (1873, PV 203, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts) was the image of a rural laborer carrying a heavy burden of firewood.85 To the 184

reputation that Impressionist painters rarely represented labor, Pissarro and his cohorts of the Pontoise group were exceptions, as were the Neo-Impressionists. There were, however, limits to both the number of workers they represented and the types they chose. Their figures were almost always outdoor laborers, agricultural or manual types, never factory personnel or the new proletariat, for the latter were rarely present in the spaces artists frequented. Yet since those spaces did include railway stations, canals, and ports, one does often see railway or dock workers, dredgers, or barge men. Even so, their presence within a generally harmonious setting was no more distressing than the presence of factory chimneys in the residential suburbs. These issues raise the question of how to represent labor in the first place. Labor is an activity performed over time. Yet painting, as has been observed since Gotthold Ephrain Lessing’s Laokoon (1866), is an art of space and as such can represent only a single moment if it is to maintain verisimilitude. It is often said that no art has ever concentrated so singly on “the moment” as Impressionism. Hence, the static work of visual art can represent workers only through poses, surroundings, and accessories that illustrate circumstances rather than reenact actual effort. As images of workers covered in sweat or exhausted from backbreaking effort, Courbet’s Stonebreakers (1849, destroyed) and JeanFrançois Millet’s Man with Hoe (1860–62, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles) are unsurpassed. But these compositions concentrated on the dehumanizing effects of labor and were consistently interpreted as having the kind of political overtones that made them ancestors of sorts to Social Realism of the Soviet kind. What the latter eschewed, however, was the evidence of the artist’s labor, in contrast to Courbet’s powerful handwork, so ostentatiously displayed—the traces of his mental effort and physical labor expended over time. Without necessarily sharing Courbet’s political views, the Impressionists insisted on displaying the individual character of their artistic process, so that many critics responded to them as the direct descendants of Courbet. A distinction must also be made between such laborers and the laundresses, wet nurses, waiters, bartenders, entertainers, and the like shown in so many paintings by Manet, Degas, Berthe Morisot, and others. Such members of the service class, often women, were visible in the daily lives of the bourgeoisie, maintaining their households and essential to their style of living.86 Of course, they reflect the social conditions of modernity, but their presence did not challenge the universality of the bourgeois world, even though they were part of the industry of leisure. The same is true for Caillebotte’s workers, whether the floor scrapers who were renovating his family’s apartment ( The

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Floor Scrapers, 1875, B 34, Musée d’Orsay, Paris) or the House Painters (1877, B 53, private collection). Nor did the Impressionists represent the interiors of railway carriages, as Honoré Daumier had in a painting that featured disenfranchised members of society up close. They were not activist crusaders for social reform. And certainly Impressionist representations of productivity are not the same thing as representations of labor. If the presence or absence of laborers raises issues of social class, then signs of productivity can embody an ideology that suppresses or sidesteps them. The bourgeois participates in a form of productivity that deemphasizes the nonetheless pivotal role of manual labor. In this sense, even when the Impressionist vision gladly included manual labor, it did nothing to challenge bourgeois hegemony. In the end, Impressionist representations of economic productivity were as allied with bourgeois interests as its representations of leisure were. Its challenge was to the traditional forms and forums through which such attitudes would be expressed rather than to the attitudes themselves. At around the middle of the nineteenth century, industrial themes would have been associated with Saint-Simonian visions of progress. However idealistic, especially in the later, quasi-religious stage of his followers under Prosper Enfantin, no social thinker was more closely associated with the advance of industry than Saint-Simon.87 The Saint-Simonians were once considered socialist because they advocated government-managed economies, which they believed would result in an ideal society. They were not oppositional, however, and the secular among them had long since evolved into supporters of industrial capitalism and technological modernization, state led or not, rather than promoters of socialist egalitarianism. Industrial views were politically safe, even if unfamiliar in respectable art. Thus Monet’s views of the Clichy dock workers or of the Gare Saint-Lazare, which celebrated the new economy overtly, were primarily challenging to an aesthetic status quo that still relegated modern subjects to the graphic and illustrative arts and to photography. Indeed, the leftist politics of most French artists of the time were mainly idealist and utopian, grounded in nostalgia for a premodern society rather than on a Marxist recognition that the working-class poor—the “dangerous classes”—would be the new and enduring product of modern capitalism.88 Eliding such issues in the anarchist vision of the future, rural agricultural landscape was a metaphor for alternatives to capitalism. Other than such landscapes, Pissarro’s most direct critiques of capitalist society would consist of ironic stereotypical caricatures of urban bankers, made privately for members of his own family.89 By comparison to Monet, Pissarro viewed his rural landscapes as politically challenging because their themes held up the myth of rural harmony in opposition to capitalism. Yet precisely because his imagery was based on allusions to a nostalgic anarchism, Pissarro’s primary challenge to bourgeois society was ineffective outside the aesthetic realm. Despite this failure, Pissarro’s work shares with Monet’s and that of their contemporaries an understanding of landscape as an ideological space through which records of and attitudes toward modernity were embodied. The result for most Impressionist painting was an ambiguous semicontroversiality in which the assumption of political radicalism was a rhetorical displacement of the public’s aesthetic distress, expressed by critics who were encouraged by the ostensible politics of the Impressionists’ exhibition strategies.90 In other words, since the utopian, integrative politics of Impressionist subject matter was never itself seriously challenging to the bourgeois social status quo, more attention was paid to tech-

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nique and to their organizational challenge to the Salon. This is certainly the lesson of the ideological content of the panoramic or high–vantage point views of the city discussed in Chapter 1. While they might challenge prevailing aesthetic codes through their relation to photography, they supported bourgeois values. With their popularity dating from the eighteenth-century British picturesque, panoramic views had political connotations referring to power and ownership.91 The new technology of photography, the medium so abhorred by Baudelaire, and Impressionist painting, which so many considered photography’s colorized handmaiden, reinforced the bourgeois sense of dominance over the metropolis that its efforts and investments had wrought. They visually echo Baudelaire’s rueful and ironic remark “To the Bourgeois” that “you are the majority . . . ; therefore you are the force,” but without the poet’s attitude.92 A similar observation might apply to Monet’s industrial landscape in The Cargo Con18 6

voy (Plate 17), discussed in Chapter 4. Adopting the formula of sublime landscape, Monet placed his figures in the safe surroundings of a meadow, where they confront the awesome chaos of industrial speed and disorder. The late Nicholas Green has emphasized how the Barbizon School became popular because of art dealers, for whose commerce their landscape paintings were like a packaging of the countryside into a consumable good.93 It should be added that except for the degree to which this practice had expanded, as in the case of panoramic views, the phenomenon dates back to the eighteenth-century picturesque. As we know, the novel technological impetus in the nineteenth century was train travel, which made the countryside easily accessible. In familiarizing a vast population with its scenery, whether in coastal villages or through the coach window, it extended the illusion of the bourgeois’s domain. Metaphorically speaking, mapping the landscape through the laying of rail might be analogous to pinning it down like a scientific specimen or subjecting it to a network created by human reason. Another analogy might be the marking of landscape by the performances of the painter who was producing it. Accompanying the laying of rail were, as we saw, documentary photographs of the adjoining landscapes. In packaging the spaces of these quintessentially bourgeois modern worlds, which combine both commerce and leisure, and in which city and country are infused with each other’s presence rather than kept in the separate realms implied by earlier landscape painting, Impressionist art embodied the consumer desire both for immediate possession and for the reassurance of lasting control. Impressionist landscape therefore constitutes a watershed following the Romantic age during which nature’s divine mysteries and realms of freedom were celebrated through scenes of awesome grandeur or reflective solitude. It embodies a time when human ingenuity and effort tipped the balance toward self-confidence before nature and its domestication for pleasure and profit. No longer the Rousseauian place of escape where the deepest thoughts or emotions could be free from constraint, nature—with the new landscape painting as its mirror—became an expression of the bourgeois economics of productivity, technology, and urbanization. One is forced to conclude that although Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism were seen as having political connotations, their politics were not necessarily either conscious or identical to the politics attributed to them. Virtually all avant-garde artistic challenges to the status quo, though they often affirm the prevailing power structure (and are eventually absorbed by it) by relying on it for their effect, have produced rhetorical displacements in which they have been given oppositional

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political value.94 Through the presence of some of the same painters, the revival of certain aspects of their themes, and the reemergence of the Impressionists’ organizational aspirations, Neo-Impressionism confirmed the political implications (not necessarily intentions) of Impressionism. But it was far from a mere revival of the earlier movement. The new look of the work itself and the prominence of a new generation—with Pissarro now positioned as a sometime follower—belie such a simplistic analysis. Rather, elements of Impressionism that have often been overlooked, partly because they had political connotations and partly because these diminished as Impressionism evolved toward commercial acceptance (as evidenced especially through Renoir but also Monet), resurfaced either as reaffirmation or critique in a succeeding generation less willing to be co-opted. This reemergence is a reminder of their presence in the first generation. 187

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8 PERFORMING REPRESENTATION MODERNISM AND MODERNITY

Modernity was the raw material for modern painting. This book has focused on modernity as subject matter—themes, motifs, and viewpoints understood as its visual references. But analysis of the pictorial properties of various works has also revealed the novel compositional and painting techniques that the artists employed to suggest the instantaneity, mobility, and visual spectacle associated with their modern world. This latter aspect, more than subject matter, has been foremost in aesthetic evaluations of Impressionism and in the avant-garde claims made for it, including its association with Modernism. The adjective Modernist generally refers to artwork that foregrounds its pictorial means and structures, as if its content were primarily the artist’s critical self-consciousness about and expression of the artistic medium and process, especially in response to the work of his or her immediate predecessors.1 To suggest that Impressionist modernity consists primarily in the way the painting is made, however, perpetuates Louis Leroy’s focus on handling and workmanship while overlooking the characteristics of imagery and ideology. It undervalues the congruency between choices of motif and means of expression. This book is hardly the first to demonstrate the importance of subject matter in Impressionist painting. But it uncovers a number of threads that connect the novel artistic means and the modern imagery of Impressionism. The two seem inseparable, making the rise of Modernism historically specific as an outgrowth of values associated with modernity rather than an inevitable stage in artistic development. The noun Modernism refers to the ideology that embodies and propagates such a system of values. The term is narrowly used to refer to a movement in art; however, in fact that movement stems from a broader modern belief that progressive change is both necessary and inevitable. Hence, when modernity of subject matter became generally accepted as the only viable basis for a modern art, the need for change and improvement had nowhere to focus other than on artistic form. From the mid-nineteenth century forward, all such changes were justified by their ability to express the reality to which they supposedly referred—the definition of reality stretching to include emotional, psychic, racial, political, linguistic, in addition to physical reality, all of which had the contemporary as their common denominator. It has frequently been observed that Modernism therefore mimics the requirements of the capitalist market, as an economic base is reflected by the cultural superstructure. I would argue, rather, that these two are so completely imbricated as to form a cultural whole, whose origins can be studied both through economic history and art history. Indeed, the study of a phenomenon at its birth clarifies its implications, in the same way as etymology can clarify the meaning of words.

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This observation proposes a pragmatic way of thinking about modernity and Modernism. The High Modernist theories of the 1950s and 1960s generally assumed that the “content” of what I called “the artist’s critical self-consciousness about and expression of the artistic medium and process” referred to the self as a free and autonomous individual, a concept based on the philosophy of Kant. During the time of the Impressionists, however, the self was understood in more Hegelian and Positivist terms—that is, as grounded in the material world. On a philosophical level, the Impressionist artists would have understood that they were taking themselves as their object as well as the world. Indeed, we have seen that the nineteenth-century self, which according to High Modernism is a transcendental and aspiring value-free self, was redefined as a time-bound self-in-the-world. Writers on art, such as Baudelaire and Zola, speaking of temperament, grounded it one way or another in modern temporality. In 1846 190

Baudelaire famously credited Eugène Delacroix with embodying what the poet regarded as the contemporary spirit of alienation and melancholy.2 And in urging artists to find heroism among “the pageant of fashionable life and the thousands of floating existences . . . that drift about in the underworld of a great city,” he linked such themes to the loss of innocence in an epoch in which “we are each of us celebrating some funeral.”3 Zola, writing about the generation of the Impressionists, linked artistic temperament to modernity as well, but in contrast to his predecessor he referred his readers to the Positivism and science of the new age: “The wind is blowing in the direction of science; we are propelled in spite of ourselves toward the exact study of things and facts. Thus every strong personality who reveals himself does so in the direction of truth. The movement of our time is certainly Realist, or rather, Positivist. I am therefore forced to admire men who seem related to one another, related by the time in which they are living.”4 Zola thus considered Manet “a child of our age,”5 and he called the young Impressionists “Actualists” when he saw their works at the Salon of 1868.6 Artists who enacted such self-reflection through their medium were thus performing values associated with their own present world. Related ideas are embodied in the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, whose works were known in France by the 1850s and, in addition to Auguste Comte, may have been a resource for Hippolyte Taine.7 By the 1870s Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1819) had become an obligatory reference. The Impressionists’ friend Théodore Duret wrote a serious article on Schopenhauer in 1878, the same year that Duret published his well-known essay on the Impressionists.8 Briefly, Schopenhauer, though he considered himself a Kantian, went beyond Kant to respond to Hegel. He considered reason instrumental and called it will, claiming that our representation (a broad term meaning both concept and image) of nature is an effect of individual consciousness, which interprets—one might say processes—the sensations it receives through perception. Hence, the world is a mirror of our inner nature that expresses certain underlying concepts but varies with each individual. The notion of reason as proactive, with the consequence of distinguishing human representations from those of the ostensibly passive photographic camera, corresponds to Zola’s idea of temperament and helps explain why Zola considered representation both a biologically determined and a deeply personal function, behind which he always sought “a man.”9 Indeed, Schopenhauer’s concept justified Zola’s focus on process rather than form as the key to the individual. It also helps explain the Modernist claim that art becomes its own subject matter. These points throw light on the reversal of gender roles and identities that also disturbed Impressionism’s critics. Such issues have been pursued by feminist scholars, but I believe they can be

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placed in perspective here.10 Courbet and the Impressionists inverted the related dichotomies of reason versus emotion, body versus mind, and male versus female. Courbet, who in his Realist Manifesto declared that his goal was “to be a man,” was implicitly alluding to the free status of men as opposed to the subservience of women.11 Defying tradition and leaving his mark on nature, especially in landscapes, was a performance of both freedom and masculinity.12 For Zola, who searched above all for the “man” behind the picture, the indexical traces of the artist’s individuality were also associated with manhood. The word virile was for him a term of praise.13 In previous generations, visible brushwork had been associated with the Rococo style, which the academic followers of Jacques-Louis David had deemed effeminate, as if traces of the body revealed a lack of rational control associated stereotypically with women. Such was the basis for Etienne Delécluze’s criticism of Delacroix at the Salon of 1824.14 For Baudelaire, Delacroix’s strongest supporter, free brushwork was the bearer of passion and a springboard for imagination—still realms beyond reason. Beginning with Courbet, marks of pictorial process were associated with the mental effort and physical labor through which man transcended nature to express his humanity.15 Although some continued to characterize Impressionism as a feminine style, traditionally associated with emotion and the body, the dichotomy of body versus mind was overcome by the notion of instrumental reason found in Schopenhauer’s conceptualization. In Impressionism, I argue, mind and body merge in the hand, which performs the constructive ethos of modernity. The concept of performative reason also helps explain why Impressionism’s successors judged that technique was central to the expression of ideology. For when the Neo-Impressionists sought to reform Impressionism, what became central to their effort was not so much a reform of Impressionism’s themes as a modification of its technique—composition, method, and execution. The NeoImpressionists felt that a loose and brushy application of paint did not adequately express aims that relied for subject matter on the kind of landscape scenes the Impressionists had already legitimated. Thus they implicitly agreed with their predecessors’ assumption that style and technique had a direct relationship to content and a bearing on its effective communication. In some sense, then, they also agreed with Leroy and his cohorts, who dismissed Impressionism as slapdash and lacking in seriousness. They responded to what in my Introduction I called Impressionism’s “double indexicality.” The mock outrage that Leroy expressed was toward the artists’ defiance of the traditional work ethic, which academic artists had embodied by their careful drawing and methodical application of glazes to produce polished surfaces. The Impressionist challenge was to values and practices that had become institutionalized in the Salons and in some sense had the force of law. Consequently Impressionist technique became associated with leisure rather than with labor. Armand Silvestre’s alternative view, however, held that in displaying the traces of their brushwork so openly the Impressionists identified with workers and manual producers rather than with the bourgeois audience one took for granted in the world of art. He was reviewing the same exhibition as Leroy.16 This view was certainly appropriate for Cézanne, Pissarro, and their specific circle and explains why Pissarro sympathized with NeoImpressionism, when it first emerged, for appearing to revive values regarding labor that he had held from his beginnings. That Cézanne became the darling of Modernist critics and artists is explained by his concentration, in still life and landscape beginning in the 1870s, on representation as a process centered in the artist’s mind. Yet this concentration was bound to the historical ethos I have been de-

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scribing, as evidenced by his displays of wit and compositional will in still life and by landscapes that, until his last works, almost always represent a terrain profoundly shaped by human will and inhabited by human constructions.

The two ostensibly opposed viewpoints of Leroy and Silvestre have in common their focus on style and technique. Underlying both is the relationship of art to labor—that is, the ideological implications of productivity in the realm of art. The physical attributes of Impressionist pictures highlight the artist’s handling of the medium; they trace his or her working practice or performance, as I have also called it, 192

in which the labor of perception and the labor of representation are simultaneously indexed. Labor had always been the source of value in painting, in which the role of craft was unavoidable. In academic art, however, the work ethic demanded the knowing suppression of labor’s manual presence in order to be associated with other values such as maturation and conscious intelligence. One may recall the statement by the conservative painter Ingres that “art never succeeds better than when it is hidden.”17 When labor became visible it was associated with the body rather than the mind, hence with the traditionally lower aspects of humanity rather than with its aspirations and ideals. This theory had powerful political implications, for if physical labor became a source of value, then those who generated that value had democratic rights that had been systematically denied. In Modernist art, the pictorial traces of manual labor were assimilated to the realm of creativity and perception. In Impressionism, the two associations tentatively and perhaps idealistically coexisted, thus allowing radically different interpretations. The terminology used to describe Impressionist execution can be said to embody these connections. In the 1860s Hippolyte Taine had characterized progressive pictorial style, exemplified by the Dutch, as based on color form, or the tache.18 Zola immediately took up the latter term to describe Manet’s style in his essay of 1867 entitled “Edouard Manet: A New Manner of Painting.”19 This word is generally translated into English as spot or patch rather than stain, although the latter is an important implication of its French meaning. A stain, even more than a spot, is an indelible indexical mark that implies an event or action behind it. In Impressionist painting, the mark is usually that of the individual brushstroke. A homonym of the word tache is tâche, the French word for “task” or “effort.” Although the circumflex accent alludes to the lost s, as in the English word task, the ear easily conflates the two in understanding the tache to be associated with the labor, gesture, or effort of painting. The near-homonym of tache, the French word touche, also refers to a touch of color, as well as to the physical manner in which the painter applies it, for example with a soft stroke or a rough hand. Like tache, it implies not only the painter’s act but a record that something has been impacted and thus bears the imprint of having been acted on. Returning, then, to the word impression, one finds in it, too, a reference to the effects—physical and imprintlike in the case of painting—made by experience. As I said in my Introduction, Impressionist painting, unlike photography as it was mainly regarded in the nineteenth century, bears witness both to the exterior appearance of reality and to the interior process of perception and representation unique to each artist. As the nineteenth-century viewer vicariously reenacted the technical processes that Impressionist painting placed in full view, he or she was subjected to both aspects of the work. The result generally was some heightened form of consciousness

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of or reaction to these effects. Such responses were inevitable in their time because Impressionist style was unfamiliar and a significant departure from the conventions established by art institutions and authorities. In defying the academic practice of blending and smoothing over individual brushstrokes to disguise them, Impressionism called assumptions and expectations into question; it challenged the ordinary seamless relationship between viewer and artwork based on habit and became instead an obstruction placed between the two, with an effect of interpellation, as I suggested in the Introduction. Viewers responded either emotionally, often mockingly, or with some line of reasoning that dismissed or rationalized the new practice. In interpellation, ideology is called into question and the interlocutor is called to action. The result of Impressionism was a great deal of press—of interpretive efforts of one sort or another. And, as the focus of our critics on style rather than on subject matter indicates, viewers became engaged with the paintings’ physicality. This book takes that physicality seriously, as anything but a release from the worldly context of time and place. Unlike High Modernism, which claims to embody universal values, Impressionism refers to the temporal body of the artist. Through both its productive self-reflexivity and its indexical self-evidence, Impressionism is anchored in the debates and conflicts that defined the artist in his place and time. These effects and preoccupations constitute what I have called Impressionist painting’s performative impact. Viewers could disagree about what ethos the visible brushwork was enacting, but they agreed that there was an enactment, and they responded to a performative effect that without mediation upset assumptions most viewers brought to the experience of seeing art. Given the major differences in subject matter and palette between Impressionist paintings and Courbet’s works (with some exceptions), conservative critics’ persistence in connecting the two may seem surprising. Yet they are indeed related with respect to these issues of labor and ideology. Courbet’s large scale and his ostensibly workmanlike handling of paint rubbed his critics’ noses not only in his paintings’ physicality but also in what they considered the morally inferior provincial and laboring world he depicted. To impose such a form of experience on viewers still seeking escape through ideals conceived by imagination was a revolutionary artistic and ideological challenge. In A Burial at

Ornans (1850–51, Musée d’Orsay, Paris) and The Studio of the Painter (1855, Figure 125), Courbet mocked the transcendental philosophies of art, religion, and politics, which promised respite from a material world thought to be a realm of abjection and despair. His underlying project, however idealistic and perhaps naive, can be described as that of unmasking these manipulative concepts to shock humankind into acceptance of materiality as the sole condition of life. He hoped thereby to free men to seize their immediate destiny and to rely on the evidence of experience as opposed to relying on faith for a future salvation. The Impressionists turned Courbet’s material world into one enlightened by bright colors, and they blurred the line between labor and leisure. Their modern pigments—an aspect of their modernity I have taken for granted20—provided the means to throw a stronger and more positive light on the condition of materiality, suggesting, according to Positivist thinking, that technological innovation and economic expansion were shaping a progressive destiny. Indeed, the Impressionists’ performance of this materiality, enacting its shaping by human control, fashioned it into the optimistic vision of bourgeois ideology. If Impressionism of the first generation included new themes as well as novel modes of execution, it could be argued that Neo-Impressionism’s reform was made necessary by the persistence

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of Leroy’s misreading, or too-limited reading—which still prevails today. It is true that in scenes of leisure painted freely the Impressionists’ rapid brushstrokes seem equivalent to the passing glance of a casual encounter. There they are the technique of the sketcher, even the amateur artist, observing the world rapidly in the manner of Baudelaire’s flâneur and painting for personal pleasure. They embody leisure as an artistic commodity. It can also be said, however, as Silvestre effectively did say, that a technique that featured the artist’s immediate efforts and perceptions was in alignment with the themes of productivity it also represented. In “The Painter of Modern Life,” where Baudelaire extolled the flâneur’s vision, the poet also equated rapid execution with modern economic values by pointing to its efficiency and cost-effectiveness.21 In his article for the Art Monthly Review, Mallarmé used the adjective energetic to characterize Impressionist painters’ efforts, which he compared to those of the modern worker.22 In the 194

context of port scenes, factory views, and train stations, a technique related to that employed in scenes of leisure could suggest the productive motion, human intelligence, and energy underlying industrial modernity. In this way, the Impressionist brushstroke commodified productivity and progressive modernization. Artists like Cézanne and Pissarro, moreover, gave their brushwork, while as visible and fragmented as Monet’s or Renoir’s, a distinctly more methodical and workaday quality aimed at avoiding associations with their colleagues’ seemingly casual and effortless lyricism. Even Zola was impressed by Pissarro’s “métier de peintre.”23 Guillaumin’s technique, though less innovative than that of his contemporaries, is often coarse and raw both in handling and in color. In all cases, the stylistic overlay tends to create a unified vision of the world that is the heir to the utopian strain associated with landscape since the middle of the century. The dual reading of Impressionist technique to evoke both leisure and productivity thus reflects an exquisite, if ultimately fragile, reconciliation of the two symbiotically related sides of modern society and economy and corresponds to an early and optimistic phase in a progressive bourgeois (as opposed to reactionary and nostalgic) version of utopia. Neo-Impressionism’s alternative solution challenged the Impressionist integration of the elements of leisure and labor, which our generation may regard as contradictory but which was, I would argue, hopeful and progressive in the 1870s. Neo-Impressionist pointillism reclaimed the old work ethic that Impressionism seemed to have abandoned, for no one could deny the laborious exertion of an artist who methodically filled his canvas with tiny dots and dashes, while its scientific claims made it appear progressive. Yet there is a contradiction within Neo-Impressionism. Its reform of Impressionism in the name of left-wing politics can be considered nostalgic—a conservative reimposition of a kind of repressive moral regime parallel to the one Impressionist challenges had sought to overthrow. That Pissarro soon dropped pointillism and that Impressionism became the mainstream style for so many painters in the modern Western world suggest that its appropriateness (valid or not) to that world—its ideological affirmation of and association with democratic freedoms and ostensibly progressive values—was instinctively accepted by those who remained optimistic. These freedoms have their expression both in leisure and in economic activity. For both were at the forefront of the changes produced by experimentation, spontaneity, and discoveries made by individuals. The dual interpretations of Impressionist technique were thus no more anomalous, discomforting, or contradictory in their time and context than were juxtapositions of leisure and industry in the same images. Similarly, while both the conservative view of Impressionism in its own time as politically radical and the more recent leftist exposure of its complicity in bourgeois hegemony have a legitimate basis, neither is satisfying or sufficient. Nor are the two

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contradictory. Faced with a society divided between progressive industrial modernity and ancient agricultural traditions, Impressionism was certainly more integrative than divisive, bringing together modern urban elements and the countryside in the creation of a range of positive modern landscape imagery expressed through a new and persuasive, as well as democratic, plurality of techniques. Even though for many today Impressionism’s appeal may be nostalgic, its aesthetic integration of even the contradictory elements of modernity continues to form the basis of its admirers’ attitudes. The seemingly opposite readings of Impressionist brushwork advanced by Leroy and Silvestre may thus be regarded as two sides of the same coin. This book’s emphasis has been on that coin’s more visibly modern, if less studied face. What both sides have in common is their representation of the relationship between technique and what could be called the creative productive process. If one accepts Baudelaire’s view that the essence of modernity lay in constant change, or as Joseph Schumpeter has put it, “creative destruction,” this underlying process drove Impressionism toward its diverse manifestations.24 This essence is expressed in Impressionist painting through innovation, which is what drives productivity and its presumed benefits such as leisure. Both the new motifs that were its unmistakable signs and the pictorial techniques that left the marks of its immediate responses and energies were aspects of this innovation. Both embody the will to shape the world to positive purpose.

By focusing on an important but insufficiently regarded aspect of Impressionist subject matter, I have attempted to reveal the values and conditions underlying Impressionism: productivity, technology, and urbanization. I argue further that Impressionist technique is as closely expressive of these values as it is of its ostensible opposite—leisure—and indeed that leisure is a symptom of these values. The invention of leisure activities and their active enjoyment through recreation, whether this involved leaving the home for nightclubs or traveling to the countryside, depended on innovations such as railroads, journalism, and industrial wealth. Understanding these relationships is also key to understanding Impressionism’s political reputation. To those who miss in this study the usual displays of bucolic pleasures, I would answer that the important and extensive body of work shown here should lead to a revision of generalizations about Impressionism, even if it does nothing to modify long-established aesthetic preferences and market values. To the degree that modernization was driven by productivity and technology, with urbanization and leisure as different aspects of its consequences, I have thus tried to shift the ground for understanding Impressionism from the outward features that it most often depicted to the fundamental values and forces that it embodied and performed. I hope that in the future Impressionism’s more overtly economic themes and relationship to contemporary technology and urbanization will no longer be downplayed, considered exceptional or anomalous, or neglected in overviews of Impressionism and explanations of its historical significance. Impressionism, as both a style and a constellation of themes, was formed within a concept of modernity that embraced and celebrated productivity, technology, and urbanization, as well as leisure. In its formative years of the 1870s, Impressionism represented the full range of this modernity through its themes, while imprinting them through its vigorous techniques with energies paralleling those that drove modernization. Modernism, in other words, emerged in the specific historical context of produc-

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tivity and optimism driven by the belief in individual initiative and creativity. That creativity is celebrated in Impressionist painting, but rather than being a universal value dissociated from contemporary history, it refers directly to conditions that underlay the ethos of modernity in nineteenth-century France. To a great extent, Impressionism still appears modern and has a wide appeal because, for better or for worse, society continues to share so many of the values it embodies. That is why it has been so easily assumed that such values are universal. For it is profoundly reassuring that artists who are still considered avant-garde by a majority of its viewers can paint such pretty pictures of a seemingly progressive and beneficent way of life.

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